The Ballroom
1976
Marion Pinto (b. 1935)
Oil and acrylic on canvas, 96 X 168
Gift of Gregory Dawson, Lewis J. Todd, and Steven Askinazy, 94.101

 

In the late 1960s, artists began flocking to the lower Manhattan neighborhood today known under its revitalized acronym Soho, referring to the blocks stretching "south of Houston" Street, with Crosby Street (east), Sixth Avenue (west), and Canal Street (south) as other defining borders. Once a thriving commercial and light-manufacturing district, the area had turned shabby after the turn of the century when its businesses departed for more fashionable midtown addresses offering newer facilities. Left behind was a concentration of vacant warehouses and lofts, often wearing ornate cast-iron facades, available at modest rents.

For cash-strapped artists emerging in New York's art world during the 1960s, these discarded buildings represented ideal studio space and living quarters, especially for those exploring large-scale installation work and relatively new forms of site-specific art. In defiance of local zoning regulations governing warehouse use, an enclave of creative newcomers took root (their lobbying subsequently persuaded officials to amend residential laws in this "Cast Iron district" of the city). By 1971 the New York press was announcing the debut of an adventurous new art scene in Soho, confirmed by the rush on the part of such prominent uptown dealers as Leo Castelli, Ileana Sonnabend, and John Weber to rehabilitate warehouses on West Broadway into stylish galleries. The Ballroom, created by Soho resident Marion Pinto in 1976, celebrates the neighborhood's coming of age as an artists' community.¹

The circumstances of Pinto's commission for this ambitious Photorealist mural reflected the camaraderie and commercial ties binding Soho together as a distinctly modern New York art colony. Three years after opening an intimate restaurant-cabaret at 458 West Broadway, Gregory Dawson, one of the Ballroom's three co-owners, enlisted Pinto to execute a large painting to replace a worn abstract hanging above the club's semicircular stage. Aiming to secure a monumental portrait of the supper club's interior, he also conceived the work as honoring the local patrons who had made the Ballroom a success: the painters, sculptors, gallery owners, art dealers, and critics who had pioneered Soho's conversion into a community receptive to late-night dining, entertainment, and fresh voices of every creative stamp.

The Spectator, a London-based newsletter commenting from afar on the unveiling of Pinto's mural on March 22, 1976, likened Dawson's largess to that of the Medici princes who had engaged artists to decorate their palaces during the Renaissance.² Praising the "courage" of both restaurateur (for commissioning contemporary art of this scale) and Pinto (for her willingness to accept the unusual assignment), the writer predicted from this conjunction of art and commerce a rekindling of fruitful partnerships between fine artists and New York City businesses. Closer to home, critics generally commended Pinto's mural as the latest in a meritorious line of artwork commissioned for Manhattan restaurants, some leaguing it with Howard Chandler Christy's murals at the Café des Artists, Maxfield Parrish's mural at the St. Regis Hotel, and Ludwig Bemelmans' bar frieze at the Carlyle Hotel.

The illusionistic opus, which took Pinto six months to execute, drew on an archive of 450 photographs produced at the project's outset for documentation of sitters and the cabaret's decorative features. Nineteen prime movers in the Soho art world were first invited to the Ballroom to pose for individual portraits. Pinto subsequently arranged the photographs into groupings to form an ensemble composition, citing Edgar Degas' famous painting The Cotton Exchange as her inspiration. Pinto's method next entailed projecting the images onto photosensitive canvas and then duplicating that succession of pictures with oil and acrylic pigments, using painstaking brushwork so finely controlled that evidence of the artist's guiding hand seems erased from the final product.

Through Pinto's manipulations, the sculptor Marisol shares a table with pop-art enthusiast and collector Robert Scull; two leading Soho dealers, Paula Cooper and Max Hutchinson, converse with the "super-realist" Alex Katz; and neon artist Rudi Stern sits at the bar talking with painter Larry Rivers. Pinto inserted herself, with back toward the viewer, and resurrected the late Expressionist painter Adolph Gottlieb -a Ballroom habitué until his death -as a table companion for critic John Perreault and abstract painter Deborah Remington. Other personalities preserved for posterity include the painters Robert Indiana and Lowell Nesbit; wood sculptor Georges Radovanovitch; gallery owner Ivan Karp; dealers Louis K. Meisel and his wife, Susan; the Performing Group's director-producer Richard Schechner, and Michael Goldstein, founder of the weekly Soho News, launched in 1973.

Notes:

  1  Pinto, in a letter dated November 23, 1994, in the Museum Archives, summarized the events and ideas that led to the painting of the mural, which she characterized as "a documentary of Soho's creation." The mural was eventually removed from its original setting and reinstalled at the New Ballroom restaurant club in Chelsea. The New Ballroom's announced closing in 1994 spurred the trio of owners who had opened the first Ballroom on West Broadway to donate the painting to the Museum of the City of New York.

  2  See Gerrit Henry, "Overnight Celebrities," Spectator, April 24, 1976. The mural's unveiling was covered widely by the contemporary art press in publications ranging from the Village Voice and the Soho Weekly News to the New York Times and the New York Post. Clippings, and a key to the sitters depicted in the mural, are in the Museum Archives.