Good morning. It’s Monday. Today we’ll look at the regilding of a famous statue at Rockefeller Center.
Prometheus, at Rockefeller Center, is getting really great new skin. It’s 23¾-karat gold.
And when you’re 18 feet tall, as he is, you can’t say you’re having a little work done — you’re having a lot. A face-lift takes time when your face stretches several feet from your hairline to your chin.
This is why one of the most famous statues in the United States is behind what amounts to a giant dropcloth right now. The early-season skaters swirling in the rink a few yards away and the tourists snapping photos with their phones can’t see how Prometheus’s cosmeticians are climbing all over him.
The cosmeticians are art restorers who promise that Prometheus will be unbound for the holiday tree lighting on Dec. 3.
When they finish, Prometheus will be thin-skinned. Each piece of gold leaf is only a few millimeters thick. But the statue has more than 400 square feet of surface area to regild. Covering Prometheus from torch to torso to toes will take 20,000 sheets of gold leaf, which comes in little squares like decals. “We’re putting them on the surface by hand, one at a time, perfectly,” Marc Roussel, the principal conservator on the project, said.
All that gold leaf weighs less than a pound. But with gold at $4,100 an ounce last week, altogether “we’re looking at more than $60,000 in just raw materials,” Roussel said.
The conservators’ first move was to scrape off the old gold skin, exposing the bare bronze of the statue itself. Since then they have been working their way up the 18-foot-tall statue, section by section.
The section they work on each day is determined by the last section they worked on the day before. They start by painting on a yellow-tinted epoxy primer as a preparation. The epoxy needs time to dry, but only overnight. With each new day, the gilders apply new skin.
Roussel and Bill Gauthier, the principal gilder, said they worked with both improvisation and deliberateness. “We don’t know exactly every step we’re going to take from the beginning,” Gauthier said. “We’re learning about the piece as we go.” They have a plan in mind, but if they need to revise it along the way, they do, and they devise a grid to guide the work in each section. “You’re not just taking a leaf and putting it anywhere,” he said. “There’s a subtle pattern that you won’t see, but you can feel, kind of. If it’s a hodgepodge, it’s going to look bad.”
After completing a section, they rub the new gold leaf with lamb’s-wool cloths dipped in ice water, which helps the gold adhere to the epoxy underneath. The buffing has to be done “very carefully, so you don’t scuff it up,” Roussel said.
Prometheus has been regilded several times in his 91 years. A 26-year-old lifeguard from New Rochelle, N.Y., was the model for the statue — according to the lifeguard, who said he was paid $1 an hour for what turned out to be easy but disappointing work. The lifeguard, Leonardo Nole, said in a written account he prepared years later that the modeling assignment was easier than his work posing for college art classes, and paid better. The letdown was that he did not see much of the famous sculptor, Paul Manship. Nole said he had posed for an assistant.
Roussel said that Prometheus was unveiled to reviews that were, at best, mixed. There were complaints that the statue looked like a “boudoir knickknack” or hood ornament for a car, and Roussel said that “someone called it Leapin’ Louie” — a figure that, according to “Great Fortune: The Epic of Rockefeller Center,” by Daniel Okrent, “looked like the Daring Young Man on the Flying Trapeze.” Manship, according to Okrent, declared in the 1950s that he didn’t like the Prometheus statue, either.
But Roussel said he marveled at everything the sculpture conveyed. Besides the figure of Prometheus, the statue has the signs of the Zodiac, with the names of the signs included — one of many touches that had made him think of the sculpture as an Art Deco prelude to the information age. “You don’t usually think about information on a sculpture,” he said, “but there’s a lot of information on this. It’s not just purely decorative.” And yes, the Zodiac and the names of the signs will be regilded, too.
Weather
Today will be sunny with temperatures nearing 56. Tonight, expect partly cloudy conditions with a low around 44.
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METROPOLITAN diary
Pixie
Dear Diary:
As a recent college graduate from Michigan living on Bleecker Street, I suffered from New York City impostor syndrome. No matter how I struggled to master the confidence “real” New Yorkers exude, my Midwesternness hung over my shoulders like a sandwich board.
One evening, I passed a man with a Rottweiler standing on the steps of a walk-up near my building.
“Cool dog,” I said, cringing inwardly.
“This is Pixie,” the man said. “She’s a sweetheart. Want to hang out with her for a while?”
“OK, sure,” I stammered.
He tossed me the leash, hurried up the steps and vanished into the building.
Utterly unfazed at having a strange woman at the other end of her lead, Pixie yawned and flopped onto the pavement, her massive chest on my feet.
I sat down too. Tentatively, I patted her head.
“Cool dog,” a man passing by said.
“This is Pixie,” I said.
“Is she friendly?” the man’s companion asked.
“She’s a sweetheart,” I replied.
Before long, it happened again. And again.
We settled into a pattern, Pixie and I. She thumped her tail to all, while I made introductions and assured strangers of her gentle disposition.
It gradually dawned on me that nobody knew this wasn’t my dog. Pixie, every ounce the streetwise urban canine, was making me look like a bona fide New Yorker.
My next thought was: What if her owner never returns?
Just then, he jogged down the steps, thanked me and grabbed the leash.
I gave Pixie one last wistful pat and continued along Thompson Street, an impostor once again.
— Kathy Passero
Illustrated by Agnes Lee. Tell us your New York story here and read more Metropolitan Diary here.
Glad we could get together here. See you tomorrow. — J.B.
P.S. Here’s today’s Mini Crossword and Spelling Bee. You can find all our puzzles here.
Davaughnia Wilson and Ed Shanahan contributed to New York Today. You can reach the team at [email protected].
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James Barron writes the New York Today newsletter, a morning roundup of what’s happening in the city.
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