For 63 years, a modernist sculptural mural in the lobby of Pfizer’s world headquarters on East 42nd Street in Manhattan celebrated a millennia-long parade of medical pioneers like Hippocrates and Louis Pasteur.
The eye-catching metal mural, called “Medical Research Through the Ages,” by the Greek-born Nikos Bel-Jon, was visible through tall glass windows to passing New Yorkers as well as visiting dignitaries headed to the United Nations down the street.
But the mural faced possible destruction after the pharmaceutical giant left it behind last year when it moved to Hudson Yards.
The orphaned artwork’s plight then grew more dire as the building’s new owners, planning to gut the lobby, secured a demolition permit that was to expire in September of this year.
The race against the wrecking crews was on.
Over several frenzied weeks, a dogged 27-year-old preservationist scrambled to find a new home for the mural as well as a deep-pocketed benefactor to pay for its relocation. A billionaire came to view it. The demolition deadline was extended. And then, late in the process, a promising possible recipient of the mural bowed out, saying the 14-by-36-foot work was simply too enormous to accommodate.
Who Was the Artist?
Born in 1911 and educated at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris, Mr. Bel-Jon immigrated in 1946 to the United States, where he developed a technique he called “painting with light.” Using steel wool and fiberglass brushes, he abraded metal to reflect colored light in unexpected ways so that as the viewer moved, the mural changed and the light danced.
Mr. Bel-Jon’s New York commissions included murals in the Greek Consulate and the Chrysler Building, as well as decorative metalwork at Lincoln Center. Elsewhere, clients included General Motors and the F.B.I.
“He had just gotten his citizenship,” said Rhea Bel-Jon Calkins, a daughter of the muralist, “and he got a message that the F.B.I. was looking for him, and he was terrified he was going to be sent back to Greece.”
Instead, the agency’s Identification Division commissioned a portrait of J. Edgar Hoover in aluminum flanked by two giant fingerprints.
Pfizer commissioned its mural from Mr. Bel-Jon as a statement piece that would greet visitors to its International Style tower, which opened in 1961. He created the artwork in his studio on East 72nd Street, in a converted synagogue where he lived with his family.
The mural was a mash-up of the conservative and the cutting-edge. The thousands of hand-cut tiles that comprised its background were an ancient art form, mosaic, rendered in the modern industrial material of aluminum. The portraits of medical figures were done in a traditional representational style, but the dynamic play of colored light on metal was an artistic innovation that evoked the innovation of Pfizer’s scientific research.
Michele H. Bogart, the author of “Public Sculpture and the Civic Ideal in New York City, 1890-1930,” said that the mural belonged to a noteworthy tradition of large-scale corporate patronage of civic public art.
Destined for the Dumpster?
In October 2023, a director of operations at Pfizer wrote Ms. Calkins to offer her the mural.
“Pfizer has vacated the building,” the director wrote of the firm’s old headquarters at 235 East 42nd Street, “and does not have plans to repurpose the art at this time.”
In July, Metro Loft and David Werner Real Estate Investments, the building’s owners, began interior demolition to convert the tower to residential use. Their planned design did not include the mural.
But Ms. Calkins and her sister, Athena Bel-Jon DeBonis, did not have the resources to relocate such a giant work.
Unto the breach, in mid-August, stepped Andrew Cronson, a young preservationist with a penchant for rescuing endangered historic murals. The building’s owners immediately agreed to donate the mural if a suitable home for it could be found in time, and Mr. Cronson quickly formed the Bel-Jon Art Preservation Alliance with art historians, the muralist’s daughters and seasoned preservationists.
Simultaneously, he cold-called strangers to try to assemble an intricate jigsaw puzzle of pieces: a public-facing institution with the space and desire to reinstall the fragile mural, an expert art handler to move it, and a donor to foot the bill.
The City University of New York School of Medicine wanted the mural and was prepared to send a team to assess whether its staff could perform the removal, likely to a storage facility with the hope of someday installing it on campus.
Acumen Capital Partners, owner of a 19th-century former Pfizer headquarters in Brooklyn, offered climate-controlled storage. A federal hospital was also in the mix.
Most promising was the Columbia University Irving Medical Center, which sent representatives to view the artwork along with a billionaire Greek American philanthropist.
But ultimately Columbia begged off, saying it had no space for the piece.
Where Is the Mural Now?
After the September demolition deadline was extended and preservationists said they were “starting to panic about the mural’s safety,” a surprise claimant swooped in to truck the artwork away: Pfizer itself.
Mr. Cronson said that an adviser to his group who saw the mural being dismantled was told that it was headed for New Jersey.
“Pfizer has always recognized the significance of the Nikos Bel-Jon mural in our former headquarters,” a Pfizer spokeswoman said in a statement. “We are proud of our efforts to preserve it, and we can now report that the artwork has successfully been removed and is in the process of being installed at another of the company’s U.S.-based campuses in Connecticut.”
Ms. Calkins was rankled by the limited communication from Pfizer about the mural’s late-in-the-day rescue.
“We only found out it was being moved when someone walked by and took a picture,” she said, adding, “Am I happy it happened this way? No. But it’s still a good thing because they’re saving a wonderful work of art, and they’re somewhere along the line acknowledging they made a mistake.”
Jack Berman, director of operations for Metro Loft, a co-owner of the former Pfizer building, said of the artwork in an email, “It is my understanding that the recent press about us trying to find a new home for it” reached Pfizer “and they decided to take it after all.”
He added that the mural “was owned by us” but that “we consented” to let Pfizer have it back.
Pfizer did not respond to questions from a reporter about whether the work would again be visible to the public, as it was for six decades.
“I’m concerned the public will not be afforded a proper opportunity to see an artwork that has universal significance,” Mr. Cronson said. “Beyond the stories the mural tells, it also speaks to Bel-Jon’s life as an immigrant who came to America to find a new path as an artist and was able to really make something out of nothing to develop a technique that was uniquely his own.”
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