Mysteries of Columbus. Exhibition in New York.

MYSTERIES BY

OF

CRISTÓBAL

COLUMBUS GABARRÓN

Dear Friends: It is a pleasure to welcome everyone enjoying Cristobal G a b a r r o n s T h e M y s t e r i e s o f C o l u m b u s.

New York City has long been known as the arts capital of the world, a reputation bolstered by our many museums, theaters, and special events. And in recent years, there have been a growing number of public art projects, open for the entire community to experience freeof- charge. From The Gates, which for two weeks in 2005 transformed our Central Park into a sea of saffron, to Alexander Calder s sculptures currently being exhibited in City Hall Park, these works attract tourists and economic activity to our City while providing priceless enjoyment for visitors and residents alike.

We thank Mr. Gabarron for all he has done to support the arts throughout the world, and especially here in New York, where his Fundacion Cristobal Gabarron operates our City s Carriage House Center for the Arts which promotes the cultural growth and identity of both Spain and the Americas. These terrific abstract sculptures follow in that tradition, turning Columbus Circle into a tribute to Hispanic Heritage on the 500th Anniversar y of Christopher Columbus s passing.

On behalf of the City of New York, I commend the Gabarron Foundation, and all tose whose hard work and vision has brought Mysteries of Columbus to the Big Apple.

Sincerely, Michael R. Bloomberg Mayor of New York

Cristobal Gabarrón's "Mysteries of Columbus" Enhance Mew York by Barbara Probst Solomon

realization, so startling to Europeans, that the great museums in New York, including the Metropolitan, weren't state-owned -- they were created with the private money of energetic entrepreneurs.

In the famous last paragraph of Saul Bellow's The Adventures of Augie March Augie, meditates: "Look at me, going everywhere! Why, I am a sort of Columbus of those near-at-hand and believe you can come to them in this immediate terra incognita that spreads out in every gaze. I may well be a flop at this line of endeavor. Columbus too thought he was a flop, probably, when they sent him back in chains. Which didn't prove there was no America."

We started at Columbus Circle, at the north end of Sixth Avenue (actually, Avenue of the Americas), where under the auspices of Mayor Bloomberg, the city officially welcomed Gabarrón "Mysteries of Columbus." The installation is directly in front of the 1892 monument to Columbus: a 77 foot granite column decorated with the prows of the Nina, the Pinta and the Santa Maria, on top of which is a statue of Christopher Columbus. What could be more fitting to this privileged space than the artist's audacious splash of color, space and form on polychrome fiber glass? -- the brilliant reds, the yellows of Andalusia, the greens and rich blue of a sea in constant movement, the sea that brought Columbus to these shores?.

Had Bellow (we were friends) lived to see Cristóbal Gabarrón's ten vibrant "The Mysteries of Columbus" now gracing Manhattan, I suspect he would have doffed his hat in appreciation. Gabarrón's ample vision would have appealed to him. Bellow, like the artist, in his work fused into one entity Europe and America, as though no Atlantic Ocean separated the two continents, and both men (Augie is a Jewish American Quijote) absorbed influences from the Mediterranean, to Africa, to the New World.

These inclusive artists employ with seductive agility a high/low mode, where the art of ancient civilizations mixes comfortably with the artifacts from our everyday life.

Gabarrón's "Columbuses" with their hot colors and just the right "push and pull" between lightness and heft (as the artist Hans Hofmann would put his essential aesthetic), work.

True, New York has had a long history of public art in public spaces (last year Christo and Jeanne Claude transformed Central Park into a sea of saffron "Gates", and currently there is an Alexander Calder exhibit of sculptures in City Hall), but Gabarrón's special relationship to the city has its roots in the impact it had in his formation as an artist.

On a brisk autumn morning Monika Abate, of the Gabarrón Foundation, my friend the writer Donald Maggin and I began our tour of the ten Columbuses placed in strategic historic spots in Manhattan. When we arrived at our point of departure, the Gabarrón Foundation, The Carriage House Center of the Arts in Murray Hill, I thought about Gabarrón's instinctive feel for New York. (The Gabarrón Foundation and international management of his work is a family affair in which his sons Chris and Juan play a leading role.) The exterior of The Carriage House is very "old Murray Hill", it evokes literary New York, Henry James, the Morgan Library, with its precious holdings of Gutenberg Bibles, and the original manuscripts of Mark Twain and Charles Dickens.

Enter inside, and experience a jump in time. The modern interior, made up of light, airy spaces and defined by a wide spiraling staircase, serves as a cultural center, a meeting place, and a space for exhibits from all countries. I remained silent, while my mind traveled on a private voyage. When I was a child, my father, whose law offices were in the same neighborhood, would take my older brother and me to the old Murray Hill Hotel (long since torn down) for lunch. He took us there because the dining room was filled with live canaries chirping away in their elegant bird cages and I was enchanted. And even more enchanted because Mark would whisper to me the shocking scandal, that William Hearst kept his mistress Marion Davies in a secret love nest in the penthouse above our father's offices.

I pictured Christobal Gabarrón arriving young in New York when art was in its most dizzyingly liberating moment, and it made sense that he should have become friends with Rauschenberg and Rosenquist. Ernest Hemingway in his journals wrote of his fascination with Rodin's statue based on Ovid's Metamorphoses: Rodin conceptualized a continuous chain of metamorphoses, in which love, art, and literature, are perpetually linked. Apropos of the idea of this perpetual chain that is handed down from generation to generation, one can say that the American generation of Rauschenberg and Rosenquist, who so influenced Gabarrón, were, in turn, influenced by Picasso. Indeed, had I been on the Board of New York City planners, who placed the "Columbuses", I would have put the first Columbus in front of the Museum of Modern Art. My generation grew up with Picasso. I see myself as a child accompanying my mother nearly every Saturday (she was an artist) to see the Picasso's at MOMA. Guernica was part of our language and experience; we had the extraordinary luck that Picasso had sent it to the museum for safekeeping until Spain became a democracy. Like Picasso, Gabarrón has roots in the North and South of Spain -- his mix is Mula and Valladolid, and in the Columbuses the intense Mediterranean palette of Mula lives along side of the intellectual restraint of Valladolid.

Gabarrón isn't being a romantic when he says that he was struck by the humility of the New York artists who came into their own in the l960s. Their egos was in their art, and, beginning with Jackson Pollock, the terrain they claimed was huge, daring, and, at times, insolent. Yet, unlike Europeans, most of that generation had working class parents. In his early days my friend Larry Rivers drove a truck to support himself. (He wrote in his memoir: "Cubism told a young man from the Bronx he didn't know very much. Cubism didn't know about him or his nights walking all over Greenwich Village with his big horn slung over his shoulders.") These were the group of artists who migrated to the potato fields of the Hamptons because the tip of Long Island, then, was cheap.

When Larry's generation discovered Cubism and Picasso they had the advantage of distance: they weren't crushed by the weight of history, by the too near presence of Picasso's genius.

Gabarrón has frequently remarked that what both stunned and moved him when he came to the United States was the bold, innovative artists of an immigrant nation, and the enormous civic energy which produced an astonishing number privately endowed museums and foundations. Thus, his idea for making an international foundation in New York, a home to artists, a creative center, a teaching center, came from this

Continuing on Central Park South in the direction of Fifth Avenue we came to Simon Bolivar Plaza. Here are a pair of Columbus's, one to the West of the Plaza, one to the East. They are very much in the same vibrant mood as the Columbus in Columbus Circle, and celebrate New York's acknowledgement of our considerable Hispanic heritage. Still, in every place that we visited, there is, like those sets of Russian dolls, a history, within a history, within a history. About the time of the first World War, when Marcel Duchamp and his artist friends climbed to the top of the Washington Square Arch, proclaiming, as a prank, the independence of Greenwich Village, the pedestal of the Simon Bolivar was temporarily vacant. The city and Venezuela couldn't agree on a style of sculpture, and another group of Bohemian artists placed on top of it a piece from a Paris art show. That was then. Now we have both Bolivar and Gabarrón.

Next we went to Dante Park, at 63d Street and Columbus Avenue. This Columbus stands over eight feet tall, opposite another privileged space -- Lincoln Center, the hub of all the artistic life of the city. This piece, with its subdued earth tones, seems to owe more to Valladolid than Mula. As I circled it, the shapes and colors shifted, very fitting for the changing perspectives of the New World. One side might be the view from Spain to the Americas, the other side the view from the Americas back to Spain.

We preceded up Broadway, to the small island on 79th Street, which divides up and downtown traffic. This was the corner where, when I was a student at Columbia University, shortly after the Beats were students there, I would turn my car East, going home to the East Side, where my family lived. This Columbus, set down in the island, is one of the most exuberant of the installations. We stopped here for a long time. I walked up close to touch it, and examine the tiny multiple repetitions of color, one of the artist's favorite leit motifs. On the under side of the top, Gabarrón placed helterskelter coins of yellow against a deep blue (perhaps the deep blue of the Atlantic).

The unexpected arrangement of pistachio greens, hot pinks, laced with yellow and reds is irresistible. The playfulness of this Columbus, which appears to be tilting to one side, almost like a Quijote tilting at windmills, is a much needed contrast to the unbroken sometimes grim stretch of buildings and shops on that part of Broadway.

We then drove past my alma mater, Columbia University, continuing up Broadway, where there are so many landmarks -- past City College, up to the Hispanic Society.

We stopped at several more installations along the way, but the one near the Hispanic Society and the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the former home of The Museum of the American Indian is spectacular. And on what a site! (The membership of the American Academy includes Mark Twain, Andrew Wyeth and Edward Hopper).

The Hispanic Society was founded in l904 by an eccentric millionaire, Archer M. Huntington, who felt that Spanish art was under-appreciated. At a time when most Americans were enamored of French and Italian painters, from the age of twenty-two Huntington was fascinated by Spanish and Portuguese culture, art, and prehistoric archaeology. Thus, this is one of the greatest, if not the greatest, private collections of Spanish art on this continent. The Goya portraits, the El Greco, and the Velazquez's are magnificent and the special Sorolla room and the Zuloagas are unexpected gems. Larry and I spent some of our happiest moments in the quiet here, far from the "museum mile". Just looking and looking again, as the treasures from every century, including the prehistoric, are overwhelming.

The choice of the particular Columbus to grace this site has been well thought out.

In this special homage to the home here of Spain's greatest artists, the Columbus moves upward toward the sky, full of light and nobility. The colors are true Gabarrón, clear reds, blues, yellows and pink. Standing there, gazing at the magnificent sculpture in this magnificent setting, so off the beaten track, I thought, yes, Gabarrón's art, at least, some of it, must remain in New York.

Our last stop was on the East Side at Fifth Avenue and 104th Street at El Museo Del Barrio, the only museum in the country devoted exclusively to the art and culture of Puerto Rico and Latin America. In my early childhood we lived just a few blocks away, at Fifth Avenue and 95th Street. Next to Del Barrio is a children's paradise, The Museum of the City of New York, with its great fire engines and doll houses dating back to the revolutionary era. (My brother and I, until the guards would chase us out, would roller skate along the marble floors of the museum!) And the mood of these twin Columbuses is exhuberant. The two Columbuses facing each other in close proximity, enhance the museum's elegant courtyard, directly opposite the great flower gardens of Central Park. Cristóbal Gabarrón has used with a deliberate abandon amoeba-like shapes that reach out in every direction; the colors are Mediterranean, punctuated with vast areas of the artist's multi-colored rectangles. I can think of no greater contemporary artistic honor to our Spanish, Hispanic, and American heritage, than the Mysteries of Columbus. Mysterious perhaps, but they speak directly to New York's abiding artistic vision.