 Thanks, David, and I also want to join my colleagues in thanking the Barnes and Bryn Mawr for organizing this great conference and in the other speakers who've gone so far today. It's been a wonderful series of papers. In 1959, Eurus Brothers, a real estate developer in New York, erected a 32-story edifice at two Broadway at the tip of Lower Manhattan. The tower was in many ways typical of the speculative office buildings then remaking the city's skyline. Designed by architecture firm Emery Roth, the building maximized rentable space by filling the large plot and taking the required setbacks on the upper floors. Yet amidst its glassy curtain wall and repetitive aluminum patterning, the building contained an unusual feature. Above the main doors and extending for the entire 86 feet of the recessed entryway was an abstract mural designed by Lee Krasner, the abstract expressionist painter, and her nephew, artist Ronald Stein. Unfurling in a ribbon of cracked and splintered mosaic, the mural offered to passing pedestrians a collage-like surface of dark, if vibrant, earth tones lit up with the occasional bright yellow and shot through with the tracery of gray cement, the material that adhered the pieces to the wall and that leaked out between the craggy tesserae. Krasner was not the only New York painter to realize a public mural commission in the early postwar years. In 1954, Adolf Gottlieb's stained glass facade was installed on the educational annex of the Park Avenue synagogue. In 1956, Hans Hoffman, Krasner's teacher and a prominent painter himself, designed a mural to cloud the elevator housing of a third Avenue office lobby. Two years later, he completed a mosaic for a public school, and it was not just the abstract expressionists who were receiving commissions in postwar New York. Max Spivak installed his mosaics at a cafe on Broadway, at a movie theater in Long Island, at public schools in Queens and Brooklyn, and in the entryway of a sixth Avenue office building, which you see here. The lobby of the Time Life building was graced with murals by Fritz Glarner and by Yosef Albers. Ilya Bolatovsky, an important painter of 1930s abstraction, created a sinuous, wending mural for Cinema One in 1962. The two decades after World War Two were a renaissance for public abstraction, for abstract art explicitly designed for architectural spaces and for public consumption. Most attempts to make sense of abstract murals in these years turned to the influential critic Clement Greenberg, who throughout the 1940s compared the growing scale of the abstract expressionist canvas to the mural. As he stated, quote, in this day and age, the art of painting increasingly rejects the easel and yearns for the wall. Other scholars have taken Mark Rothko's Seagram murals, created at the end of the 1950s, as the paradigmatic abstract wall paintings. Designed for but never installed in the Four Seasons restaurant in New York's Seagram building, the mural seemed to capture a central tension in 20th century art between the seriousness of high modernist abstraction and its quick conversion into a fashionable backdrop for the upper classes. And yet these critical lineages of Greenberg and Rothko, important as they are in the history of abstract expressionism, seem insufficient to the field of post-war public abstraction, as I briefly sketched it here. For one, the many murals appearing in the 1950s and 1960s made use of a plethora of materials, not just paint, but also mosaic, metal, cement, and stained glass, a far cry from Greenberg's insistence on the medium specificity of pure painting. Furthermore, the murals exhibit a stylistic diversity, cheerful quasi-surrealist forms, geometric abstraction, glistening fields of color that extend beyond just the gestural painting of abstract expressionism. Perhaps most significantly, the murals' explicit concern with public communication, cited at the entrances, facades, and lobbies of these buildings, are a far cry from Rothko's unfinished project, intended for the more rarefied and somewhat private realm of fine dining. In my talk today, I'll focus on a subset of these murals mosaics made for the new corporate towers that rose with startling speed over New York at the end of the 1950s. These murals, I argue, typified by the mosaics of Hoffman, Spivak, and Krasner, triangulated between three roles. They acted as a form of publicity. They served as a visual complement to the austerity of modern architecture, and they were incorporated with remarkable ease into the speed and demands of post-war speculative office building. The first thing to note about the office murals generally is how closely they map onto the centers of new business construction in New York City. When Hoffman's mural was unveiled, commenters hailed the building, 711 Third Avenue, as the jumpstart for Third Avenue's long- awaited midtown office boom. The avenue's elevated subway line had just been dismantled, and one architecture journal credited Hoffman's gleaming mosaic with, quote, lending bright notes to a neighborhood only recently under the shadow of the Third Avenue, L. Further west, Sixth Avenue, which had shed its elevated line just before the war, was also emerging as a site of new construction. The building housing Spivak's mural was greeted as an early volley in that avenue's redevelopment. The Glarner and Albers murals, although I won't be talking more about them today, were cited in the Time Life building, whose completion in 1959 signaled Sixth Avenue's definitive transformation into the heart of New York's business world. For its part, Krasner's mural graced the facade of the first major skyscraper in Lower Manhattan in over 20 years, one that signaled Wall Street's return as a bustling hub for business. We can see the towers and their murals as thus intimately involved in the changing geography of capital and post war New York City as finance and construction remapped the building. Framed this way, embedded within a changing urban fabric, the questions become less ones of mural tendency or artistic intention and more ones of use. What was the function of abstraction in these new buildings? What needs of corporations, office workers, real estate agents did abstraction fulfill in the public spaces of modern architecture? On the most basic level, the mural served as ways to generate press and prestige for the builders that commissioned them. The planning and installing of murals was newsworthy enough to occasion numerous mentions and articles. Critics were quick to latch on to examples of what one called the new alliance between art and architecture. Furthermore, the use of abstract murals endowed the buildings with a level of cultural cache as hosts of the latest art trends. When Hoffman's mural was completed on Third Avenue, the building developers held a preview for the unveiling along the lines of an art opening and put together a pamphlet in which they described the murals as a blend of tradition and modernity. Installed at the entrances of these towers, the murals acted as a form of publicity, broadcasting the building's character or status to those who entered. In the period discussion of these murals, a persistent trope surfaces, one with origins earlier in the decade, that abstract art could be a source of vitality and humanism for a modern architecture to void of both. Spivak's mural wrote the Times will quote, relieve the grayness of the lobby with its multi-colored tesserae. In the words of another writer, Spivak's mosaics bring joy, vitality and excitement to public place. They humanize the stone and steel of modern living. In the pamphlet on Hoffman's elevator mosaic, the developers wax poetic about the life and luminosity in Hoffman's art, which they hoped would vitalize the lobby. From Life Magazine to Architectural Forum, writers offered variants of this argument. Architecture critic Ada Louise Huckstable explained how, quote, the large scale, the excitement, the explosive color and the intricate, often sensuous patterns of abstract art add congenial richness to the austerity of today's building forms. Fortune magazine, in an article on the corporate splurge in abstract art, noted that, quote, not only is abstract art in vast supply, but it happens to fulfill a good many needs of modern architecture. It is big, colorful, often highly decorative and creates a welcome contrast to severe, rigorously detailed building. For these and other writers, it was not just the look of buildings that was at stake here. It was a question of the character of modern life itself, a life increasingly dominated by corporate values. The Times, for example, was typical in noting how, quote, as our new buildings went up and our streets took on the look of endless canyons of glittering glass walls and little varying steel grids, with nothing to relieve their bleak monotony, the very human need grew for something more. Or in the blunter words of Fortune, abstraction could, quote, provide a sense of emotional release and give the beholder a thin grip on humanity in a business machine world. Abstraction, according to these critics, returned the human and the emotional to a corporate world that had exiled such values. If publicity and a sort of compensatory humanism were functions sought out by the corporate patrons of these works, the abstract mural as a form was a remarkably useful vehicle for realizing them, particularly in the context of the speculative office tower, the location of all three of the mosaic murals. Critic Douglas Haskell characterized the speculative towers as, quote, the quick return, low cost rental office building with plentiful elevators, acreages of modern curtain wall, and generally not much architectural merit. Emory Roth, who designed to Broadway was one of the leading architecture firms for such buildings. As they describe themselves in a business week profile, quote, we're in the business of designing buildings for businessmen who put up buildings for other businessmen. These speculative towers by Roth and others were emphatically not the high profile prestige buildings like Seagram or Chase Manhattan Bank. Those buildings serving as architecturally striking headquarters for a large corporation tended to make their concessions to public art and humanism through three dimensional works, fountains and sculptures that emphasize the open expanses of their ground level plazas. Speculative buildings on the other hand, which generally occupied the entire plot rather than making provisions for plazas, could make great use of abstract murals, which non referential and repetitive were easily scalable to a given size and space. As two-dimensional skins or cladding, murals didn't require substantive changes to building design that would eat up valuable floor space. Nor did they interfere with construction schedules or engineering concerns. Speculative towers were full of available surfaces, elevator banks, doorways, entrance facades that could easily be recruited. William Kauffman, the building developer who footed the bill for the Hoffman mural, commented directly on the return on investment for such murals. Quote, it costs so little to have something outstanding, he told Architectural Forum, I'm amazed more spec builders don't go in for it. Indeed, at Two Broadway, Eurus Brothers, the developers of Two Broadway, paid less than $30,000, a little over half a percent of the total building cost for the design and manufacture of Krasner's mural. In concluding, I want to return to Two Broadway, where we began. How did the needs of publicity, abstract warmth and speculative construction play out here? The mural was indeed used as publicity. Upon its completion, Eurus Brothers sent out press releases to the editors of architecture and mainstream papers, as well as to the directors of New York museums. In at least one article, the mural was held up as the saving grace of the building, the one distinguished accent on an otherwise low brow edifice. And what was the mural's relationship to corporate life? Did it effectively rescue the building from soulless rationality or at least soften the hard edges of architectural monotony? Two fascinating articles from 1959 read Krasner's mural in precisely these terms, as a battle between business and humanism, although they reached opposite conclusions. The first, by B.H. Friedman for Craft Horizons, begins with a glowing evocation of the old produce exchange, the building demolished to make way for the skyscraper. Decorating the new building, the New Two Broadway, the new skyscraper is uniquely difficult because of the nature of modern materials. What was lacking, Friedman writes, was, quote, the ornamentation and texture of the old red brick produce exchange and the effects upon it of time itself. For even time, he continued, the weathering and character giving friend of undistinguished architecture cannot help aluminum and glass. Friedman suggests that Krasner's mural is, if not an outright reference, at least a ghostly echo of the ornamented red masonry structure that used to occupy the site. Indeed, there is something hard, flinty and enduring about the mural. Its cracked and textured surface suggests an aerial view of terrain or sedimented fossil layers. For Friedman, the mural does not just humanize the building, it imparts a sense of temporality, persistence, even history that is lacking in the resolutely contemporary structure around it. A second reviewer, Leslie Katz, writing in The Nation, saw a more pernicious connection between the building and the mural. Like many others, he began by deriding the two Broadway Tower, which, he sneered, quote, can hardly be called a building. It is more an installation, a package, a broad box encased in shiny wrapping, presenting an anonymous and faceless personality. Its overall effect is one of unmitigated self-assertion, negating everything in sight but itself, a glittering non-entity. For Katz, Krasner's mural does not add something human or historical to the anonymous package, rather it betrays the very same impulse. The facade, he writes, is glorified and enshrined at its entourage by a large, wide, abstract mosaic, an innocuous arabesque of round and jagged colored shapes. Like the building, this mosaic is committed to nothing beyond the mystique and logic of its own specialized, abstract function as a thing apart, a law unto itself, a disrelation, end quote. In the early post-war years, public abstraction fulfilled a number of roles for its patrons and viewers. It was a tool for publicity and prestige. It added humanist vitality to the impersonal regimes of corporate life. And it did this particularly well for speculative office buildings that filled their plots completely and sought quick return on investment. In the case of Krasner's mural and its competing interpretations, abstraction was seen both as an analog to speculative capital, pure, instrumental, without relation, and as a resistant force within that system, textural, temporal, weathered, adding interest and history. That Krasner's mural could inspire such disparate readings as a sign both of the urgency of such concerns about corporate life in the modern world, and a sign of abstraction's own complex role at mid- century in answering them. Thank you.