Wisdom, with Light and Sound - New York City, NY
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Metro2
N 40° 45.527 W 073° 58.725
18T E 586201 N 4512481
This sculpture is located at the entrance to 30 Rockefeller Plaza in New York City.
Waymark Code: WMCFT8
Location: New York, United States
Date Posted: 09/02/2011
Views: 18
The Smithsonian Inventory (
visit link) describes this workk thusly:
"A limestone panel relief of a bearded man, holding a compass, who represents Wisdom. He is flanked on both sides by panels each with a figure, one representing Light and one representing Sound. Sound, on Wisdom's proper right, is a muscular male nude crouched on all fours. Light, on Wisdom's proper left, is a robed female reclining among the clouds. Below each panel is a grid pattern consisting of 240 Corning glass blocks."
The Inventory also adds this remark:
"The Corning Glass Works produced the screen of glass blocks, each hand-poured and containing intended imperfections."
Wikipedia (
visit link) has a good article about the artist, Lee Lawrie (1877-1963), informing us that Lawrie:
"was one of the United States' foremost architectural sculptors and a key figure in the American art scene preceding World War II. Over his long career of more than 300 commissions Lawrie's style evolved through Modern Gothic, to Beaux-Arts Classicism and finally into Moderne or Art Deco. His work includes the details on the Nebraska State Capitol building in Lincoln, Nebraska and some of the architectural sculpture and, his most prominent work, the free-standing bronze Atlas (installed 1937) at New York City's Rockefeller Center."