There’s a New York collection featuring works by Henry Moore, Fernand Leger, Marc Chagall, Salvador Dali, Henri Matisse, Barbara Hepworth, Rufino Tamayo, Candido Portinari, and numerous others. It doesn’t appear on museum listings because it isn’t housed in one — it’s in the United Nations complex in Manhattan. Somehow, in the midst of performing all of its other functions, the U.N. has acquired a striking amount of great art.
This art is not curated in any traditional sense. In fact, there’s no curator. The U.N. has no budget for buying art nor any mechanism for shedding it. Politics and donor interests naturally play a role in the functions of essentially all museums, but seldom so overtly as here, where suggestions about moving a piece can earn you the opprobrium of not just a grandee but a nation-state.
The U.N. began receiving art donations soon after its building opened in 1952. Like most new homeowners, the U.N. initially wasn’t very choosy about what filled up its blank walls. But space soon grew constricted, and there’s been more than one moratorium on art acquisitions. Currently, the complex features 300 gifts from 193 countries. These range from tapestries to mosaics to coins to busts to even a movable type model.
The U.N. eventually established a theoretical limit of one donation per country. Werner Schmidt, a U.N. public information officer, explained that the limit is “really about equal representation” and that “we want all member states’ voices.” Like most international protocols, this one has been broken repeatedly. A number of states have made multiple donations, and others are constantly offering to.
Another concern is the maintenance of these donations, for which there are no official sources of revenue. There’s no endowment, and the organization doesn’t use member dues to pay for it. Typically, donor states are asked to refurbish their own pieces. Some donations have been removed due to decay, and many have required substantial touching up (especially in a building that didn’t ban smoking indoors until 2008).
In the early years, the U.N. often accepted donations from individuals and foundations. But today, Schmidt says, “We are now only focused on donations by member states because we know where to find them.” One of the most famous works in the building, the stained glass Peace Window by Chagall, was donated by U.N. employees in 1964. Several panels are broken or missing. “If it was donated by a member state,” Schmidt explains, “we could say, ‘Here’s the bill. Wouldn’t you say this needs some restoration?’” They’re not about to ask current U.N. staff to pay for it.
Of course, not every state survives. There’s a relic of East Germany in the U.N. plaza in the form of The Rising Man, a bronze statue by Fritz Cremer now tended to by Germany.
The Arts Committee, which vets donations, is theoretically charged with questions of aesthetics. But its responsibilities, as explained by current head Viktorija Kocman, are principally diplomatic. A former undersecretary, Brian Urqhart, told the New York Times in 1983 that the collection featured “some monstrosities,” but the current staff is far more polite. Kocman explained that “most of the problems are simply about equity and space. Equatorial Guinea, for example, donated a beautiful sculpture. They wanted it inside the building, but it’s too heavy. It would fall through the floor. So I worked with them to find a suitable location.” The committee is also careful not to accept art that could be directly insulting to other states.
There’s an effective hierarchy of art in the building. The most desired locations for donations are the hardest to access — for instance, the second-floor delegate’s lounge, to which there is no tour access. And just as membership on the U.N. Security Council offers states a whole set of grandfathered privileges, countries that donated art early often get pride of place. Nigeria’s donation, the sculpture Anyanwu by Ben Enwonwu, graces a curved wall in a prime spot thanks to being gifted in the ‘60s. Moving works is rare, but it has happened: Finland graciously consented to shift its plaza sculpture to make room for a memorial to international slavery.
You can still see plenty of art on normal tours, with plaza access recently restored. Hepworth’s Single Form sculpture is excellent, as is Moore’s Reclining Figure: Hand and Carl Fredrik Reutersward’s Non-Violence, featuring a revolver with a barrel twisted to uselessness. One Russian gift, Zurab Tsereteli’s Good Defeats Evil, is a powerful depiction of St. George defeating a dragon, wrought out of parts of Pershing and SS-20 missiles. The Sleeping Elephant statue, donated by Kenya, Namibia, and Nepal, raised eyebrows on account of its prominent genitalia; hedges were planted to shield the impressionable. There’s even a Slovenian beehive, tended to by “Beekeepers without Borders.”
Inside the building’s main entrance is Tamayo’s La Fraternidad mural, a marvelous donation from Mexico. And the works decorating some of the main chambers, including Fernand Leger’s murals in the General Assembly and Per Krohg’s bizarre but captivating mural in the Security Council, are fascinating as well.
The lack of any conventional curation lends the collection interest. There’s a 1,700-year-old mosaic from Tunisia, as well as a tapestry about the Chernobyl disaster from Belarus. There’s an 11th-century stone sculpture of the Hindu god Surya from India and an impressive number of modern South American paintings. The fact that their placements aren’t driven by thematic or chronological coherence, or even any intentional aesthetic juxtaposition, makes for a reliably novel and somehow refreshing museum-going experience. If some works are overly domineering or gaudy, there’s also little frivolity (no one wants his or her state represented by a Jeff Koons), and the donations from actively Marxist states are immensely more bearable than the latest exhibition from your local woke curator. If aggregating the interests of all the nations of the world doesn’t always work well in the General Assembly, doing the same for their art collections somehow does.
Anthony Paletta is a writer living in Brooklyn.
