During the Great Depression, John D. Rockefeller Jr. (known as ‘Junior’ to distinguish himself from his father) was the driving force behind the financing, development, and construction of Rockefeller Center in midtown Manhattan, where Christie’s New York now makes its home. Originally envisaged as a location for a new Metropolitan Opera complex in 1928, the Stock Market Crash of 1929 meant that the Opera could no longer afford to move uptown, and within a month the land leased for the project had been reimagined by Rockefeller working in conjunction with RCA, NBC, and RKO as a mass-media entertainment complex, which would provide a hub for television, music, radio, ‘talking pictures’, and plays. Construction on the project began in 1931 and the first buildings opened in 1933; the core of the complex was completed by 1939. Considered one of the greatest projects of the Depression era, Rockefeller Center was declared a New York City landmark in 1985 and a National Historic Landmark in 1987.
The then-RCA Building, now 30 Rockefeller Plaza, the complex’s centerpiece, opened in the spring of 1933. Preparing for the building’s opening, Junior originally approached Picasso and Matisse about decorations for the lobby, both of whom declined to participate in the project. Sir Frank Brangwyn, José Maria Sert and Diego Rivera were subsequently chosen to create the building’s murals, though Rivera’s mural was later replaced over a dispute about his inclusion of a figure of Lenin. All three artists were instructed to create their murals on canvas with the figures en grisaille and Brangwyn’s designs were to include some lettering as well. The unifying theme of the decorative program was to be 'New Frontiers', encompassing aspects of modern society, including science, labor, education, travel, communication, humanitarianism, finance and spirituality.
Brangwyn’s commission, which he received in 1932 with the final product installed in December of 1933, was for four large-scale murals, each measuring 17 by 25 feet, which still decorate the entrance hall and elevator bays along the south corridor of 30 Rockefeller Plaza. Brangwyn was assigned to interpret four themes around ‘man’s relationship to society and his fellow man’ and each of the murals bears the artist’s interpretations of these themes as their title: Man Laboring, Man the Creator, Man the Master, and Man’s Ultimate Destiny. Brangwyn did not produce the canvases in situ, but instead worked on them in a room at the Brighton Pavilion, as his studio in Ditchling, Sussex, about 50 miles south of London, was not large enough for him to paint them there (fig. 1). They were then transported to New York by steamer for installation. Sadly, Brangwyn never saw the finished murals in situ in New York (fig. 2). The present work and the following lot are studies for the first and last of Brangwyn’s murals from the series – Man Laboring and Man’s Ultimate Destiny.
The present work is a large-scale study for Man Laboring, which was Brangwyn’s interpretation on the theme of ‘man’s family relationships.’ This work is clearly an early idea for the compositional arrangement of the figures, with the artist ultimately deciding not on a composition which was arranged centrally as in the present work, but instead arranged in a V-shape, in order to situate the text more centrally. The use of the blue background in the present work is also notable, as the artist had been tasked to work in a very limited palette, and no colors appear in the final composition. The text in the final version of the composition reads: ‘Man Labouring Painfully With His Own Hands; Living Precariously And Adventurously With Courage Fortitude And The Indomitable Will To Survive.’
Man Laboring is the first in the series of four murals, which in addition to interpreting the themes that Brangwyn was presented with, clearly illustrate man’s forward progress through time as well. Man Laboring is meant to illustrate a Edenic scene, with the figures unclothed and surrounded by a bountiful variety of animals in a lush garden. While there are a number of changes in the placement of the figures between the present work and the final composition, many of the significant figural groupings have already been worked out at this stage and are identifiable in the final version. The figures of the two men in the foreground pulling up a fishing net so laden with catch that fish are leaping out of it adhere quite closely to those in the finished work both in pose and placement. The two men here seen at upper right with a stag carried between them on a rod have been moved to the left side of the composition in the final rendering (with the stag changed to a goat in the finished mural) their implied forward movement drawing the viewer’s eye inward toward the text. Other figures, like the nursing mother, are identifiable as well, but the final composition’s huge variety of animal figures was apparently only at an early stage of planning when this cartoon was created.
We are grateful to Dr. Libby Horner for confirming the authenticity of this work, which will be included under no. M1110 in her Sir Frank Brangwyn catalogue raisonné, currently in preparation.