Art Bent but Not Broken

Thirty feet below an onramp to the New Jersey Turnpike, Victoria Leacock balanced atop a mound of charred and twisted steel. Out of the millions of tons of World Trade Center debris, this pile at a temporary storage yard is Leacock’s personal crusade.

“Is this OK?” she wondered, aiming her camera to document every wavy piece. “I’m walking on art.”

Beneath her feet are the remains of Alexander Calder’s once-imposing “Bent Propeller,” a 25-foot-tall sculpture that stood at the World Trade Center until it was crushed by collapsing buildings Sept. 11. Now the carcass rests amid musty stacks of lumber, metal gutters and bags of grout.

Calder’s sculpture is one of only two survivors out of the hundreds of artworks that graced corporate offices and public plazas at the World Trade Center. Gone is a rare tapestry by Spanish surrealist Joan Miro. Dozens of bronze sculptures by Auguste Rodin have vanished. Paintings by Pablo Picasso, David Hockney and Roy Lichtenstein are cinder now.

The Calder has been crumpled, burnt, sliced into pieces and scraped by the jaws of earthmoving equipment. Its remains are barely discernible from ordinary scrap metal.

Is it still art?

Like Leacock, those who have seen the tangled pile of steel scrap beneath the turnpike find themselves strangely moved by the horror that has been fused into each piece.

“It’s now an extraordinary monument, to the living and the dead,” said Karen Yager, an art conservator and founder of the New York Regional Assn. for Conservation. “It’s an emotional piece. It’s very quiet now, very dignified.”

Calder’s grandson, Alexander Rower, has vowed to restore the sculpture if more pieces can be found at the Fresh Kills landfill on Staten Island or other places that received World Trade Center debris.

The twisted steel plates would be pounded flat, then fused together and molded into their original shape. New pieces of metal would be used to fill the gaps.

Although the sculpture is owned by the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, which built the World Trade Center, Calder’s heirs wield enormous influence in the debate, especially because Rower initiated the search and is willing to pay for a full restoration.

“It’s sort of like a family member,” said Rower, director of the Calder Foundation in Manhattan’s Soho district. “We want to put it back exactly the way it was. We don’t need to leave scars on it.”

But to others, “Bent Propeller” in its mangled state has become something far different than what Calder ever intended. Despite Rower’s pledge, they believe it is impossible to turn back the clock.

“These things have taken on another life,” Yager said.

The decision about what to do with the Calder isn’t driven by the practical concerns facing government planners and real estate developers as they debate how to replace the World Trade Center towers.

It strikes at the deeper issue of how we live after tragedy.

For Leacock, the debate seems distant. So few pieces have been found, and it may be months--if not years--before any restoration work could begin.

Like thousands of others around the country, Leacock is trying to make sense of such devastating violence. She isn’t sure whether the Calder ought to be rebuilt or left as is.

But in the midst of so much destruction and so little hope, what has become important to her is the search itself. For more than two months, she has been meticulously hunting down these scraps of steel.

“It was important to find something that meant something to someone,” she said.

In its pre-attack state, “Bent Propeller” resembled three oversized boomerangs joined at the center like a giant pinwheel. The tomato-red sculpture greeted tens of thousands of workers each day with its graceful beauty and sweeping lines. Set against the hard, gray edges of the World Trade Center, it was a splash of human imagination.

Now the bridge where it stood is gone. Sunlight streams through the gutted, grid-like remains of Building Six, the Calder’s closest neighbor. This is where Leacock began her search, when the area was still littered with rubble.

Leacock, a self-described “artistic entrepreneur” who is producing an off-Broadway musical, hadn’t fancied herself a Calder aficionado. She remembers seeing the sculpture on the bridge but never gave it much thought.

Like many New Yorkers, Leacock made her way to ground zero the afternoon of the attacks. For the first two weeks, she passed out coffee to burned-out rescue workers and, with her bright red lipstick and cheerful sweaters, tried to keep their spirits up. Her focus shifted after Rower, her close friend from childhood, asked her to help him find his grandfather’s sculpture.

“It was a welcome distraction from the horror of everything,” she said.

At first, her quixotic campaign struck the construction workers as absurd.

“Two foremen dismissed me out of hand,” she said. “They were busy trying to find bodies.”

But as the days wore on and their search became more frustrating, recovery workers warmed to Leacock and her quest.

With a stack of fliers tucked in a bag, Leacock threaded her way through the workers clearing out tons of steel fragments. She approached them one by one and pressed a flier into their hands.

“Please Help Recover and Preserve Famous AMERICAN SCULPTURE,” pleads the flier, which is dominated by a photo of the structure’s three curving swooshes of steel. “When discovered--IN ANY CONDITION--please contact us immediately.”

On Oct. 11, exactly one month after the attack, construction workers clearing the site came upon the first remains of the sculpture. At first, they didn’t recognize them as distinct from the steel shreds that had once been buildings. One orange-tinted panel was so massive that workers had to cut it into three pieces so that it could be lifted into a dump truck and transported to the Fresh Kills landfill.

When Leacock arrived at ground zero that afternoon, she caught workers mid-slice on another large steel panel. It was set aside and taken to the Jersey City storage yard for safe keeping, along with other remnants discovered over a three-week period.

Every scrap is precious. “Bent Propeller” had an insured value of $1.5 million, though many art experts believe it was worth perhaps $1 million more. Altogether, about $100 million worth of art was destroyed at the site.

The Calder was created as part of a public art program funded by the Port Authority when it built the World Trade Center more than 30 years ago. A panel of curators and museum directors set about identifying artists whose work should be commissioned for the twin towers.

Calder, an American artist best known for his gigantic mobiles, was a logical choice. Born in 1898, he came of age as America matured from a society of steam and grain into one of technology and steel. His mobiles are highly engineered, tilting and rotating with the help of wind or motors but never losing their careful balance.

His monumental sculptures--dubbed “stabiles”--are composites of hypergeometric shapes fabricated out of half-inch-thick steel and secured by clearly visible bolts. His style fit perfectly with the clean, steel lines of the twin towers.

“He came over to look at the model of the World Trade Center,” said Saul Wenegrat, who directed the Port Authority’s art program from 1969 to 1995. “He asked for some red paper and scissors. He made a cutout of a stabile and placed it right between the two towers.”

Calder suggested the sculpture stand 150 feet, or 15 stories, tall. Minoru Yamasaki, the towers’ architect, countered that it could be 15 feet tall. The two compromised on 25 feet.

Wenegrat commissioned the work in 1969 for $100,000. It was delivered in 1971 and installed in 1974, when construction of the buildings was complete. Calder died two years later.

It was never recognized as one of Calder’s greatest works, but it has taken on new significance because it is one of only two survivors of the terrorist attack.

The other is a punctured bronze globe that used to be Fritz Koenig’s “Sphere.”

The 25-foot-high monument to fostering world peace through world trade once sat atop a granite fountain in the middle of the plaza. Now its gleaming surfaces resemble a partially deflated soccer ball.

Koenig traveled from his home in Ganslberg, Germany, to New York in October to view the remains. He intended to say farewell to one of his largest works. Instead, he said he was overcome with joy that it survived. He is determined to have the world see “Sphere” in its present state--infused with the malice of the terrorists who struck the twin towers, the fear of the victims inside, and the spirit of renewal awakened by the attacks.

“It is not restorable,” the 77-year-old sculptor said.

Embracing the scars of time is relatively easy in Koenig’s case, since his “Sphere” is still recognizable. By contrast, the Calder has been so completely transformed that it is not clear how the surviving pieces could be displayed in any way that recalls the original.

For those who support leaving the Calder as it is, the scars are the precisely the point.

“Art is a symbol for a moment in time,” said Dietrich von Frank, president and chief executive of Axa Art Insurance Corp., the New York firm that will pay claims on more than $25 million worth of insured art at the World Trade Center, including the Calder and the Koenig. “Art personifies and objectifies what people actually feel. A piece of public artwork like this Calder would stand as a piece of survival and also as a piece of resolve. It’s damaged but it’s not lost. It didn’t cave in.”

Still, Rower is anxious to rebuild “Bent Propeller” and restore his grandfather’s artistic vision. He wants to make it a Calder again.

For Rower, the sculpture is just as deserving of restoration as if it had been the victim of an earthquake, a flood or a random act of violence.

No one debated the wisdom of restoring Michelangelo’s Pieta after it was attacked by a hammer-wielding sculptor named Laszlo Toth in St. Peter’s Basilica in 1972. The Vatican spent several months repairing the broken arm and chipped face of the Madonna, who cradles her crucified son Jesus Christ in her lap. The marble sculpture is now protected behind bullet-proof glass.

Regardless of the source of the destruction, the impulse for many is simply to make right what is now horribly wrong.

“There was nothing else worth saving that was found down here,” said Scott Chapman, a labor foreman from North Coram, R.I., who helped unearth some of the Calder pieces at ground zero. “Something good could get out of here.”

That will happen only if more of the sculpture is found. Rower estimates that about half of “Bent Propeller” has been recovered. Restoration work will begin if he and Leacock can find an additional 30% of the sculpture. If they can’t, it’s unclear what will happen with the recovered pieces.

After the last Calder pieces were plucked from ground zero, Leacock hoped to repeat her success at Fresh Kills. First she took photos of the scraps under the turnpike onramp. Then she arranged them into a new poster to distribute at the landfill.

But at Fresh Kills a few weeks ago, the police detective in command refused to let her speak with workers sorting through the rubble. He was openly skeptical of the notion that the piles might contain pieces of a valuable sculpture.

“If it was brought on Oct. 11, it’s gone, it’s been processed,” said the stone-faced detective, who wouldn’t give his name.

Still, Leacock spent the next 10 minutes persuading the officer to take her fliers and post them near the area where workers are sorting through rubble from the area where “Bent Propeller” stood.

“I just can’t guarantee anything,” he said. “You know how many red pieces of metal are up there?”

Frustrated, Leacock drove away. “I’m so close,” she said.

She and Rower next visited Metal Management Northeast in Newark, one of the companies charged with recycling 25,000 tons of World Trade Center steel.

They spent nearly five hours looking at mountains of metal two stories high. The Calder pieces should be recognizable by their thickness--one-half-inch--and their evenly spaced bolt holes, even if the red paint has been seared or scraped away.

But they found nothing.