Men Without Women (mural)

Men Without Women is a 1932 mural by the American painter Stuart Davis executed in what the critic Hilton Kramer termed a "modified Cubist style". The work was commissioned for the Art Deco-style Radio City Music Hall at Rockefeller Center in New York City, where it hangs in the downstairs men's lounge.[1][2][3] It was named by the Rockefeller Center art committee after Ernest Hemingway's second short story collection of the same name, which had been first published in the same year.[4][5]

Men Without Women
ArtistStuart Davis
Year1932
MediumOil on canvas
LocationMoMA on loan to Radio City Music Hall, New York City

History

Originally conceived for a show curated by Lincoln Kirstein at the Museum of Modern Art named "Murals by American Painters and Photographers", the Radio City Music Hall mural was an outgrowth of the exhibition wherein Davis was one of four artists commissioned from the survey to create a new work for Rockfeller Center, the new "skyscraper city within a city" (the other three having been Henry Billings, Louis Bouche, and Henry Varnum Poor).

In 1975 it was given to the Museum of Modern Art as a gift.[6][7] This was an arrangement which included the restoration of the work after decades of casual damage to it, including countless wafts of cigarette and cigar smoke that had stained the canvas.[8] The work was then loaned back to the music hall in 1999 in conjunction with the restoration of the arts facility.[3]

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References
  1. Gilligan, Edmund (November 29, 1932). "Roxy Presents New Mood" (PDF). The New York Sun. p. 20. Retrieved November 11, 2017 – via Fultonhistory.com.
  2. "Radio City Music Hall" (PDF). New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission. March 28, 1978. p. 14. Retrieved November 15, 2017.
  3. Roussel, Christine (May 17, 2006). The Art of Rockefeller Center. New York: W.W. Norton & Company. p. 47. ISBN 978-0-3930-6082-9.
  4. "Stuart Davis. Mural (Radio City Men's Lounge Mural: Men without Women). 1932 | MoMA". The Museum of Modern Art. Retrieved 2020-03-03.
  5. "Stuart Davis at the Whitney – The painter behind a prized Radio City mural". Rockefeller Center. August 30, 2016. Retrieved March 1, 2020.
  6. Kramer, Hilton (April 3, 1975). "Music Hall Mural Going to Museum". The New York Times. ISSN 0362-4331. Retrieved December 15, 2018.
  7. Okrent, Daniel (2003). Great Fortune: The Epic of Rockefeller Center. Penguin Books. pp. 429–430. ISBN 978-0142001776.
  8. Kramer, Hilton (1975-04-13). "Art View". The New York Times. ISSN 0362-4331. Retrieved 2020-03-03.
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