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" Why is everyone piling on Aby Rosen, who, as a founding partner in RFR Holding, owns the Seagram Building and wants to redecorate the place a little? Here&amp;#039;s his problem: like a few of his neighbors on Park Avenue, he&amp;#039;s got a hand-me-down Picasso that he wouldn&amp;#039;t mind unloading. His is in the lobby, and he doesn&amp;#039;t like it. He calls it a schmatte. Honestly he&amp;#039;s not far off. As Picassos go, the 19-foot stage backdrop is a minor transitional work, a dingy exercise\u2014excuse me, dusty mauve\u2014that Picasso painted 95 years ago for a Ballets Russes production of Le Tricorne. Its creation may have had something to do with the fact that he&amp;#039;d just married a 17-year-old dancer in the company, Olga Khokhlova, weeks before. The work is a cartoon, a hasty mishmash of emergent Classicism, leftover Cubism, and the worst of Picasso&amp;#039;s regrettably recurrent weakness for Iberian kitsch. (The music for the ballet, by Manuel de Falla, is the sort that encourages the orchestra to clap and yell &amp;quot;Oi.&amp;quot;) Its most outstanding feature seems to be its size\u2014second only to Guernica in the artist&amp;#039;s oeuvre, the only possible measure by which the two works might ever be compared. Christie&amp;#039;s estimated its value at $1.6 million in 2008, which is probably as cheap as you can get a Picasso, certainly if you&amp;#039;re buying by the yard. It&amp;#039;s in terrible condition. And no wonder\u2014photographs online show the maintenance staff vacuuming the surface of the painting. No one will ever admit this, but the outsize Picasso appears to be a placeholder of sorts, an artistic also-ran that can never make up for the absence of the Seagram Murals by Mark Rothko, the greatest art work associated, in name only, with the modernist masterpiece. In 1958, at the recommendation of Philip Johnson, the Bronfman family, owners of Joseph Seagram, Ltd, offered a commission to Rothko, then a rising star of abstractionism, to paint a series of murals for The Four Seasons. The famously conflicted artist regretted the association almost immediately, and as the series took shape he told the publisher of Harper&amp;#039;s that he&amp;#039;d only accepted the offer because he hoped &amp;quot;to ruin the appetite of every son-of-a-bitch who ever eats in that room.&amp;quot; Once he completed the work, he recognized his own base impulse, returned the money to the Bronfmans, and donated many of the murals to the Tate in London, where they still hang. But the 29-year-old Phyllis Bronfman, who&amp;#039;d been instrumental in hiring Philip Johnson and Mies van der Rohe to create the building that would house her father&amp;#039;s company, had ideas of her own. She headed to Cannes to visit Picasso. The 77-year-old twisted bread into animal shapes to amuse her but he too refused a commission\u2014Bronfman attributed his unwillingness to the jealousy of his 30-year-old girlfriend at the time, Jacqueline Rocque. But Bronfman did get her hands on the old backdrop with the checkered history by other means: Serge Diaghilev, the master of the Ballets Russes, poor and dying of complications of diabetes in Venice, had cut it up in 1929 and sold it to a Swiss collector, who&amp;#039;d sold it to a French dealer, who was at the time that Bronfman bought it shilling the work around town for roughly five times the price of an equivalently sized Matisse. Alfred H. Barr, Jr., who curated the first Picasso retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art, wrote Philip Johnson to warn him that he considered the painting inferior, calling it a white elephant. And yet the work is now being heralded as something it is clearly not. There is nothing to substantiate the idea that Philip Johnson ever considered the curtain, as one critic grandiloquently put it, part of his Gesamtkunstwerk, never to be trifled with, in perpetuity. It seems equally plausible, given the very few works that Johnson ever allowed to hang inside the restaurant\u2014Jackson Pollock&amp;#039;s Blue Poles, a big Roy Lichtenstein, and not much else and never that long\u2014that the architect resented the intrusion of his employer in his efforts and relegated the work to its current spot between the grill room and the pool room, as a token gesture for a client who was, after all, impossible to put off entirely. Nearly all the accounts of this controversy mention Rosen&amp;#039;s schmatte comment. This is a loaded word, as anyone who&amp;#039;s ever eaten a bagel in New York will know. In the context, it&amp;#039;s intended to be a colorful Yiddish insult, but the attribution in various stories seems designed to cast Rosen as a new-money arriviste, part of a horde who prefer Kanye and Jeff Koons over Pablo Picasso and the Ballets Russes. Still, Rosen is hardly alone in this preference, and his recent installations at the Seagram Building and the Lever House (which RFR also owns), big, provocative contemporary works by Urs Fischer and Bruce High Quality Art Foundation, among others, have been welcome additions to the formal Park Avenue landscape. Rosen&amp;#039;s choice of sculptures is hardly shocking. They&amp;#039;re exactly the sort of monumental works in the bad-boy vernacular that are being installed on lawns all over Greenwich, Connecticut, and the Hamptons. Some neighbors consider this a troubling development. But it would be a misplacement to direct that anxiety at Aby Rosen, who is not trying to tear down Penn Station all over again. He just wants to get rid of a second rate Picasso. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.townandcountrymag.com/leisure/arts-and-culture/reviews/a2120/picasso-aby-rosen-the-four-seasons/>