New York City Art Commentary
After a 37 Year-Run, A Roadside Venus to be Veiled

A sooty yellow crane rose at the corner of 19th Street and the West Side Highway last Tuesday, supporting a drill the size of a tree trunk. In the flat light of early evening, its crosspieces and wires looked like the part of the abstract mural painted on the wall behind them.

But nothing could have been further from the artist's intention. The mural, a flat plane of bright discs and angled lines painted on the side of a womaen's prison, is titled "Venus" and was designed in 1979 by Knox Martin, an artist who had been associated with the New York School of Painters.

David Comfort, an executive at Cape Advisors and the building's project manager, did not return several calls seeking comment. The possible exlipse of the mural was first reported on Curbed and other real-estate buildings.

The other day, Mr. Martin sat in a folding chair at The Art Students League of New York, where he teaches a class twice a week, and expressed his sadness about the current plight of his mural. With his blunt-cut gray hair, paint splattered, shirt-open to mid-chest, adn permanently arched gray eyebrows, Mr. Martin , who is 83, looked every inch a painter. He spoke affectionately of the mural: "I've seen it from a jet," he said. "it was like a song."

But he also expressed excitement about a new mural, which he said that Cape Advisors had agreed to partly finance, adn which he hopes to paint on a wall on Hudson Street. The mural a pod of undulating, 110-foot-long whales spurting blood as they are hacked and speared by stick figures reminiscent of those created by Keith Haring.

"One of the community groups that I went to for approval, they said, 'My God, it's violent!'" Mr. Martin recalled, "I said, "No, it's against violence.' My friend who teaches children, she showed the children the maquette for the whale wall. And they said, 'My God, that will save the whales.'"

by Alex Mindlin
February 11, 2007