Alice has been down a lot of rabbit holes.<\/p>\n
The eternally curious children\u2019s book character and her menagerie of fantastical friends tumbled into the wonderland of New York City in a raucous, exhilarating mural painted by Abram Champanier from 1938 to 1940. Across 16 monumental panels that once wrapped the children\u2019s ward of Lower Manhattan\u2019s Gouverneur Hospital, which served immigrant communities, Alice and company buzzed over the Empire State Building and the East River in tiny planes, scaled the crown of the Statue of Liberty, parachuted into Coney Island, rode the stone lions of the 42nd Street Public Library and squeezed onto a subway at rush hour.<\/p>\n
Champanier\u2019s was one of some 2,500 murals commissioned by the Federal Art Project<\/a> for public buildings nationwide between 1935 and 1943 as part of the W.P.A.\u2019s New Deal program putting people to work. But in the 86 years since the Alice Mural was installed it has seen further adventures, including a guerrilla-style rescue operation led by a renegade conservator in 1981 from the abandoned hospital as it was being gutted.<\/p>\n After initial restoration of five panels, work on the rest was stalled for three decades because of a lack of funding. Now, new patronage and momentum supporting artworks within New York City\u2019s public hospital system has led to the full resuscitation of the Alice Mural. The complete cycle \u2014 repaired and cleaned with two lost panels faithfully recreated \u2014 has been reunited at the Museum of the City of New York, in the exhibition \u201cAnother Wonderland: Abram Champanier\u2019s Alice Mural,\u201d<\/a> opening on June 6.<\/p>\n \u201cWhat could be more New York than this hodgepodge crew crashing the city?\u201d said Lilly Tuttle, the museum\u2019s curator, describing how Champanier composed his dreamy urban landscape to help sick children transport themselves through their imaginations beyond their hospital beds. \u201cFor viewers today, the mural is a reminder of what federal funding for the arts could do for cities like New York and how public art could inject light and energy into unexpected spaces.\u201d<\/p>\n After the show closes on Sept. 20, the Alice Mural will be relocated long-term to NYC Health + Hospitals\/Gouverneur<\/a> at 227 Madison Street on the Lower East Side, several blocks from the original Gouverneur Hospital. (That building, with two striking U-shaped wings visible from the Franklin D. Roosevelt Drive, is now called Gouverneur Court<\/a>, and provides low-income housing for people with mental health struggles.)<\/p>\n All 16 panels will be accessible, across three floors, with some panels visible from the street. \u201cIt\u2019s pretty significant that the largest municipal public hospital system recognizes them as valuable to the people of New York,\u201d said Larissa Trinder, assistant vice president of Arts in Medicine<\/a> at NYC Health + Hospitals. The department stewards a collection of some 8,000 artworks \u2014 from W.P.A. commissions to contemporary projects by artists like Nina Chanel Abney and Mickalene Thomas realized in collaboration with RxART<\/a> \u2014 across about 70 community health centers in all five boroughs.<\/p>\n Founded in 2018, Trinder\u2019s department received more than $5 million from the Laurie M. Tisch Illumination Fund<\/a> for programs using the art collection for holistic care benefiting patients, families and staff. \u201cThis is not instead of medicine,\u201d Tisch said, \u201cbut joy and beauty and reducing stress, and having something to look at, is an important part of healing.\u201d (The Illumination Fund is also the lead supporter of \u201cAnother Wonderland\u201d.)<\/p>\n The idea of using art therapeutically was just emerging when Champanier painted the Alice Mural.<\/p>\n The future artist was born Abram Scherschewitz in 1896 near Lodz in Russia (now Poland), and sailed into New York as a young Jewish immigrant, arriving at Ellis Island in 1905 at age 9. The Scherschewitz family settled in Paterson, N.J., where they ran a deli that sold champagne tea (spurring their name change to Champanier, according to family lore).<\/p>\n The Museums Special Section<\/p>\n Champanier studied at the Art Students League<\/a> and, in the 1920s, participated in the Whitney Studio Club<\/a> (a precursor to the Whitney Museum) alongside emerging artists including Stuart Davis and Alexander Calder. \u201cChampanier\u2019s part of a cohort with Calder and Edward Hopper and George Bellows at this really heady time,\u201d Tuttle said.<\/p>\n Making his living as a muralist, Champanier also completed projects for the New York Athletic Club and the 1939 New York World\u2019s Fair, and won the W.P.A. commission in 1935 with his proposal for a new Alice story. In an interview in the current exhibition catalog, the artist\u2019s son said his father\u2019s concept was inspired in part by a 1932 visit to New York by Alice Liddell Hargreaves<\/a> \u2014 the real-life model for Lewis Carroll\u2019s 1865 book, \u201cAlice\u2019s Adventures in Wonderland\u201d \u2014 who made a big splash in the papers.<\/p>\n Champanier also included some new landmarks, such as the Empire State Building (just finished in 1931), which he painted from above and popping through the clouds. In the largest panel, 22 feet long, he staged a massive animal concert including the White Rabbit and Mad Hatter entertaining the storybook king and queen at the Central Park Zoo, which was rebuilt in 1934 by Parks Commissioner Robert Moses with W.P.A. funds.<\/p>\n There are only a few black-and-white photos of the mural in its early days, ringing one of Gouverneur Hospital\u2019s bullet-shaped wings with children in rows of small iron beds.<\/p>\n The hospital lost its accreditation in 1961, a year after Champanier\u2019s death. Years of neglect and transient uses followed, before the building was abandoned in 1978. Soon after, Andrew S. Dolkart, who had just started at the Landmarks Preservation Commission<\/a>, was put in charge of assessing buildings planned for demolition and discovered the Alice Mural in the children\u2019s ward.<\/p>\n \u201cThe room was a ruin,\u201d recalled Dolkart, now a professor of historic preservation at the Columbia University Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation. But the Alice panels were \u201cwitty and fun and bright and even in that abandoned space you could tell that they were pretty wonderful and shouldn\u2019t be just torn down,\u201d he said, adding, \u201cthe city had no interest in the mural.\u201d<\/p>\n Dolkart eventually found his way to the conservator Alan Farancz, who had led other mural extractions<\/a> \u2014 including saving a Stuart Davis work from Radio City Music Hall \u2014 and was gung-ho to take on the project despite its questionable legality. \u201cTo his credit, he was going to put his neck out,\u201d Dolkart said.<\/p>\n Over four steamy days in August 1981, as a demolition crew was gutting the interior of the hospital, a small band of minimally trained volunteers, guided by Farancz and his wife, the conservator Denise Whitbeck<\/a> Farancz, waded through the filth and broken glass of the children\u2019s ward to excavate the panels. They had been painted on canvas and attached to the walls with white lead paste. (A panel of Alice and friends on a fishing boat reeling in a giant swordfish was too deteriorated to be retrieved.)<\/p>\n The team attached Japanese rice paper to the face of each panel to secure flaking paint and used cake knives to pry loose one side of the canvas, which would be stapled to a giant tube that they turned carefully to roll each painting off the wall. \u201cA lot of lead paint and plaster stayed on the back of the canvases, and it took like five people to get each down,\u201d Farancz said (Alan died in 2016).<\/p>\n Did they have permission to take the Alice Mural back to their conservation studio?<\/p>\n \u201cThis is a gray area,\u201d she said. \u201cNo one really hired us.\u201d<\/p>\n The couple worked with organizations including Reader\u2019s Digest to raise money to begin restoration. The first completed panel went on view at Lincoln Center in 1993, with four more exhibited that year at the Bronx Museum<\/a>, before funding dried up. These five were later returned to the hospital system and put on view at various centers (the panel with Alice at the Statue of Liberty went to the hospital in Elmhurst and was misplaced at some point).<\/p>\n \u201cAlan and Denise had a lot of devotion to the city and public art,\u201d said John Lippert, who began interning for them in 1988 and painstakingly removed the lead paste from canvases with a solvent and an X-acto blade. \u201cAlan saw himself as this kind of gunslinging conservator, like, \u2018No one else is going do it, but I\u2019m going do it.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n The Faranczes stored the remaining panels on tubes until 2008 and passed custody of Alice on a handshake to Lippert, who had recently opened Foreground Conservation & Decorative Arts<\/a> with Dawn D\u2019Aluisio. When Trinder\u2019s newly minted Arts in Medicine department came calling, more than a decade later, Lippert and D\u2019Aluisio carried Alice over the finish line, panel by laborious panel, including re-creations of the lost Statue of Liberty and Swordfish.<\/p>\n \u201cWe were looking at Champanier\u2019s brushstrokes, but we weren\u2019t super literal,\u201d Lippert said. They decided against an antiquing glaze, keeping the two freshly painted scenes brighter than others in the group. \u201cWe didn\u2019t put a patina of time on these,\u201d D\u2019Aluisio said. \u201cLet\u2019s not pretend.\u201d<\/p>\n The Alice Mural is believed to be the only W.P.A. commission for a children\u2019s ward in the country to have survived and is one of 14 Depression-era murals from New York\u2019s public hospital system that have been spared and are publicly accessible.<\/p>\n At NYC Health + Hospitals\/Harlem, for instance, four 1930s murals by Charles Alston, Alfred Crimi, Vertis Hayes and Georgette Seabrooke have been restored and installed in a Mural Pavilion<\/a> built in 2012. Work by David Margolis<\/a> is on view at NYC Health + Hospitals\/Bellevue and by William Palmer<\/a> at two NYC Health + Hospitals\u2019 locations in Queens. Each has its story.<\/p>\n Seeing the Alice Mural finally come together is an emotional moment for Farancz. \u201cWe figured eventually, no matter how long it took, it would happen,\u201d she said. \u201cAlan was the force that would not let it die.\u201d<\/p>\n Another Wonderland: Abram Champanier\u2019s Alice Mural<\/p>\n June 6 through Sept. 20 at the. Museum of the City of New York, 1220 Fifth Avenue; 212-534-1672, mcny.org.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Alice has been down a lot of rabbit holes. 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