Art of 9/11: Remnants, Models, Memorial Tributes UPDATED

Every visitor to the 9/11 Memorial Museum brings his personal remembrances and unique sensibility to its viscerally powerful displays. While art is a peripheral player in that solemn space, the remnants of sculptures found at the site and the new works created in commemoration of the horrific event beckoned to me from the agonizing agglomeration of mangled metal and memento mori. (The museum was closed today to the general public, because of the by-invitation 9/11 anniversary ceremony at the site. But the Memorial Plaza opened to the public at 6 p.m. and, for the first time, stays open until midnight.)

My June Wall Street Journal article on the museum’s artifacts and my companion blog post mentioned that a riveting touchstone for me, when I visited a few months ago, was this decapitated Rodin ruin:

There were several other personal touchstones. The triangle-shaped folded metal, below, is a fragment of Alexander Calder‘s “Bent Propeller,” 1970, which had been commissioned by Port Authority for the World Trade Center Plaza. When I interviewed him for my WSJ article, objects conservator Steven Weintraub told me that the Calder remnant was about to be cut up into smaller pieces, to be carted away and dumped, when “somebody identified it and said, ‘Wait a minute. That’s not scrap!'”

Now it’s a museum piece:

The silver rectangular plaque that you can see in front of the Calder remnant was its identification marker at the site:

Mounted beside the Calder relic is another sculptural remnant. This one is a fragment of Fritz Koenig’s “The Sphere,” commissioned by the Port Authority in 1966:

Although damaged, Koenig’s work survived largely intact and was controversially reinstalled in nearby Battery Park:

The 9/11 Memorial Museum now makes do with Koenig’s model for “Sphere”:

The museum also has another artist’s model for a monumental sculpture destroyed on 9/11:

This painting was created after the attacks by a New York City artist “inspired by the sight of his grieving neighbors comforting one another,” according to the label:

The most widely reproduced artwork in the museum is the one that was commissioned for it. It has much greater impact in person than can ever be conveyed in a photo:

Up close, its 2,983 washes of watercolor (one for each victim of the terrorist attacks) have a luscious delicacy that seems incongruous in such an imposing work. The mosaic-like composition has an unexpected sculptural quality, imparted by the lightly attached, seemingly floating patches of “sky”:

What’s missing is the famous emblem of devastation that then Metropolitan Museum director Philippe de Montebello, in a NY Times Op-Ed piece published two weeks after the attacks, said “should stand forever as a sculptural memorial—“the huge, skeletal and jagged steel fragment” of the façade. It is commemorated at the museum in this photo (with Koenig’s “Sphere” having come to rest in front of it):

The 9/11 Memorial Museum’s director, Alice Greenwald, told me that when anyone suggested she should display that hulk, she “would look at them cross-eyed: The scale of that façade was so enormous!”

The most monumental and yet ephemeral commemoration-creation is the four-mile-high Tribute in Light. I’ll update this post after sundown, if possible, with a photo of it from my terrace.

UPDATE: