February 11, 1972: A spiraling steel sculpture, 13 feet high, 7 feet wide and painted vivid orange, will be dedicated in the plaza fronting The Brooklyn Museum on Friday, February 11, at 10:30 A.M. Brooklyn Borough President Sebastian Leone, Parks, Recreation and Cultural Affairs Administrator August Heckscher, and Mrs. Beth Straus, President of the Cultural Council Foundation, will join J. Stewart Johnson, Acting Director of The Brooklyn Museum, in welcoming the Museum’s colorful visitor, the work of Israeli sculptor, Buky Schwartz. The 2,000 lb. sculpture was installed the previous afternoon with the aid of a large crane, courtesy of Consolidated Edison.
A gift of the Association for a Better New York, Inc, (ABNY), to the Cultural Council Foundation, the Museum’s piece is one of six large scale sculptures that will be placed outdoors around the city by the PRCA and the Council and the only one to be located in the borough of Brooklyn. All have been especially sized in comfortable proportions for maximum visual satisfaction.
The sculptures were selected for ABNY by Robert R. Littman, director of the Emily Lowe Gallery at Hofstra University, and purchased through the cooperation of Sculpture Editions Ltd., a new company formed to make available to the public large-scale sculptures by outstanding artists in limited, signed editions. The pieces are engineered so that they may be moved and each year, the Cultural Council and the Department of Cultural Affairs will move them to new sites.
Sculptor Buky Schwartz has executed many important commissions over the past ten years in Germany, Austria, South Africa, Switzerland and Jerusalem, including a work chosen for the Knesset Building (parliament) in Jerusalem. His awards include the House and Gardens Prize and the Sainsbury Award for Sculpture (London); the Deutscher Kritikerpreis (Berlin); and the Dizengoff Prize, (Tel-Aviv). Predominantly conceptual, his free-standing, monochromatic and non-objective pieces are demonstrations of underlying structural principles yet manage at the same time to convey a sense of the poetic. The Brooklyn Museum piece is composed of five identical units combined in such a way that a spiral form emerges.
Brooklyn Museum Archives. Records of the Department of Public Information. Press releases, 1971 - 1988. 1972, 009-10.
