It is not likely that many passersby passing a big hole on Third Avenue and Fifthy-eighth Street, where the Alexander’s department store once stood, stops to mourn his loss, but those who do so might consider going about a mile north to Barbara Jakobson’s house. Jakobson, an art collector from the 1960s and 1950s furniture, liked Alexander’s. She did not admire the large white box of the store building, but has pleasant memories with what was attached to it: a huge piece of art by Stefan Knapp consisting of about 400 colored enamel domes, each of which was placed on a square white enamel panel. The panels were attached in neat rows to the facade of the building, and the whole looked like a billboard filled with eyeballs, car hubs or salaters. It was easily the most monumental Op art work in New York.
When Alexander’s was demolished in 1998, no one paid attention to either the building or Knapp’s play. The destroyed remains of her came into the hands of a demolition company that sold the domes to anyone who showed up. Four of them landed at a flea market on Sixth Avenue, where Mark McDonald, a mid-century decorative art dealer, spotted them. "They looked familiar and finally realized that they came from Alexander’s," McDonald said. "The guy said he had more in his magazine, and I finally bought about a hundred pieces". McDonald exhibited domes at his stand at the Modernism exhibition in Park Avenue Armory two years ago, and Barbara Jakobson was passing by. Unlike McDonald, Jakobson immediately knew what she was looking at.
"I just said, ‘Oh my God, it’s Alexander’s!’" Jakobson recalled. "I immediately fainted to death. Alexander’s was part of the history of my family. That's where my daughters bought mini-beauty and fake fur coats."
Jakobson knew she had to have these domes, and she knew what to do with them. She bought eighty best copies from McDonald – seventy-six small (foot diameter) and four large (two feet) – and reconstructed Knapp's work, or at least a large part of it, in the garden behind her private house.
"The garden was once a dark hole," Jakobson said, and decided that turning it into a tribute to Alexander’s would be the perfect way to lighten it. She wanted to create a mood recalling another icon of the 1960s, architect Edward Durell Stone. So she called his son, architect Benjamin Hicks Stone, who recently restored a perforated concrete grate on his dead father's tenement. Stone designed the garden as an elegant outdoor room, with smooth metal shutters in the side walls and a back wall with pink plaster. Knapp's domes were walled into the back wall, arranged by Jakobson in a pattern roughly resembling Alexander's facade. Now when you enter the living room of Jakobson, you can see through the glass wall her reconstructed Alexander’s, combined with a pair of four-footed Jeff Koons bears.
Stefan Knapp, who was born in Poland and worked mainly in England until his death in 1996, would probably be pleased that his work was at the house of Jakobson alongside works by artists such as Frank Stella and Julian Schnabel. He never entered the first line of abstract artists. But his work was particularly appreciated by the Farkas family, Alexander’s owners. In 1960, they would have commissioned him to create a mural consisting of two hundred and eighty spinning panels, enamelled colours, two hundred feet long and fifty feet high, outside Alexander’s at Route 4 in Paramus, New Jersey. Unlike most works of abstract public art, Mural Knappa turned out to be extremely popular and encouraged Farkas to do something similar when building Alexander’s in Manhattan.
This assignment almost went to Salvador Dale. One member of the Farkas family offered them to Dale at the same time as another – Knapp. The Farkas eventually rejected Dale's idea to decorate the store's facade with images of giant giraffes from which the bodies would extend huge desk drawers. So the job was given to Knapp, whose colorful abstraction had exactly the kind of cheerful spirit Alexander’s wanted and as Barbara Jakobson remembers. "In one of the garden models that my architect made, he stencilly wrote the word ‘Alexander’s’ on the wall, but I did not go that far," she said. "I was tempted – but I thought I could always add it later."
Written by Paul Goldberger
Source: NewYorker.com
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