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Published on 5/16/08
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When the Peerless Confection Company’s building at Diversey and Lakewood comes down, so will a minimalist piece of art that evokes pick-up sticks. Suspended from the Peerless building’s exterior, the wooden sculpture is the last work of Angelo Testa, one of Chicago’s most prominent 20th-century designers, who died in 1984 at the age of 63. Its story raises crucial questions about how to preserve Chicago’s built environment.
Testa studied at the Chicago Bauhaus, founded by László Moholy-Nagy. (Then known as the School of Design, it would later merge with IIT.) After graduating in 1945, he began a decades-long distinguished career, selling his own screen-printed textiles and producing designs for major manufacturers such as Knoll, which still carries his Campagna fabric. His abstract geometric and minimalist patterns—many of which are in the Art Institute of Chicago’s collection—were groundbreaking for their time.
Peerless, the former manufacturer of Starlight Mints, began making candy in 1914. When it expanded its facilities in the late 1970s, company president Robert Picken wanted to dress up the building’s blank western facade. He called Testa, whom he had met a few years earlier when the designer created a sculpture for the Picken family’s Hyde Park townhouse. Though Testa’s Peerless construction was installed in the early ’80s, it is the quintessence of midcentury-modernist style.
Now that Chicago’s once-thriving candy industry has all but evaporated, it seems a foregone conclusion that high-end residences will someday sprout from the Peerless property. The fate of Testa’s sculpture is less certain.
Chicago has faced art preservation nightmares before. The most notorious is the disappearance of John Warner Norton’s WPA mural from 400 West Madison Street (the former Chicago Daily News building, a.k.a. 2 North Riverside Plaza). Its depiction of newspaper publishing once adorned the ceiling of a concourse to the Ogilvie Transportation Center, but—as has been reported most recently by the Chicago Tribune’s Blair Kamin—its whereabouts are unknown. The building’s owner, Sam Zell, had the piece removed for restoration in 1993; since then, Zell’s spokeswoman, Terry Holt, has told the media the mural is in storage, but she’s refused to divulge its location. Milton Horn’s Chicago Rising from the Lake languished in a city salvage yard for years before being miraculously retrieved; it now hangs on the side of the Columbus Avenue bridge.
According to James Peters, Landmarks Illinois’ director of preservation planning, art is not protected by landmark legislation unless it is integral to a historic structure. Successive owners of the Inland Steel Building have tried to remove the metal sculpture in its lobby, but they can’t, Peters says, because his organization was “smart enough to landmark the lobby, too.”
In a recent phone interview, Kitty Picken, daughter of Robert Picken, who died in 1999, noted that her family is in negotiations to find Testa’s sculpture an appropriate home. One interested institution is the Elmhurst Art Museum. “It clearly fits the midcentury focus of our growing collection,” says director Neil Bremer. He is pursuing it aggressively, but admits he’s still trying to work out “the logistics.”
Although the Pickens would like to see the piece at IIT, Justine Jentes, director of the school’s Mies van der Rohe Society, says, “We simply don’t have a good place for it and don’t have money to build something to show it off well.… Experts here felt we would run into rejection from the Illinois Historic Preservation Agency” for trying to alter the facade of a protected Mies building.
Chicago architect Robert Kleinschmidt, a Mies van der Rohe Society board member, doesn’t buy this logic. “Let them find a donor!” he says, scoffing at the proposed move to Elmhurst. “It belongs at IIT.”
He’s probably right, but it sure beats relocation to a junkyard.
As of press time, Testa’s sculpture is on the wall of Peerless at Diversey and Lakewood.
Dr Mark
Sat, Mar 22, at 12:59am
I always admired this wall sculpture as I drove by it almost daily to and from my home. I never knew of its historical significance, but always had an interest in exploring it. When the Peerless Factory was being demolished, I wondered what would become of this beautiful piece. I wanted to photograph it and attempt to recreate the work on a blank wall in my home. Thanks for the interesting article and the accompanying photograph.
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