For 64 years, rubber-necking architectural savants stopped to stare 25 feet above them at the concourse ceiling of the old Chicago Daily News Building on West Madison Street. Often they did so under risk of being bumped and thumped by stampeding commuters.
If they’ve stopped there lately, they’ve more likely been jolted by the realization that the object of their admiration is gone.
What they’ve been looking at is a 180-foot-long, 18-foot-wide mural attached to the vaulted ceiling in the public concourse of the building now known as Two North Riverside Plaza. Damaged by years of exposure to the elements, workers removed the painting several weeks ago to determine if it can be restored and placed back.
Several art restoration experts have voiced concern that the building’s owners may have further endangered the historic mural by giving the contract for its restoration to an inexperienced company.
The building is owned by a partnership under the control of financial wizard Sam Zell, who maintains his offices there. Zell angrily defended his choice of restorers to evaluate the mural, Conrad Schmitt Studios in Milwaukee, and said he had been told by advisers that they were the best people to restore the work.
The mammoth painting was created by a little-known master of mural art, John Warner Norton, who taught at the Art Institute from 1910 until his death in 1934. Art enthusiasts have long loved the mural’s stylized depiction of Chicago newspapering in the “Roaring Twenties” era.
Norton was commissioned by the now-defunct newspaper to paint the concourse mural. The building was constructed in 1929. Since then, the mural has delighted discerning commuters who daily use the concourse as a route into and out of the Chicago & Northwestern railway station.
“The Daily News mural is Chicago’s equivalent to the Sistine Chapel,” said Rick Strilky, a prominent Chicago art restorer who is restoring another Norton mural at the Tavern Club.
“It is a world class painting and needs a world class effort (in its restoration). It’s one of the biggest restoration jobs you’re ever going to hear about, and the Conrad Schmitt (firm) aren’t really restorers, but decorators, essentially.”
When a piece of the mural came loose several years ago, the building’s owners at that time brought it to Strilky for repair.
When he found out that the Zell partnership was planning on a total restoration, Strilky said the job was too big for him. But, he said, he offered to advise the partnership free of charge on restoration procedures, and was turned down.
“I’m just sick about the whole thing,” he said. “In some parts of the city the top designers of new buildings are emulating the neo-classical designs from the 1920s and 1930s. You wonder what they’d pay now to have a real John Warner Norton mural.
“Other guys have the real thing, these absolute real jewels, and they don’t know what to do with them. God help us that this one doesn’t end up in a Dumpster somewhere.”
Several art restorers and conservators questioned about the Norton mural expressed concern that the Schmitt company removed the painting to its studio. The most modern restoration methods try at all costs to keep the artwork in place because removal usually causes additional damage.
“I’m really surprised that they (Conrad Schmitt Studios) are working with murals with artistic historical value,” said James DeYoung, conservator for the Milwaukee Art Museum, “and that they are not deferring to people with stronger historical art knowledge than they have.”
DeYoung said Conrad Schmitt Studios is aggressive in seeking work. When the Wisconsin legislature recently asked for bids to restore murals in the the state’s capital building in Madison, several art conservators feared the Milwaukee firm would get the job as low bidder. They met with legislators, he said, to make sure they understood the complexity of the work and the danger of giving it to an unqualified firm.
The job eventually went to Anton Rajer, a Wisconsin restorer who worked on the Sistine Chapel and has a worldwide reputation for his skill.
“You always avoid removals,” Rajer said. “Whenever you remove a mural it sustains damage.”
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For his part, Zell expressed confidence in the firm.
“The answer from my perspective,” he said from an airplane phone while on a business trip, “is that we’re not an expert on restorers, so we got advice and were told these (Conrad Schmitt) were the best in the business.
“We hired them to restore it, and we want them to put it back up into the building. We think it’s a treasure and a very valuable part of the building.”
A representative for Conrad Schmitt Studios said the mural owners asked the studio not to talk to the press. The firm, however, has compiled an extensive resume of its president, Bernard Gruenke, including a list of 10 mural conservation projects he has supervised in the last 30 years. They include murals in hotels, movie theaters and other public buildings.
Earlier, a Zell representative said the Conrad Schmitt firm was initially doing an evaluation to see if the painting could be restored and returned to the building. Zell said the initial evaluation should be ready in a month.
The firm already has reported, the representative said, that the mural was damaged by a leaky roof and by coal and diesel fumes entering the concourse from the railway station.
The newspaper connected its building to the train station with an enclosed bridge across Canal Street, hoping to pull commuters through the building as they left and entered the station.
Though the newspaper left the building in 1960, the concourse remained and is still heavily used by commuters.
Every morning tens of thousands of them thunder eastward through the concourse. Every evening they thunder back.
The mural is painted on canvas glued to special backing made to fit the vaulted curve of the ceiling. The painting, executed in reds, greens, blues and grays, is a study in geometric shapes and representational figures that heralded the Daily News and what was then state-of-the-art newspaper publishing.
“It’s a geometrical composition, more so than most of (Norton’s) work, an extremely complicated piece,” said James Zimmer, director of the Sioux City Art Center in Iowa.
Zimmer, who until recently worked for the Illinois State Museum, mounted a major Norton exhibit that traveled the state for 18 months, ending last January.
Norton was recognized in his time as one of the great mural artists in this country. In 1931, the piece he did for the Tavern Club on Michigan Avenue won the Gold Medal of Honor from the Architectural League of New York.
Frank Lloyd Wright admired him and commissioned murals from him for his Midway Gardens project, since torn down. He was commissioned to do several large-scale pieces for pavilions at the Century of Progress World’s Fair 1933-34, none of which apparently survive.
But many examples of Norton’s work survive.
Among them in Chicago are murals at the Cliff Dwellers Club, the Board of Trade Building, the reading room of the Cudahy Memorial Library at Loyola University, and the library of Peirce Elementary School, 1423 W. Bryn Mawr Ave., Chicago.
His work is also found in public buildings around the country, including the Logan Archeological Museum in Beloit, Wis., the city hall in St. Paul, Minn., and the courthouse in Birmingham, Ala.
“He was not a self-promoter,” Zimmer said of Norton, who was born in Lockport in 1876. He dropped out of Harvard when his father, a Lockport grain merchant, lost his fortune in the 1890s.
After joining Teddy Roosevelt’s Rough Riders during the Spanish-American War and a period of drifting through the West, he returned to Chicago to study at the Art Institute in 1901. He began teaching there in 1910 and remained for the rest of his life.
“When I went out and found his surviving work, people in the buildings where I found it were very fond of the murals, but nobody knew who the artist was.
“Norton spent a lot of his time and energy on teaching, which was very important to him. So much so, it probably didn’t help his career as an artist, even though his work shows he was one of the outstanding muralists of his time.”