Bel-Jon Art Preservation Alliance

Modernist Artist Nikos Bel-Jon and Pfizer                                                                           Medical Research Through the Ages

Captivated by his distinctive technique after reading about it in the press, in 1960 Charles Pfizer & Co. commissioned GreekAmerican artist Nikos Bel-Jon to create amongst the greatest works of his prolific career for the lively 42nd Street lobby of their New York corporate world headquarters, a modernist glass, steel and polished granite building designed by celebrated Emery Roth & Sons with Leonard-Colangelo-Peters.  

“Bel-Jon’s art has the intrinsic character of modern architecture – clean, precise, yet capable of a sudden warmth.  
The colorful movement portrays a fiery world of imagination and creation that is distinctly contemporary.”  

“Medical Research Through the Ages” or “The Pfizer Mural” spans floor to ceiling and 36 feet across the open-plan ground-floor entrance, captivating company employees, clients and passerby alike, gazing through the soaring windows since opening day and for over 60 years.  Inspire, educate, stimulatewas the sentiment Pfizer trusted the Bel-Jon composition would impart. The artist certainly delivered on the power that a bespoke artwork can have within an architectural space while conveying a message about the legacy, mission and achievements of the company. In turn Pfizer demonstrated their growing prestige and forward thinking support of the arts. 

Bel-Jon’s technique itself aligned with Pfizer’s pace of innovation and discovery.  Hand-crafted in the artist’s Upper East Side New York studio, the surfaces of segments shaped as laboratory glassware and various historic figures vital to the advance of medical science incorporate his signature technique of etching, polishing or texturizing metal surfaces of aluminum, copper, brass, bronze and tin-plated steel, in breathtaking detail.  Across these industrial materials, Bel-Jon’s delicate manipulations – extraordinary results achieved with everyday tools – were applied with the skilled hand and eye of an illustrator or painter…”a handful of steelwool is like a paintbrush to Bel-Jon.” The forms are set into a field of thousands of aluminum tessera – the mosaic glimmering with each moment as it nods to an age-old traditional technique achieved in an utterly modern material. The overall surface textures are further activated by a custom design of multi-colored lighting, a reflection of Bel-Jon’s experience in theatrical production and his intention for the experience of this artwork to be an immersive one for the viewer.      

The completed composition is an enthralling visual journey – a story of medicine and chemistry from the Egyptians and Middle Ages to modern achievements dating to the mid-20th century when the design was developed. A generous amount of detail was shared in a brochure from the period that accompanied the artwork. 

Nicholaos Fotios Baloyannis – Nikos Bel-Jon (1911-1966)

From Greece to New York – Leading Artist of the mid-20th century 

Throughout the 1950s and 1960s until his death in 1966, Bel-Jon completed numerous notable commissioned works for companies – in addition to Pfizer, US Steel,

General Motors, and Reynolds Aluminum among them – and was engaged in some of the most significant events of the mid-20th century, which influenced the public and industry alike. A mosaic map for Air India presented during the New York World’s Fair of 1964, a 28-foot mural for The Iron and Steel Institute’s 1962 exhibition titled “Steel in the Future” at the Museum of Science and Industry in Chicago, and public expositions related to the steel industry such as Rhapsody in Steel at Hornes department store in Pittsburgh, during which the versatile applications of steel were presented. He was affiliated with some of the most significant architects of the time including Welton Becket, with whom he worked in the late 1950s on West Coast projects. As well as notable industrial designers such as Raymond Loewy and Peter Muller-Munk of Pittsburgh who must’ve taken great interest in how the artist’s approach converged industry and art.  Buckminster Fuller, who designed the openwork metal geodesic dome for the American Society for Metals in Materials Park Ohio (a professional organization for materials scientists and engineers) commissioned with the company Bel-Jon’s seven-panel brushed aluminum mural in 1953 titled the “History of Iron,” for use in ASM trade shows. That work is now installed throughout the headquarters campus often visited for the impressive experience of the Fuller dome. 

Amongst his contemporaries working metal and mosaics into modernist public and private art commissions in New York and beyond at the time – Richard Lippold, Harry Bertoia, Mary Callery – Bel-Jon synthesized his techniques with custom scale and surroundings with aplomb, interfacing client and designer expectations with the delightfully unexpected – making his artistic achievements outstanding and deserving of as high recognition today as they received during his time, as they enriched the spaces of post-war modern society.