Prometheus Unmasked

Sometime in mid-June 2020, as protesters across the United States dethroned monuments to white supremacy, the sculptures adorning the grounds of New York’s Rockefeller Center were fitted with blue surgical masks. Among them was the figure of Prometheus, gilded and unbound, as portrayed in 1934 by the sculptor Paul Manship. Despite the mask, it is not difficult to recognize the whiteness of Manship’s Prometheus, a characteristic that is confirmed when we learn that the model who sat for the figure was Leonardo Nole, a lifeguard from New Rochelle, New York, whose Italian-American heritage had only recently joined the ranks of racial privilege. The Prometheus myth, in which the Titan who defied Zeus by delivering fire to humankind is forever bound in punishment, is also in no small degree the myth of the modern architect and of modern planning. In Delirious New York, Rem Koolhaas rewrote that myth by casting Rockefeller Center’s commercial architects as capitalist heroes: Wallace Harrison as Howard Roark.