This article is part of FT Globetrotter’s guide to New York
Dotted across Manhattan’s most historic bars, large frescoes immerse patrons in painted worlds. At the St Regis in Midtown, you’ll find a 30-foot-wide Maxfield Parrish hovering behind the hotel bar called “Old King Cole”. Commissioned around the turn of the 20th century, the three-panelled mural depicts the merry king from a British nursery rhyme, surrounded by his cheeky courtiers.
Uptown at The Monkey Bar in the Hotel Elsyée, the main bar is decorated with various primates, etched in 1946 by Eugene Eakin and in 1955 by Charles Vella. In 2009, illustrator Edward Sorel was commissioned to add a Jazz Age-inspired mural to the dining room.
These spots are institutions; their artworks have come to define the very character of Manhattan, colouring the city’s walls with the same irreverence that you see on its streets. So it has been a shame, over the past decade-plus, to watch new bars abandoning the mural tradition. New York City design has been de-gilded: beige is king and “Japandi” is an operative word. Behind our bars, white walls have sufficed — or worse, exposed brick.
Thankfully, a counter-reaction is afoot. I have recently stumbled across a revival of wall art at some of the city’s most raved-about bars. And as an arts writer and Manhattan-history nerd, I can’t help but contextualise these new murals within the greater tradition. Here, we’ll meet the designers, artists, and proprietors re-establishing the practice. Though they tell me that their inspirations are global, their murals are ultimately in conversation with the New York classics.
The scenic oil
The River
102 Bayard Street, Chinatown, New York, NY 10013
Behind a nondescript door on Bayard Street is a landscape panorama of the Hudson river. It wraps around a dark, wood-panelled bar in Chinatown, aptly named The River, like an expansive crown.
The mural begins as an untouched setting of flora and fauna, and then progresses through the stages of New York’s development from agriculture to industry, culminating in modernist architecture. Bar-goers might discover new details as they carry a River Water (vodka, absinthe, lemon and club soda), one of the bar’s signature drinks, to the seating area. In the dim lighting, they might even spot the glimmer of a burning church.
To me, the painting reads like a downtown twist on the iconic mural at Bemelmans Bar in the Carlyle Hotel on the Upper East Side. There, cartoonish scenes of Central Park span the walls, drawn by muralist and famed illustrator Ludwig Bemelmans in 1947.
As in The River’s mural, key details are hidden in Bemelmans’ vista, including the storybook character he was best known for: Madeline. Also like The River, the mural at Bemelmans has a temporal dimension, depicting Central Park over four seasons.
Often filled with a New York fashion crowd, The River is co-owned by designer Emily Bode and her husband Aaron Aujla. Aujla also co-runs the design firm Green River Project, which crafted the space. He tells me that they were inspired by old taverns, many of which were adorned with painted motifs, so they tapped Matt Kenny, an artist who regularly paints the New York City skyline.
Aujla says that the story of the bar is something he hoped might be reflected in the mural. “We were thinking of a place downtown that would exist in the history of Manhattan.”
As the work was conceived as fine art rather than bar art, Kenny and the team painted on drywall with Old Holland oil paints, so you might notice added richness in the blues, greens and browns. “We painted as if we were working on canvas or panel,” Aujla said, “so you can see brushstrokes and imperfections.” Website; Directions
The figurative primitive
Clemente Bar
11 Madison Avenue, flatiron, New York, NY 10010
If you were to be randomly dropped into Clemente Bar, you might not assume that you’re sitting just above Eleven Madison Park, often cited as one of the best restaurants in the world. You might instead think you’ve landed in the home of a very sophisticated caveman. The sprawling frescoes that adorn the walls and ceiling are rendered in rocky tones, with primitive figures playing out visual parables.
Like the St Regis’s “Old King Cole”, the art at Clemente Bar is referential, this one said to be inspired by allegories and ancient mythology. Behind the bar, a fisherman casts a line from the edge of his boat. While nude lovers couple up on deck, he seems to accidentally hook a human swimmer. If this is a common Italian myth, I cannot source it. Nor do I care to. As Francesco Clemente, the Italian artist behind the painting has said, “Drowning in a sea of love is drowning in the sea of love.”
Like Bemelmans, Clemente Bar is named after the author of its wall art. Bemelmans famously laboured over his mural for 18 months, while living at the Carlyle Hotel for free. Clemente, on the other hand, has a long friendship with Eleven Madison Park chef Daniel Humm, who commissioned the murals for the upstairs bar.
Clemente rose to fame in the 1980s as part of a wave of artists returning to figuration. He was known for his large-scale oils even then: he did a fresco for the iconic Palladium nightclub in 1985 and a ceiling mural for the Hudson Bar in 2000. Website; Directions
The improvisational tableau
The Mulberry
240 Mulberry Street Lower Level, SoHo, New York, NY 10012
On a good night at The Mulberry, the faces in the crowd may start to blur with the faces on the wall. Inside the red-lit, swanky SoHo space, a continuous line of deconstructive wall portraits sets the bar in motion. It draws you through the space with a sort of dream logic, wrapping behind booths and reflecting off the mirrored ceiling.
New York has a history of peopled murals, and this one feels like a cubist Edward Sorel, the artist behind the caricaturist tapestries at the above-mentioned Monkey Bar and The Waverly Inn.
When Swedish artist Emelie Törling was commissioned to paint The Mulberry’s mural, she flew from her native Stockholm into a construction zone. Builders were working feverishly on the bar, separated from her workspace by only a curtain. She turned on a playlist she had pre-curated for the moment, got in the zone and began to paint, first outlining the contours.
“I’m not a strategist whatsoever,” she tells me. “I don’t prepare or plan much. I may have a rough sketch, but that’s it.”
The bar team, including design studio Ateljé Nordöst, trusted Törling’s process. They wanted to let the work emerge entirely from her artistic practice, hoping that that freedom would seep from the walls into the spirit of the bar.
Working 10- to 12-hour days on the mural, Törling carefully considered how best to combine colours and create depth. “I spent a lot of time working with the colours, mixing and smudging,” she says. “I knew exactly the feeling I wanted to express, but I wasn’t sure how it would turn out until I was finished.” Website; Directions
The mythical fresco
The Bar at Quarters
383 Broadway Floor 2, Tribeca, New York, NY 10013
Grabbing a drink at The Bar at Quarters, which is furnished like a private loft, is a bit like housesitting for a rich friend with really good taste. You arrive at the bar through a couch-filled lounge area and then find, in a space overflowing with eye-catching design, the crown jewel.
Spanning the length of the bar, with deep blues and bold greens crawling on to the ceiling, a fresco emerges that feels daringly painterly among its more neutral, straight-edged surroundings. “We wanted to take a different approach,” said Nick Ozemba, one half with Felicia Hung of design duo In Common With, and who co-owns and co-designed the bar with Hung. “Something that felt more old-world, rooted in the kind of traditional craftsmanship we’re always drawn to.”
Claudio Bonuglia, a traditional fresco painter working in Italy, spent six weeks in New York painting the mural on to panels that were later installed and refined by hand. The imagery derives from Pompeiian mythology.
“One of the central motifs is a boy’s pet eel, adorned with an earring,” said Ozemba. “It’s a quiet detail, but one that adds an extra layer of storytelling.”
When Ozemba and Hung opened the bar, they imagined a space that was both day-to-night hangout and design showroom. Almost every element there is for sale, but the mural they commissioned is not. It is one of a kind in Manhattan.
I say one of a kind because it feels most reminiscent of a bar installation lost to time. In 1938, German-born artist Winold Reiss painted eight egg-shaped murals for the Longchamps restaurant at the base of the Empire State Building. Like Banuglio, Reiss coloured with bright pigments, which stood out in the restaurant’s art deco interior. In one of the panels, a serpent emerged from a spotted flower to caress a nude figure.
It reminds me of Bonuglia’s eel.
Trey Heller is an art and architecture history writer based in New York City
Do you have a favourite bar mural in New York, old or new? We’d love to hear any memories or stories about it in the comments below
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