Marmoreal Service

In 1985, the insurance giant Equitable Life expanded its portfolio from the business of death to that other inevitable enterprise, New York real estate—spinning off a subsidiary that used Equitable’s $20 billion worth of property, including a pharaonic postmodern headquarters by Edward Larrabee Barnes, still under construction, as a springboard to becoming the United States’ largest investor in property assets for pension funds. Decorating the lobby of these Seventh Avenue digs, along with wallfillers by Roy Lichtenstein, Sol LeWitt, and Thomas Hart Benton, was a furtive piece of POPS art by postminimalist phenom Scott Burton. For thirty-five years, the sittable sculpture provided Equitable’s actuaries and underwriters some forty feet of cold comfort in the form of a bow-shaped bench of verde antique marble. From this adamantine perch these company men might have gazed contemplatively upon the work’s circular centerpiece (initially a fountain, later a jardiniere) made from the same polished stone, the ensemble partially rimmed by a sickle of coniferous plantings and …