Burning Building, for Six Poems/Seven Prints

Otto Piene taught art for many years at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology following his own education in Munich, Dusseldorf, and Cologne and a position at the University of Pennsylvania. He developed “sky art”: large works that hovered over public spaces, including his “Olympic Rainbow” project for the 1972 Munich Olympic Games. Although this drawing does not deal explicitly with the destruction of the World Trade Center, having been made 30 years earlier, its depiction of what may be construed as smoke or flames emanating from a many-windowed building, with what looks to be water in the distance, eerily evokes the events of 2001.