Carl Fredrik Reuterswärd, Non-Violence, 1980, bronze, 79 x 44 x 50″ (donated by Luxembourg, 1989). All photographs courtesy of the author.
On January 30, 2026, the New York Times published an article with the headline “U.N. Says It’s in Danger of Financial Collapse Because of Unpaid Dues.” The United States owes the lion’s share of those dues—95 percent, totaling about $2.2 billion. Eight days prior, the charter for a new organization called the Board of Peace had been signed in a ceremony at Davos (naturally). The Board of Peace, an invention of Donald Trump’s, was supposedly established to execute the Gaza Peace Plan. Trump has appointed himself chair for life, and charges each country $3 billion in dues for permanent membership. The name, as it appears on official branding materials, is notably not prefaced by the, so, when spoken aloud, it sounds like an expression of ennui, or the title of an early-aughts teen movie about the skateboarding child of a diplomat. The Board of Peace seems designed to replace the United Nations with a more U.S.-centric organization, devoid of even feeble protections to limit U.S. domination of international affairs. This turmoil was the backdrop for an art tour I took at the UN, a guided look at the collection described on the UN’s website as “a combination of artworks, historic objects, and architectural components donated by member states, foundations, and individual donors since 1950.” Our guide was a Greek woman named Regina, who began by rattling off the goals of the UN: peace and security, zero hunger, climate action, inclusion, education, women’s rights, global health, ending poverty, clean energy, disaster relief, et cetera. These, she said, were reflected in the art collection, which was intended to “catch the eye, warm the heart, and light up the imagination.”
We opened the heavy nickel-and-bronze entrance doors, featuring reliefs of nude women representing Justitia, Veritas, and Fraternitas (donated by Canada in 1953), and entered the palatial north lobby of the General Assembly building. The lobby is illuminated by frosted, gridded floor-to-ceiling windows and has three gently curving balconies. Clusters of phone-scrolling teenage Model UN girls wearing pantsuits and lanyards sat on benches in front of woven-silk portraits of past and present UN secretaries-general (donated by Iran in 1997). Our tour group included a German mother and father with their two teen boys in matching fur-collared puffers, a chatty Upper East Side retiree accompanied by her middle-aged son and her grandson, and a man wearing a suit, who asked precise questions of our guide at each stop. After sorting some logistics, the tour began in the plaza outside, with Non-Violence by Carl Fredrik Reuterswärd. The sculpture is an oversize Colt Python .357 Magnum (misidentified as a .45-caliber revolver on the UN’s site) with a comically elongated barrel twisted into a knot. The work was made in reaction to the murder of Reuterswärd’s friend John Lennon. According to the UN website, Reuterswärd “became so upset and angry over his death and many other outbursts of unnecessary violence that [he] went right to [his] studio and started working on the project.” The government of Luxembourg purchased the sculpture in 1988 and donated it to the UN in 1989. This is how art-collecting at the United Nations works: objects are offered by a member state (or occasionally by an individual), then the Arts Committee reviews the potential donations and selects some of them on the basis of “high artistic merit, relevant to UN purpose & functions. Portraits, replicas, & Memorials [sic] of individuals are discouraged.” While we were outdoors, we also looked at Sphere Within Sphere by Arnaldo Pomodoro, donated by Italy in 1996: a bronze orb cracking open to reveal a fractal-ish inner world of spheres and steps. As with Non-Violence, multiple versions of this sculpture have been plopped into plazas around the world. According to the artist, the sculpture “is intended as a metaphor for the coming of a new millennium, a promise for the rebirth of a less troubled and destructive world.” Regina described each artwork as if it were a kind of flag, purely in terms of the symbolic meaning intended by the artist and how it reflects the mission of the UN. Art history, material choices, shifting contexts, and the viewer’s subjectivity were off the table; the United Nations, it seems, has remained untouched by postmodernism.
Poseidon of Artemision, cast bronze replica, approx. 84 x 66 x 28″ (donated by Greece, 1953), and Rufino Tamayo, Brotherhood, 1968, oil on canvas, 13’4″ x 29’10” (donated by Mexico, 1971).
In the lobby, proximate to a cool life-size model of Sputnik 1 and a Foucault pendulum, was Brotherhood by Rufino Tamayo, a painting depicting a group of abstract silhouettes holding hands in front of a fire and flanked by an ancient pyramid and a modern building that, we were told, “represent eternity.” This is positioned behind Poseidon of Artemision, a 1953 bronze replica of a classical sculpture of a nude Poseidon donated by Greece, the genitals of which, Regina told us, are “covered up for certain events.” The material used to obscure them, and the nature of said events, were left unexplained.
José Vela Zanetti, Mankind’s Struggle for Lasting Peace, 1953, 10′ x 60’10” (donated by the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, 1953).
We headed to the third floor (the second floor is closed to the public, so we missed the tapestry replica of Picasso’s Guernica), passing a moon rock suspended in Lucite that may or may not have been art. There was a quick rundown of the main mission of the UN, a peek out the window into the off-limits courtyard, featuring works by Henry Moore and Barbara Hepworth—two artists well known in the art world, a rare occurrence on this tour. We looked at Mankind’s Struggle for a Lasting Peace by José Vela Zanetti, a sixty-foot-wide mural that “begins with the destruction of a family and ends with its resurrection. Concentration camps, bombings, and all the agony of modern war are symbolized in the painting. In the center is a gigantic four-armed figure implanting the emblem of the United Nations on a building dome, as mankind reconstructs a war-torn world.” Unexplained is the shirtless man dangling a pendulum, who bears an uncanny resemblance to Doctor Manhattan from the Watchmen comics, a character so disappointed by humanity that he exiles himself to Mars.
The Security Council Chamber.
Then it was off to the main chambers. We started in the Security Council Chamber, furnished and designed by Norway. It’s the kind of room you imagine when you think of the UN: a grand space designed for international diplomacy. At its center is a C-shaped table with name placards for each of the fifteen members of the Security Council, ringed by chairs on metal posts covered in UN-blue vinyl for the associates of the member states, and behind these by similar chairs finished in red. The backdrop of the room is a wall clad in marble on which hangs a massive 1952 painting by Per Krohg called Untitled (Mural for Peace). It dramatically portrays a phoenix rising from the ashes of despair and suffering, ascending toward a joyous village and a happy nuclear family. The side walls are covered in wallpaper patterned with the anchor of faith, the growing wheat of hope, and the heart of charity that reminded me of the decor in a third-wave Williamsburg coffee shop circa 2004.
Next was the Trusteeship Council Chamber, designed by Denmark and completed on December 31, 1953. It has wood-lined walls, brightly colored ceiling panels, and wooden seating arranged in a horseshoe. The overall feeling is one of a tasteful spa. When we entered, there was no business being conducted, but the huge screen was playing a YouTube video called “Richter in Hungary (1954–1993) CD9 of 14 – Bach (16, 18 March 1973)” with ROOM TEST displayed on the mini screens at each seat. The curtains here and in the other chambers were closed, apparently for security reasons. Obscured were the floor-to-ceiling windows with spectacular views of the East River, giving the room a hermetic feeling reminiscent of Dr. Strangelove’s war room. The only art in the chamber is a folksy carved-wood sculpture by Henrik Starcke of a woman with a bird flying out of her head that, we were told once again, symbolizes mankind and hope. The function of this room is a bit up in the air, as the Trusteeship Council was designed to look after colonized nations, but those nations have since gained independence. We took photos of the room and moved on.
The Economic and Social Council Chamber was also donated by a Scandinavian country, in this case Sweden. Its main feature is a curtain with interlocking orange and cream triangles, evoking a backgammon board, that Regina explained represent a “mutual exchange of views.” The UN website says that “the ceiling is designed to appear unfinished, leaving the air vent pipes exposed, as a reminder that the work of the UN is never finished.”
Coop Mosaic Artistico Veneziano, The Golden Rule, 1961, Murano glass tile mosaic, 125 ½ x 108 ½ x 13 ½” (donated by the U.S.A., 1985).
Regina got a phone call and learned she had another tour right after ours so had to pick up the pace to get through everything. She went into a frenzy, scampering between artworks, frantically rattling off each work’s country of origin, creation date, materials, and their quantity, and meaning. “This is The Golden Rule a mosaic made after Norman Rockwell died but based on a painting he made in 1961 donated by Nancy Regan from the United States in 1985 made with twenty-three thousand glass tiles and it shows people of every race creed and color and touches on the theme of human rights and the Golden Rule ‘Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.’ ” We rushed from that to Chernobyl by Alexander Kishchenko, donated by Belarus, a 12.6 × 33″ tapestry depicting the aftermath of the 1986 nuclear meltdown in Ukraine. One of the best and weirdest works we saw, it has a retrofuturist motif shot through with lightning bolts, a crying book, and a naked baby holding an apple. As an artwork, it’s compelling, but, like so much at the UN, its primary function seems to be as a prop in political theater. Shortly after Belarus donated the tapestry, UN member states canceled a pledge of $646 million in aid to the countries most affected by Chernobyl, because scientific data provided by the International Atomic Energy Agency declared that there were few harmful effects from the nuclear explosion.
Detail from Alexander Kishchenko, Chernobyl, tapestry, 12’6″ x 33′ (donated by Belarus, 1991).
Situated between natural-history-museum-style wall graphics about land mines and a room of artifacts from Hiroshima and Nagasaki is the perplexing Abused Ammunition by Thommy Bremberg, made in 2019. A joint donation from the USA and Sweden, it’s a two-foot-tall cast-glass sculpture of an anthropomorphized bullet with a bloodred tear coming out of its eye. It reminded me of the candlestick from the animated Beauty and the Beast, or a red-chip artwork you would see in the home of a twenty-seven-year-old tech founder, which he would describe as “dope.” According to our guide, it “shows how fragile we are. It has a face that cries and bleeds.” The UN website goes into more detail, explaining that the sculpture “is meant as a symbol to irradicate [sic] weapons in the world.” The artist offers this commentary:
The artist asks,
Mankind doesn’t seem to care
But this bullet is crying.
Because of all the killing
it has to take part in.
This clarifies neither the nature of the titular abuse this guilt-ridden bullet has suffered, nor what kind of life the bullet would ideally have led if it had not been forced to kill.
Thommy Bremberg, Abused Ammunition, 2017, glass, 60 cm x 15 cm (donated by the U.S.A. and Sweden, 2022).
The final stop was the United Nations General Assembly hall, a room of church-like proportions (165 feet long by 115 feet wide, with a 75-foot ceiling), topped by a dome. Above the green serpentinite desk of the president of the General Assembly floats the UN logo on a circle of gold leaf, mounted on a gold-painted wall. The left and right walls feature two large abstract murals of blobby, colorful shapes by Fernand Léger. Without explicit figuration, the UN’s ongoing symbolic approach to interpretation was tested, but Regina rose to the occasion, explaining that the red symbolizes war and the blue represents peace, and that each mural goes by a nickname given to it by Harry Truman, who treated them like associative Rorschachs. He saw Bugs Bunny in the one on the west wall, and scrambled eggs in the one on the east wall. These flat-footed interpretations stuck, and are used on the UN website as shorthand names for the works, possibly as a way of avoiding the fact that the murals’ meaning isn’t easily boiled down to a humanistic celebration of peace.
The General Assembly Hall (murals to the left and right are out of frame).
After this final stop, Regina hustled us into the elevator with a wave goodbye, an ending too abrupt for the older woman in our group, who asked, as the doors closed, “Will we see you again?” Returning to the lobby, my companion and I took a self-guided tour of Marc Chagall’s Peace Window, a large stained-glass piece depicting angels, flowers, and children that was so alluring, a small child ran under the rope stanchion to take a closer look. We peeked into the dimly lit Meditation Room, where a six-ton iron-ore stone altar (unauthored) donated by Sweden is paired with a geometric abstract fresco by Bo Beskow, a close friend of the UN’s second secretary general, Dag Hammarskjöld (conspiracy lovers, look into the plane crash that killed him). The Meditation Room is described as a nondenominational space of contemplation, but of course it is also “dedicated to peace.”
When the UN was formed, its goal was to find shared solutions to problems facing all of humanity. This goal was tempered by the veto power of the five permanent members of the UN Security Council (China, France, Russia, the United Kingdom, and the United States). This single-vote veto undermines even the most minimal notion of international democracy. A recent example is the U.S.A.’s six-time single-handed veto of a resolution demanding a ceasefire in Gaza—never mind the fact that, had it passed, the UN has no real mechanism for enforcement. Historically, the UN has been mostly a ceremonial organization, a window dressing on political reality. It therefore seems appropriate that the art in its headquarters, some of it great, is purely symbolic decor, much like a cheery mural at a middle school. The day we visited, the General Assembly was full of Model UN teenagers in business attire taking pictures of one another at the Future We Want summit. This felt like the UN in a nutshell; the real delegates seem scarcely more capable of direct political impact than this roomful of teens, some of whom surely believe in the UN’s goals and others who are just looking for extracurriculars for their college applications.
Teens.
At some point we were shown one of two 1957 murals by Candido Portinari that face each other in the Delegates’ Entrance Lobby. (Ironically, because of his membership in the Communist Party, Portinari was prevented from coming to the U.S.A. to inaugurate the panels.) From the balcony where we stood, we could see only Peace, a warm-toned figurative painting of a children’s choir and universal harmony. Its counterpart, War, is cooler-toned and depicts the Four Horsemen of the apocalypse and various other horrors. Regina explained that when ambassadors arrive in the morning, they look at the possibility of war, and at the end of the workday they leave looking at peace. If only it were that easy.