Lofty Solutions

New York, with some 50,000 working artists, can lay claim to being the art center of the world. But almost to a man, artists are plagued by a common problem: lack of light and space big enough to serve as studios. The fact that the art community continues to swell and that works these days grow ever larger only exacerbates the problem. To get a space big enough to work in, Painter Mark Rothko, for instance, once took over the gymnasium of a no longer used Bowery high school. Helen Frankenthaler, who ordinarily works out of an East Side brownstone, had to hire a theater to stretch out her 30-ft.-high banner painting for Expo 67. Ellsworth Kelly confesses that he never saw one of his large canvases all in one piece until it was put together in an exhibition. Some artists, such as Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg, who work on the same billboard scale as James Rosenquist, have bought their own buildings.

By and large, artists have tried to solve the problem by moving into old industrial lofts. But living there often meant breaking the city's fire and non-occupancy laws or entailed the double cost of maintaining separate living and studio quarters. And with urban renewal, even lofts are becoming a rarity. Last week a spate of new projects, all aimed at alleviating their housing problem, convinced artists that their pleas for help might at last be beginning to register.

The National Council on the Arts and the J. M. Kaplan Fund announced a joint project to convert the eight-building Bell Telephone Laboratories on Manhattan's Lower West Side into a $10 million artists' center providing housing for 500 painters, writers, musicians, dancers and film makers. At the same time, Lyons Houses, which owns' a chain of dollar-a-night hotels on New York's Bowery (where artists have traditionally hobnobbed with derelicts) began renovating one of them, the Alabama, into studio housing, eventually may follow suit with others. And in Brooklyn Heights, the city has decided to include a low-cost studio cooperative for artists in its urban-renewal plans.

Of the projects, the conversion of the Bell Laboratories is by far the most ambitious undertaking. The building itself--where Herbert Hoover watched the first television demonstration, Jascha Heifetz recorded on one of the first "primitive" hi-fi systems, and Sam Warner made the first "talkie"--is peculiarly suitable, with its 10-ft. to 16-ft. ceilings, a cafeteria and an auditorium, all features that Architect Richard Meier hopes to preserve in the ren ovation. Tenants, to be screened by a citizens' committee, will be able to rent units at approximately $110 a month.

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