Lee Lawrie did more work at Rockefeller Center than any other single artist by far. Lawrie is responsible for three major well-placed pieces, and another eleven minor pieces here and there. So if the Center carries anybody's signature, it's Lee Lawrie's.

He was born in Rixdorf Germany in 1877, now a suburb of Berlin, and came to Chicago as a child. He studied under Augustus Saint-Gaudens and Karl Bitter, producing a lot of allegorical sculpture for the 1904 St. Louis World's Fair for instance, before Bertram Goodhue took him under his wing as mentor around 1910.

Lawrie worked under Goodhue on at least six or seven buildings and developed into the world champion integrator of human figures into stonework, which is not an easy trick. Human shapes and building shapes are hard to reconcile aesthetically, they don't mix, and then it's hard to keep these things from looking stiff, or ridiculous, or out of place with the rest of the ornamental scheme.

Genius, Which Interprets to the Human Race the Laws and Cycles of the Cosmic Forces of the Universe, also known as Genius, also known as "Wisdom" part of "Wisdom, Light and Sound." This three-figure group is placed above the main entrance of the tallest building in the complex, the natural focal point, and is the most dynamic, well-integrated and understandable art in Rockefeller Plaza. It delivers a message about delivering messages, and that message is tied to the function of the building.

I like that gilded halo thing that's scalloped into the stone face of the building, there at the top. For years Lawrie had produced figural sculpture that was elaborately integrated into the shape of the structure, with humans growing out of pylonic masses for instance, and all of that integration is reduced, here, into one little witty interruption. There are 240 of those amazing irreplacable glass blocks, all unique, hand-cast at Corning Glass Works. One of them contains a cast swastika, according to Christine Roussel anyway.