USA > New York > New York City > New York panorama : a comprehensive view of the metropolis > Part 19
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When all is said, New York City is the writer's market rather than "literary capital." Publishing houses, magazines, literary syndicates ar agents-these are the things that, to the average writer, mean a livelihood economic security, success, possibly lasting fame. The rest is more or le in the nature of window trimming, very attractive after bread and butt are assured, and useful at times in assuring bread and butter. In this r8 spect, literature in New York is true to the temper of modern Manhattap
MARKET PLACE FOR WORDS 179
e Federal Writers' Project
The economic plight of the writer not endowed with an independent ttome has even in periods of general prosperity been discouraging. The phew writers who starved it out until fame reached their garrets have been morialized in many romantic biographical sketches; but of the many omo were forced by want to abandon their literary aims no record exists. In New York City, where struggling authors are to be found in greater mbers than anywhere else in the country, the depression of the early 30's had unusually severe effects, and there was a united demand that ec Federal government should include in its work-relief program a plan employ the writer in work suited to his training and talent.
With the inauguration of the Federal Writers' Project of the Works ogress Administration, late in 1935, the New York City division of the pal oject was organized on the same basis as in each of the States. At its vetak, the project employed more than 500 workers; in July 1937 the num- r had dropped to below 400. Some were employed as administrators, expervisors, photographers, map-makers, typists, filing-clerks, proofreaders, d in other necessary non-literary capacities. The writers included re- arch workers and those who in the past have devoted themselves to frewspaper reporting and the writing of magazine articles, radio scripts, etry, plays, novels and short stories. y
The primary task of this project was to prepare an inclusive guide book New York City, for publication in the American Guide Series. But it on became apparent that only a small part of the valuable material gath- ed by the project's research workers could possibly be included in the new York Guide. A number of secondary enterprises were then evolved, nong them an annual Almanac for New Yorkers, of which the volumes Hr 1937 and 1938 have received wide distribution; a series of racial stud- ds, the first of which, The Italians of New York, has already appeared; number of volumes for children, after the manner of Who's Who in the 20, published in 1937; a Bibliography of Bibliographies Relating to ibor, an Encyclopedia of New York City, a Motion Picture Bibliography, id others. t he ot 1
Though the technique of planning creative work for so heterogeneous group and within the necessary limitations of the national program is not yet been fully perfected, it has been clearly demonstrated that a gh degree of cooperation may be secured among the writers on a large llective task.
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The encouragement that this project has afforded to aspiring writers their individual strivings may be gauged in part from the fact that seve of those on the project have published books written "off-time" wł their daily needs were supplied by the project for work done on the Gu and other books, that one of the New York WPA writers has be awarded a Guggenheim fellowship, one has received a prize in a nati wide Story Magazine contest, and still another has been given the Shel Memorial Award for Poetry.
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In Studio and Gallery
ARLY American painting developed along two main lines: the tradition the professional artist, working under the influence of European train- g and models; and the handicraft tradition, improvising an art in con- ction with the making and decoration of useful objects. For two centu- es these two lines of creative activity continually crossed and recrossed ch other under the pressure of American social and cultural conditions. ften they converged in the individual artist-an artisan coming in con- ct with imported paintings and, through copying or belated schooling, quiring a professional manner; a studio-trained artist turning his hand the popular demand for inn-signs, "limnings" or ornamentation. But hile American handicraft art lay outside the main currents of traditional t-values, American professional painting remained a provincial version : the European schools. And it was not till past the middle of the 19th ntury, when the country commenced to grow into its present industrial ature, that an independent American art arose.
In the Dutch settlement of New Amsterdam art was, necessarily, a ance pursuit. The colonist who had acquired an art-training before aving for the New World was compelled upon his arrival to devote his nergies to more practical pursuits. Severed from the art and teachings of urope, a continued development of technique was impossible. The artist clined to employ his talents in this raw country could resort only to rawing upon his memory of the masters he had seen back home. Where emory failed, invention supplied what it could. Jacobus Gerritsen rijcker found relief from his duties as farmer, merchant and magistrate y painting a number of portraits indicating that he must have had occa- on to study the approach of the prominent Dutch painters of the 17th entury. Evert Duijkinck, glass-maker and limner by trade, appears, how- ver, to have been far removed from any contact with Rembrandt or Ials. On the purely utilitarian side were those engravers of maps and iews who came with the explorers and early settlers as gatherers of
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"news," and who from their sketches supplied the Old World reports, often fantastic enough, of life among Indians, monsters and abundant nature.
The colony that fell to the British in 1664 had reached a population some 10,000. The century that followed was marked by an almost ur. terrupted expansion. The increase of commerce and of immigrat brought in its train new public buildings, fine residences, schools ¿ newspapers. Paintings and engravings found their place on the walls homes and public buildings, and artists continued to arrive from abro Native painting thus became a colonial transplanting of the English p trait school. At length a few artists found it possible to maintain the selves by obtaining portrait-commissions from the commercial and offic aristocracy. The most memorable among these early professionals Copley, Earl and Feke. Neither Copley nor Earl is associated with N York City, except through an occasional commission. John Singlet Copley, "the best painter produced by colonial America," passed his ea life within a small circle in Boston and his later years in the Engl. homeland. Ralph Earl was a native of Connecticut. Robert Feke is son times connected with New York, but little is actually known of t background and studies of this artist. An important visitor to the colo was Joseph Blackburn, who arrived from Bermuda in 1754 and remain for nine years. His style is typical of the period. In a three-quarter po trait of a rigidly posed figure the artist displays his virtuosity by t detailed reproduction of the designs and textural sheen of his sitte carefully draped garments. The drawing and modeling of the fa emphasize the hard, linear quality of his English contemporaries. rectangular upper corner of the canvas opens upon a landscape of clou and classical architecture receding into the distances. The total effect one of dignity, and of extreme, if somewhat strained, orderliness-appr priate, apparently, to the patron's own conception of his class distinctio With individual variances and with different degrees of success, this bas pattern of colonial painting was repeated by other New York professio als, Lawrence Kilburn, William Williams and John Durand.
Until the Revolution, studio art in New York consisted of such po traits, painted for the satisfaction of native and newly arrived merchan and officials. Into the modeling of these worthies and their ladies cree traces, often hardly perceptible, of the local rigors of living-of a certai. severity and bareness, a certain impulse towards simplicity and directnes a pioneer forthrightness of arrangement, reflecting the artisan regard of
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actical people for things that are above all well-made and useful. It is is narrowing and concentration that constitutes the identifying sign of lonial painting within the English school to which it belongs.
But beneath the art addressed to the "high people" of the colony had ready sprung up the multiple manifestations of an art, rarely recognized such, of the common folk: the work of the craftsmen and amateurs of e 18th and 19th centuries who supplied a popular demand for art- puse painters, sign painters, portrait limners, carpenters, shipwrights, pod carvers, stone cutters, metal workers. In the busy port town of ew York, makers of ships' figureheads, weather vanes, shop and inn gns, decorative grave-stones and carvings, lawn figures and hitching osts found a ready market. For many years sculpture in America con- sted solely of the work of these artisans. William Rush, the first notable merican sculptor, was a carver of figureheads and portrait busts. Itinerant tists, commonly self-taught, supplied more modest homes with portraits id landscapes, many ground out in stereotyped repetition, others, more re, revealing the operation of an original genius for character, color and esign, and achieving with their makeshift knowledge startling harmonies d insights. To the folk tradition of this horde of anonymous artists elonged Pieter Vanderlyn, who as a youth emigrated to New York from lolland. His portraits and sign paintings indicate that he was an impor- nt popular artist, an American "primitive" of high caliber. To this same opular tradition belongs also, though in a different sense, the famous eries of lithographic prints-historical scenes and portraits, country and ty views, sentimental and sporting subjects, etc .- published in the mid- le and later 19th century by Currier and Ives of New York, which served s models for many a homespun artist.
Previous to the War of Independence, New York City had already ecome. a center of resistance to the authority of the Crown. Having risen b social ascendency, its merchants, though still considering themselves pyal subjects, were prepared to assert and defend their own interests and Their own version of life. The war, which drove out or discredited the dherents of nobility, cemented the prestige of the local financial and rading classes. By 1790, when the Federal capital was removed from New York to Philadelphia, the city had already become, in the scale of he period, a metropolis. Outwardly, this growth was accompanied by ultural advance. New schools and universities were established and news- papers and public institutions multiplied. Essentially, however, commer- ial activity submerged all other pursuits.
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Benjamin West, called the "Dean of American Painting," had left timtrep American colonies towards the middle of the 18th century and after thr whose years of study in Italy had settled himself in London as a painter rand portraits and historical subjects. He attained great prominence und ver, George III, and in 1792 succeeded Sir Joshua Reynolds as president memb the Royal Academy. This honored ex-American set up a school of art sainte London which came to be known as "The American School." To WEbully, and his school early Republican painters, almost without exceptionbe owed some part of their training. The esthetic principle with whiculto West animated his pupils was that the story depicted upon a canvas ougratter to exert an elevating influence, through its appeal to moral, patriotic darvi religious emotions. It seemed to the artists of the young Republic thiwas American history demanded to be treated in precisely this manner. The t
Returning from West's studio imbued with the expectation that e: I tensive commissions would be proffered them by the new governmenterm the pupils of West were doomed to deep disappointment. The officials catio the new Republic participated but slightly in the artists' grandiose comocre ceptions of history and allegory. For the art of the capitol they turned tmov French decorators and architects. American artists soon found themselv I compelled to apply their main energies to the painting of portraits ancor family groups, or to abandon painting altogether for activities morphe harmonious with the temper of the times. A number of historical pain tion ings were executed, however, for private and public purchasers. Johlege Trumbull's familiar Battle of Bunker Hill, painted in West's studio, datetur from this period, as well as his The Surrender of Cornwallis, The Signinand of the Declaration of Independence, The Surrender of Burgoyne, Thlitt Resignation of Washington. Trumbull had been in personal contact wit the Revolution and its heroes. He had served with the colonial army, hamo sketched plans of the enemy's military works at Boston, and later had been arrested in London and released through the mediation of West. His fullpar length portraits of Washington, George Clinton, Hamilton and Jay, exeen cuted during the 1790's, became part of the collection of the City HaNa of New York. Trumbull was also president of the American Academy ofof Art founded in New York in 1802.
Gilbert Stuart, whose Athenaeum portrait of Washington remains th th accepted likeness, also studied under West, but his work shows little of West's influence. Like most artists of his period he passed some time it New York, but his career can scarcely be identified with the art of thing city. The same must be said of that remarkably versatile craftsman la
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ftthtrepreneur, soldier, lecturer, naturalist, artist, Charles Willson Peale, thhose history belongs to that of colonial Philadelphia. His son, Rem- er un nt art candt Peale, trained by his father and by Benjamin West, served, how- ver, as president of the American Academy and was one of the original members of the National Academy of Design. Other portrait and historical ainters of the school of West who worked in New York include Thomas ally, William Dunlap (author of a History of the Rise and Progress of tinthe Arts of Design in the United States), and the inventors, Robert ulton and S. F. B. Morse. It was characteristic of the age that the two uglitter should have divided their art with other interests. John Wesley ic arvis, who contributed a number of portraits to the City Hall gallery, thras Sully's partner in a portrait-painting enterprise in New York. Among he recorders of historical events was also Robert Walter Weir.
The war of 1812 brought great hardship to the advancing city, but its nemtermination was followed by a new spurt in business, building and popu- station. When in 1825 the great Erie Canal was officially opened, the comcrease of wealth and immigration and the expansion of the city's area dmoved forward still more rapidly.
This intensive material aggrandizement, however, brought with it no amforresponding improvement in cultural and esthetic taste. The mechanical, nothe spectacular and the didactic proved more engrossing to the imagina- infion of both upper and lower classes than the serious historical and oh legendary themes of the West school. Waxworks, stuffed animals, natural atauriosities, geographical views and melodramatic tableaux drew crowds innd money for their exhibitors. The question of artistic quality received Thlittle attention.
The controllers of public life augmented their esthetic anesthesia with hafnoralistic intolerance. When John Vanderlyn attempted to exhibit his PerAriadne at the American Academy, its withdrawal was demanded by ilparents who feared the depraving effects upon the students of the pres- xelence in the building of an image of a nude reclining in a landscape. Thus allVanderlyn's early attempts to introduce the influence of the French school of David was met not with appreciation and intellectual interest but with . scandal. In sculpture the effects of prudery were even more disastrous ; the study of the human figure was fatally impeded in a society where even off. cast of the Venus de Milo had to be locked up out of sight.
id Legislative intolerance brought to an end an interesting experiment, be- isgun in 1838, in the popular dissemination of art. The Apollo Association, nater renamed the Art Union, was formed on the plan of collecting five
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dollars from each of its members and spending this fund on works of a aintir Ash een th which, after being exhibited, were distributed by lot. A copy of an engra ing, a critical bulletin and free admission to the exhibitions were include in the membership fee. This forerunner of the modern book club prove ttenti ndepe
very successful, soon reaching a subscription of one hundred thousar dollars a year. Many talented artists were thus brought before the publi The enterprise was terminated, however, when it was found to violate tl law against lotteries.
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In this epoch of the settlement of new territories, the eyes and fanci of the city turned towards the rural life from which it drew its substanc A sentimental naturalism varying from the melodramatic panoramas ( fearch
Cole, Church and Bierstadt to the literalist pastorals of Inman and Mou succeeded the decline of portrait and historical painting in the Englis
calcul manner. Art of the pre-Civil War decades is identified with the land scapes of these and other nature-painters who collectively came to known as the Hudson River school.
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The "Father of American Landscape," Thomas Cole, was born in Eng Kens land and during his youth spent in Ohio learned the rudiments of paintin from a wandering German portraitist. Arriving in New York in 1825, h Neline exhibited his landscapes in the window of an eating-house in Greenwic Rive epro Village where they attracted the attention and patronage of Trumbul T Audi
With the funds earned by the sale of paintings he departed for th Hudson River Valley to work directly from nature. In later years h studied abroad, and, inflating his notions of art with meditations on gran allegorical themes, produced such series as The Voyage of Life and Th berk Course of Empire. These, with his Expulsion from Eden, acquired by th Metropolitan Museum, and his Catskill landscapes, gained him consider able fame.
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The Hudson River painters, like those whom their canvases wer intended to please, found themselves absorbed almost exclusively b; subject matter and story-telling. A panorama limited only by the fou The boundaries of its frame and leaving its sentiment with the beholder com ærsı pleted the purpose of the artist. Color, form or compositional value car iron I this æexe scarcely be said to receive more than elementary consideration; occasion ally, certain touches of virtuosity in lighting intervene as a relief. Flat diffuse and unevocative, thin in pigmentation, over-detailed with static and unresolved superficialities, the landscapes of the Hudson River group Bet lacked as a rule both esthetic harmony and psychological incisiveness. Ye to the Hudson River painters belongs the important distinction of having
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een the first (with the exception of isolated folk artists) to take American inting out of doors.
Asher Brown Durand, another "father" of this movement, first gained tention through his popular engravings of Trumbull's Declaration of idependence and Vanderlyn's Ariadne. After a period of portrait paint- g and of study abroad he returned to America and became prominent as landscape painter and president of the National Academy. Cole's pupil, rederick E. Church, preferred the melodramatic in nature to the moral id metaphysical romanticism of his master. Natural marvels-volcanoes, ebergs, tropical daybreaks, giant waterfalls-attracted his fancy, and in arch of these vistas he traveled over the world. His work was well lculated to achieve immediate success; he was elected to the Academy in is early youth and subsequently found many purchasers both here and road. Other successful academicians were the genre painters Henry man and William Sidney Mount, both of whom did much work in New ork and are well represented in its museums; also John Frederick ensett and Eastman Johnson, whose methods, derived from the disci- lined and unimaginative Düsseldorf school in Germany, were applied to producing the American scene in a manner similar to that of the Hudson iver school.
The impulse to record nature in detail also inspired John James Audubon, whose Birds of America, originally engraved and published London, quickly brought him a lasting success. Audubon, whose rtistic training developed for the most part outside the schools, ought erhaps to be linked with American folk art, which reached its culmina- on around the 1850's. His fresh and dynamic renditions of bird-plumage nd bird-posture reveal the utilitarian objectives and the freedom from chool restraints of the gifted artisan. His art is achieved through the im- hediate sincerity and faithfulness of his recording. The preservation of he house he built on the Hudson, near what is now 158th Street and Riv- rside Drive, and the recent popular reprint of his book testify to the ontinued regard in which his work is held.
In recapitulating the development of American art up to the Civil War, his relationship of Audubon to folk art is extremely suggestive. It xemplifies the constant tendency on the part of the two main currents in American art-local craftsmanship and European borrowing-to flow to- gether at the center: on the one hand, through the transformation of elf-trained amateurs and shop-skilled handworkers into disciples of some European school, and on the other, through the application of art to
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popular demands. But while this flowing together occurs repeatedly ilharac individual artists, the currents themselves remain at their extremes rigiditudie apart: a cultivated art of the upper class and a makeshift art of the comartisan mon man. Clark
This separation of cultivated education from popular life affected botrian s our pristine native art and our borrowings from abroad. Since only thyeginn rich or the protégés of the rich could acquire a European schooling, thexamp requirements of the wealthy patrons were bound to determine the pemorari spective in which European culture would be approached. Merchantaind a landlords and public officials decided, in the last instance, what ought tlhory be borrowed from Europe. And with their naturally conservative anm the esthetically indifferent tastes they inevitably demanded the "best," that itwere the most established artistic articles Europe could supply. Hence the morvord, forward-moving of the European schools, the early appreciation of whichHe g could rest only upon an impulse towards artistic and theoretical discoveryenter were for a long time avoided by American students.
With the fixing of the boundaries of American "fine art" in this man pica ner, the social origins of individual artists became a matter of merel If personal importance. The artisan-turned-artist who "arrived" as a fash hoth ionable portraitist or landscapist came to produce his work in competition with and in the style of the European academician. There remained n ef th 's to center of resistance which would enable him to place the stamp of different kind of life upon his necessary derivations. His transformation into a European was too complete: the "American" characteristics of pre mpoп Civil War art are, essentially, negative characteristics, arising from uncon sivas scious limitations rather than from positive esthetic purposes. The Amer The ican student not only increased his education by his study abroad-h capitulated to it. scho
The rigid duality of American creative currents left its effects also upor the artist who remained true to the native traditions. Here the remotenes Aca of cultural forms forced expression into crude, primitive moulds, and, bylary preventing an interchange of ideas and methods, condemned folk art to isolated, atomic "springing-up," with no hope of a unified organic de In velopment.
These tendencies are especially obvious in sculpture. We have referrechati above to the masterful achievements of American makers of figureheads pour weather vanes and trade symbols. Of these folk artists William Rush ancmet John Frazee succeeded in leaving an individual impress on their productsod and in extending their skill into portrait modeling of a high order of raff
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