New York panorama : a comprehensive view of the metropolis, Part 20

Author:
Publication date: 1938
Publisher: New York : Random House
Number of Pages: 630

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dly characterization. Frazee, proprietor of a marble-cutting shop in New York, igidudied at the American Academy and applied both artistic training and comitisan skill to his carvings of tombstones, busts and decorative mantels. lark Mills, cabinet-maker and sculptor, fashioned America's first- eques- botian statue. But while these laborers in the wilderness were forging the y theginnings of American sculpture, often without having seen a single g, ti xample of what the masters of this art had accomplished, their contem- perforaries who studied abroad promptly succumbed to an abject conservatism hantend a loss of identity. The Italian school of the expatriate Dane, Bertel ht thorwaldsen, became the center to which American students were drawn anh the pre-Civil War epoch. Numberless imitations of classical models at irere produced. A prominent member of this school was Thomas Craw- morord, who was born in New York but made his permanent home in Rome. while gained success with his mythological groups and figures: Orpheus ntering Hades in Search of Eurydice, Hebe and Ganymede, Sappho. The hany commissions which he executed for American purchasers were pical of the sculpture of the Italianate school.

If in the two centuries before the Civil War American art remained othing more than "a local dialect of the great language of European rt"-the phrase is Holger Cahill's-and even fell in the middle decades f the 19th century into an insensitivity deeper than ever, the explanation ; to be found in the lack of free play between the cultivated tradition pon which it drew and the ever-changing needs of the American people. n 19th century Europe, the old culture, striving to maintain its stability, ras from generation to generation taken in hand by and made to serve he interests of new social elements. Within these tensions the successive chools of European art replaced one another. Nowhere so well as in imerica did European culture retain a relative stability; America was the Academy of Europe. Before an American art could appear it was neces- ary to begin borrowing in a new and more radical way.

In the decades following the Civil War, America lifted itself out of its gricultural and mercantile past and entered its industrial phase. A vast redational expansion followed which sent wealth and organizational power adspouring into and through the port city of New York. The embryonic andhetropolis matured, rapidly taking on the physiognomy which it bears actsoday. Its size and tempo increased at an enormous rate: skyscrapers, ofraffic, advertising, newspaper extras and ornate residences; standardized

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housing blocks, tenement slums and street markets composed its visit reality.

Social and cultural life were thrown into new relations by this upheav beneath it. Europe, brought closer by the improved methods of tran portation, by the gigantic flood of immigration, by new political ar trade arrangements, saw industrial New York mounting the historic incline that was to achieve the level of its own capitals. The spiritu lag of the province gave way as the city took its place in world-civilizatio.

New museums and schools of art in New York made study abroad I longer an absolute necessity in education. Private purchases continued i augment the available store of European examples. Newspapers, art mag zines and reproductions carried art far down into the mass of the peopl Soon the ingression into art of the lower social strata was no long attended by an abnegation of previous values; instead there commence the preparation of that succession of violent revolts against the academ which was to shake the art-world in the years to follow, and from whic art in New York was to derive so much of its energy.

Under these conditions the two earlier currents in American art cam together in a synthesis which for the first time raised American paintin to an independent position. Fundamentally, this synthesis represented th spiritual encounter of city and country, of rural and cosmopolitan value of the farm handicraftsman and the trained urban technician.

Slowly American art intensified its searching, broke more and mot decisively with the prettiness and sentimentality of earlier styles, becam harsher and more nakedly critical, absorbed and exchanged its Europea teachings at an accelerated speed. A genuine, serious American art cam into being, attended by anguish and rebuffs but persisting defiantly out o a new sense of inner necessity, a new conviction of possessing a role an a function. American art acquired a core of critical resistance whic. brought selection and purpose to its derivations.

At the moment when this new birth occurred began the exhaustion o the older strains: the rich production of folk art dwindled after 1860 an ceased almost entirely by the end of the century; the talented American apprentice of the European atelier lost his educational monopoly and wa relegated to the dim halls of the Academy.

The art of Homer, Eakins and Ryder, the pioneers of the new spirit i American art, breaks decisively both with the sentimental scene and th classical tableau. For the realists, Homer and Eakins, art is an instrumen of research into and communication of objective facts; to the mystic and

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OFF MANHATTAN'S SOUTHERN TIP, THE STATUE OF LIBERTY GREETS INCOMING SHIPS

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LOWER MANHATTAN CASTS ITS REFLECTION IN THE EAST RIVER

BEYOND THE TIP OF MANHATTAN, BUTTERMILK CHANNEL APPEARS BETWEEN THE BROOKLYN SHORE AND GOVERNOR'S ISLAND

BROOKLYN BRIDGE, FIRST TO SPAN THE EAST RIVER, CONNECTS MANHATTAN AND BROOKLYN

FISHING CRAFT FIND A HARBOR CLOSE TO THEIR DESTINATION, THE FULTON FISH MARKET, NEAR BROOKLYN BRIDGE

EXCLUSIVE TUDOR CITY, BEEKMAN PLACE, AND SUTTON PLACE BORDER THE EAST RIVER IN MID-MANHATTAN

AT THE JUNCTION OF HARLEM RIVER AND EAST RIVER, TRIBOROUGH BRIDGE CONNECTS MANHATTAN, QUEENS, AND THE BRONX

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NEWTOWN CREEK, BRANCHING FROM THE EAST RIVER BETWEEN LONG ISLAND CITY AND GREENPOINT, IS AN IMPORTANT INDUSTRIAL WATERWAY

WHERE THE HARLEM SHIP CANAL JOINS THE HUDSON RIVER, WITH NEW JERSEY IN THE BACKGROUND

GEORGE WASHINGTON BRIDGE SPANS THE WIDE HUDSON BETWEEN UPPER MANHATTAN AND THE PALISADES AT FORT LEE, NEW JERSEY

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STEAMER DOCKS AND FERRY SLIPS FRINGE THE WESTERN SHORE OF LOWER MANHATTAN

BATTERY PARK WITH GOVERNOR'S ISLAND AND BROOKLYN IN BACKGROUND

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IN STUDIO AND GALLERY 19I

scetic Ryder the transcription of an image brought into being by an iner state demands no less faithfulness and accuracy. All three are far moved from mere "good painting" according to the tenets of some sthetic school.

Winslow Homer began his self-instruction by persistently drawing from fe, deriving his teaching, so to speak, from the objects he was attempting render. In New York he refined this amateur approach by periods of rofessional instruction and through study of native and imported litho- raphs and paintings. He opened a shop for wood-engraving, and found mployment as a lithographer and as a magazine illustrator, reporting the Civil War from the front for Harper's Weekly. The water-colors of his maturity reflect the ability thus gained to seize quickly the immediate ppearance of events. If the rough and ready tradition of the shop and he finesse of the studio had alternately characterized the education of eale and Durand, shop and studio came together stylistically in Homer, oh the break with "finish" for the sake of accurate depictions of light and orm relations. In his travels, he was the trustworthy reporter of peoples, occupations and natural phenomena, finding little to attract him in the rt of Europe-though he studied in Paris for a year-yet expending great devotion on the movements of the sea off the coast of Maine, or on he palms and colored races of the South.

Thomas Eakins was a realist in a deeper sense. His artistic insight cuts beneath the surface like the scalpel of the surgeon in his famous Clinic anvases. Thoroughly trained, familiar with the schools and masterpieces f France and Spain, a pupil of Gérôme in the Ecole des Beaux Arts and of Leon Bonnet, he applied his technique not to the reproduction of the rtistic manner of some European movement but to the direct analysis of ocal personalities and activities. The cosmopolitan language of his art robed the prose-world of contemporary life with the simple directness nd adherence to fact with which the farmer-painter of early Pennsylvania night have attempted his colloquial reproduction of environing hills and treams. Thus genre painting in his hands, as in Homer's, had nothing n common with the smooth surface attitudes of Inman and the Düssel- lorf decor. Playing over the details of muscles, nerves, veins and dress, trong contrasts of light and shade point consistently to his major empha- is, the anatomy of human character. To this he willingly subordinated olor and composition in his portrait, sport and genre studies.

The new social life of post-Civil War America affirmed itself in the critical and often harsh observations of Eakins. The grace and beauty

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which Eakins was accused of neglecting in his canvases were lacking to in the young industrial civilization which he accepted as his subjec These were the days of Thomas Nast's effective cartoon attacks on th Tweed Ring, an epoch which this tireless draughtsman characterize

pat politically by introducing the symbols of the Republican Elephant, th Democratic Donkey and the Tammany Tiger. Says Parrington in his Mai Currents of American Thought: "The idealism of the Forties and th romanticism of the Fifties, the heritage of Jeffersonianism and of thy French Enlightenment, were in the Seventies put thoughtlessly away, and with a thorough lack of social conscience, with no concern for civiliza tion, no heed for the democracy it talked so much about, the Gilded Ag threw itself heedlessly into the rough and tumble business of mone che

bas an getting and money grubbing." The tough-minded talents of Eakins re flected this spectacle, attempting neither to reject nor to gloss over it meanings.

At the moment, however, when industrial society began to observe itsel Ifro lo realistically, a powerful force of negation sprang up within it, equalling irpro its lyrical intensity the violence of the life which it thrust aside.

Despite all obvious differences, Albert Pinkham Ryder might be calledy the American Van Gogh. In his work, as in Van Gogh's, imaginativ fy conceptions, founded upon strong religious and ascetic emotions, modif and exaggerate natural appearances; direct and simple statements breal through inadequate training and subject drawing and color to new need of expression. Ryder never underwent the radical modifications which the influence of the Impressionists wrought in the development of Van Gogh Nor could the skies of New England and smoky New York pour down upon him the sunlit intoxications of Provence. It is night, not sharp day light, that inspires Ryder. His landscapes and fables are heavy and broods ing, like the thick solemn impastos of the Dutch modernist's early isolated gropings towards a significant language. Ryder worked slowly and pain fully, endlessly painting and repainting, never completely satisfied that hi! inner image had been conveyed. His moonlit subjects, drawn from mid night walks at the Battery or from folk tales, Shakespeare, the Bible, o some self-invented legend, became friezes of overpainting or were de stroyed in the effort towards perfection. Out of his nights of sharply jutting masses, emerge the incandescent green, silver and blue apparition: ite of ships, clouds, seasurges, allegorical horsemen, in a sweeping simplicity of shapes which links his work to the best of the romantic modernists This real opposition to the realities of modern industrial life already LÄS th th

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preshadows in Ryder one of the major esthetic attitudes of the art to ome in America.

About the dominant figures of these three pioneers whose work consti- ites the Declaration of Independence of American painting other changes rere affecting New York City's art. In landscape painting the influence f Düsseldorf had yielded to the "new naturalism" of the Barbizon school. the of the purposes of this school Millet, one of its leaders, had written: "I thay not to have things look as if chance had brought them together, but s if they had a necessary bond between themselves." As this French fluence began to mount, artists turned their backs upon the labored astorals of Düsseldorf and the picturesqueness of the Hudson River style 0 nd strove for the mellow harmonies of Millet and Corot. Sponsored by re its he landscapists Inness and Martin and by the sensitive and cultivated rtists and travelers Hunt and La Farge, French art now became the pre- ominant European source of American instruction. George Inness, the lowness of whose development testified to the difficulties of self-training, rogressed from the formless panoramas of his earlier years to the con- rolled atmospheres of his maturer landscapes. Homer Martin, who began ed y pursuing the traditions of Cole in his renderings of the untamed scen- ry of the Adirondacks, was in time so far penetrated by French examples ve hat in his last paintings he proceeded to break up his tones and lay them ilide by side in heavy strokes in order to achieve the effects of the Impres- glionists. The cultured eclecticism of Hunt and La Farge ranged as far as he Italian Renaissance; and in the windows and murals which the latter xecuted for several New York churches he attempted to recapture the ranscendental quality of the masters. Alexander Wyant died in New York after painting landscapes which showed an English rather than the general French tendency. Another important landscapist of this period vas Ralph Albert Blakelock, in whose original and largely self-tutored alent resemblances are sometimes found to the genius of Ryder. 1-

Succeeding the Barbizon influence, Impressionism became the dominant American derivation from European sources. Weir, Glackens, Twachtman nd Hassam are the outstanding American reputations of this phase. Of hese, Childe Hassam and William Glackens painted street scenes of New York City. The fate of Impressionism in America, however, wherever its eachings were not leavened with fresh purposes, is perhaps best summed up in the following quotation from a recent bulletin of the Brooklyn nstitute of Arts and Sciences: "The strangest thing about impressionism s that when it was invented, it was attacked as a radical movement sub-

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versive of established traditions and public morals. Now it is the mannnough of the academics."

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Thus the absorption of European trends continued throughout the laark quarter of the 19th century. During this period many of the famous Nepunta York collections, including the Frick and the Havemeyer, were establishe huse The Municipal Art Commission was created in 1898. It was an epoch By vigorous learning and assimilation. All foreign trends were attentive Ice

and sympathetically scrutinized by American artists, if not by the buye rst and the officials of art. The upsurge of original energy which had pr st duced Homer, Eakins and Ryder was not to spread into new local cha; Alivil nels until it had enriched itself with a thorough education. By the turn the century this had been accomplished: the expatriate Whistler ha studied Japanese prints and had declared for "musical painting" in th jargon of modernist theory; Mary Cassatt, another expatriate, had bee accepted as a ranking artist among the followers of Degas and the Impre sionists; the poetry and art criticism of Baudelaire had stimulated a ne

efi romanticism; "art for art's sake" had become a slogan; ideas, mystical socialist and scientific, had infiltrated the minds of American artists bot at home and abroad; the effete superficialities of Sargent had dazzle wealthy New Yorkers with the prospect of sitting for a portrait by es1 fashionable American "master"; Chase and Duveneck had drawn art bac for to the studio with the emphasis in their teaching on the brush drawin ech and heavy paint-mass technique of the Munich School. he

In sculpture important strides had been taken by the pioneering effor! of Henry Kirke Brown and his pupil, John Quincy Adams Ward. Brow had spent four years of study in Italy, but unlike so many of his com patriots abroad he succeeded in retaining his native character. His Abre, ham Lincoln and equestrian statue of Washington, both at Union Square show a rugged originality rare in his period. Ward, though America he trained, was a finished craftsman whose realism has evoked compariso. with Eakins and Homer. His bronze Washington at the Subtreasur Building and his Pilgrim, Shakespeare and Henry Ward Beecher are im portant city monuments. Py

At the time when the Paris influence became dominant in painting, i was brought forward also in sculpture in the plastic romanticism o Saint-Gaudens, who studied in New York and worked with La Farge berg fore leaving for Paris. Saint-Gaudens is represented in this city by th Admiral Farragut monument in Madison Square and by his Peter Coupe De and equestrian statue of Sherman. Other practitioners of the new style

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manntough without the verve and feeling of Saint-Gaudens, were Frederick acMonnies, modeler of Nathan Hale and Civic Virtue in City Hall irk, and George Gray Barnard, familiar to New Yorkers through his untain at Columbia University, his Pan in Central Park, and his unique useum "The Cloisters."

By the end of the 19th century American art was prepared to set a fast ice for itself. The decades to follow were to witness a veritable cloud- irst of creation in the plastic and graphic arts. But certain obstacles had st to be met and overcome. The conservatism which had shackled pre- chativil War art still retained powerful strongholds. True, the Academy had hanged its style and was to change again in the future. But it had re- r hakained constant in its procedure of barring the road to the new wher- er it appeared, as something radical, destructive and artistically mean- gless. In 1877, New York artists had already felt compelled to set Memselves into organized opposition to the esthetics of the Academy. In nulation of their Paris colleagues, who in an analogous situation had efied the Paris art authorities with their Salon des Refusés, they formed e Society of American Artists. The stale eclecticism of the Academy ith its lucrative control over commissions had felt in itself an inner esistance to all living currents in American art, both to the direct and orthright discoveries of Ryder and Eakins and to the intellectual and witechnical innovations of the more significant importations. Ryder, Eakins, nness, Wyant and Martin, who had been consistently ignored by the offi- ial cliques, were joined by La Farge and Hunt in the exhibitions arranged ly the new society.

The Academy, however, proved to be not merely an Organization but a rocess. By the time the first decade of the 20th century had been reached, atthe art rejected by the Academy in the 1870's had won its way to emi- ence, and had begun to yield to still fresher forces, which it had helped o create. The moment had now arrived for the Academy to accept the ormer outcasts, in order to gain their support in opposing the new threats o its prestige. In 1906 the Society of American Artists amalgamated with ts old foe to form the present National Academy of Design.

But a tremendous secret accumulation of artistic energies was to alter adically the character of art production in New York. And against the lood of painting, sculpture, graphic art and photography that swept up but of this first decade of our century the excommunications of the Acad- my proved of little avail.

The "refusés" of the 1900's consisted of artists who in the 1890's had

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been coming together in the Philadelphia studio of Robert Henri artists, quietly preparing a revolt against all that was dead in American art. Th, Ram's majority of the "Henri Group" were newspaper illustrators whose art w: into t produced in direct contact with the life of the times. Technically, they ha, ainti developed in themselves an alert workmanlike ability to faithfully reproeauty duce the tonalities and atmosphere of streets and public gathering place their Intellectually, they had immersed themselves in social and political cui fever rents, familiarizing themselves, more or less deeply, with the ideas Cheth Bellamy, Henry George, Nietzsche, Tolstoy, socialism, individualism an 0 the labor movement. Through Eakins and his disciple, Thomas Anshutz PPP Mino the who taught at the National Academy, members of the group had acquire a taste for an esthetic of uncompromising realism. Henri himself ha practiced an independent approach to the masterpieces of Velasquez Goya, Hals and Rembrandt, as well as to the realists and Impressionist4 d of France. In the words of one observer, the Group "cared more for lif than for paint."

In 1908 "The Eight," as they were also called, presented their worl Th before the eyes of New York. Exhibitors included Henri, John Sloan pra George Luks, William Glackens, Arthur B. Davies, Everett Shinn, Ernes bf t Lawson and Maurice Prendergast, the latter having discovered for himsel the work of Cézanne and the post-Impressionists. The variety of theinhe techniques reflected the backgrounds of American and foreign art from which they had emerged-romanticism, realism, impressionism, commer. cial illustration. It was against the academic and all that it stood for that they were united. But what was more important was that once again the ibro influences of the past both native and foreign had been absorbed into an tec idiom of American experience. In this sense their work was a direct con- pic

tinuation of the spirit of Homer, Eakins and Ryder.

The reaction to their show could not have been unexpected: from their critics the "Henri Group" acquired the additional colorful labels of "The Revolutionary Black Gang" and "The Ashcan School." Their paintings and prints of slums, race tracks, park benches, bathing beaches, busy thor-ik oughfares, rooftops, backyards, old paupers and children of the poor seemed no more to belong to art than had the dots and dashes of color of the early Impressionists.

Most of the "Henri Group" had come to New York by 1900. In ai spiritual sense, these artists might be said to constitute the first "New York School." For their work was of and concerning the city, both sub- jectively and with respect to its material. In any event, these streets and

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habitants of New York now became the concern of a whole corps of ttists, who bestowed upon their subjects not the remote touch of Has- im's Madison Square or Fifth Avenue but a close intruding observation to the condition and habits of the people. In addition to the city-scene aintings by "The Eight," poolrooms, restaurants, prizefights, circuses, eauty parlors and human types belonging exclusively to the city made heir appearance also in the canvases of Glenn O. Coleman, Jerome leyers, George (Pop) Hart, Reginald Marsh, George Bellows and Ken- eth Hayes Miller.

Out of this realistic movement and animated by its spirit of critical pposition arose also the satirical social and political cartoons of Bob Minor, Art Young and Boardman Robinson, and in succeeding decades he caricatures and social commentaries of Peggy Bacon, Mabel Dwight, nd the sharply conceived lithographs and paintings of William Gropper. determined impulse to speak to the broad masses had brought a new itality to the graphic arts. Lithography as an art medium had declined owards 1900, leaving etching as the sole important graphic medium. Whistler, Cassatt, Duveneck, Twachtman, Joseph Pennell and Hunt had practiced the printmaker's art. The situation in this field at the opening f the century is summed up as follows by Carl Zigrosser in his Fine Prints Old and New: "The favorite etchers of that period made romantic views f foreign architecture, or pretty landscapes, or sentimental portraits of nimals or of human 'types.' They spoke in the language-though not lways in the spirit-of Whistler, Meryon, Haden, Cameron."

The new realistic and analytical spirit inaugurated by "The Eight" brought a return of lithography and wood-engraving. In the expansion of echniques that followed, with the rise of photography and the motion picture as independent arts, with the development of color-reproduction of painting, the making and circulation of prints became part of a great novement to render art easily accessible to all and to cause it to form a normal element of daily life. Among the etchers and lithographers of the past 25 years are Sloan, Hassam, Bellows, Hart, Coleman, Rockwell Kent, Miller, Weber, Hopper, Davies, Albert Sterner, Ernest Fiene, John Marin, Marsh, Hugo Gellert, Alexander Brook, Louis Lozowick, John lor Taylor Arms, George Biddle, Kuniyoshi. Other printmakers of New York nclude George Constant, Adolph Dehn, John Groth, Kerr Eby, Wanda Gag, Isami Doi, Philip Reisman, Raphael Soyer, Howard Cook, Emil Gauro, Doris Rosenthal; and such newspaper and magazine cartoonists as Rollin Kirby, Peter Arno, Otto Soglow, Denys Wortman.

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New York panorama : a comprehensive view of the metropolis, Part 20

Author: Publication date: 1938 Publisher: New York : Random House Number of Pages: 630

Author:
Publication date: 1938
Publisher: New York : Random House
Number of Pages: 630