Wednesday, June 10, 2020 INDUSTRIAL SUBLIME

By admin

WEDNESDAY,  JUNE 10, 2020

The

75th Edition

From Our Archives

INDUSTRIAL SUBLIME

Creating Industrial Sublime

Billowing Smoke stacks, booming industry, noble bridges, and an epic waterfront-American art swung on an axis.

PART 1 OF 2 PARTS
TO BE CONTINUED ON THURSDAY,  JUNE 11TH

GEORGE AULT   FROM BROOKLYN HEIGHTS  C 1925-1928

This article is from the 2014 review of this show at the Hudson River Museum in Yonkers:

They came to New York from near and far — Connecticut and Australia, Pennsylvania and Norway — to paint the wonders of the new century. But even though the 50-odd artists whose works are on view in the magnificent new show at the Hudson River Museum were all looking at the same railyards and bridges and waterways, they were seeing very different things.

ELSIE DRIGGS  QUEENSBOROUGH BRIDGE   1927

(NOTE SPIRAL STAIRCASE LEADING OVER THE UPPER LEVEL FOR PEDESTRIANS, SINCE REMOVED)

LEON KROLL     QUEENSBOROUGH BRIDGE   1912

OSCAR BLUEMNER    HARLEM RIVER   1912

In “Industrial Sublime: Modernism and the Transformation of New York’s Rivers, 1900-1940,” viewers can share the excitement — maybe even the ecstasy — that these painters felt as they confronted both the urban maelstrom and the new ways of setting it down. Some, like Georgia O’Keeffe, gained wide celebrity; others became merely art-history footnotes. But all were seeking transcendence in the great, gritty machinery of the city, just as previous generations of painters had sought it in the rough grandeur of the American wilderness.

THEODORE EARL BUTLER   BROOKLYN BRIDGE    1900

EDWARD BRUCE     POWER   1933

DANIEL PUTNAM BRINLEY     1915
HUDSON RIVER VIEW  (SUGAR FACTORY AT YONKERS)

Noble, the youngest of the exhibition’s painters, was born in 1913, the year that the modernist innovations of the Armory Show turned America’s art world on its ear. Several pictures selected for “Industrial Sublime” by the curators, Kirsten M. Jensen and Bartholomew F. Bland, like Oscar Bluemner’s vivid 1912 watercolor “Harlem River,” were in the Armory Show. But many more clearly proclaim its impact. Refer your friends to The Times. They’ll enjoy our special rate of $1 a week.

Around 1915, Daniel Putnam Brinley depicted a manufacturing plant as a Fauvist riot of color and geometry in “Hudson River View (Sugar Factory at Yonkers).” Cubist influence can be discerned in the simple forms and flattened color of George Ault’s striking 1920s oil “From Brooklyn Heights,” rightly chosen for the cover of the show’s excellent catalog. John Marin has a different take on the New York skyline in the nervous energy of “Lower Manhattan From the River, No. 1,” a 1921 watercolor. And the soft hues and agitated brushwork of John Folinsbee’s 1917 “Queensborough Bridge” dissolve its snowy rooftops and distant ironwork into passages of near-abstract painting.T
Men and women who created the works in “Industrial Sublime” were painting contradictions — and sometimes expressing their own ambivalence about the gleaming skyscrapers and bustling harbors in their pictures. So at the very start of the 20th century, in “Cumulus Clouds, East River,” the pivotal Ashcan painter Robert Henri places the unsettling figure of a child in white amid looming black towers on the waterfront, then overwhelms both with a gorgeous, blazing sunset. And in “The Building of Tidewater,” John Noble, based in Staten Island, turns an oil refinery being constructed in late-1930s Bayonne, N.J., into a luridly compelling dreamscape of scarlet tubes and tanks.

ROBERT K. RYLAND   THE BRIDGE   1931

VIEW FROM THE 30TH FLOOR OF THE HOTEL SHELTON     GEORGIA  O’KEEFE  1928

AARON DOUGLAS   POWER PLANT IN HARLEM  1934

GLENN COLEMAN   THE DOCK

LOUIS LOZOWICK LOWER MANHATTAN 1932

RICHARD HAYLEY LEVER   HIGH BRIDGE OVER THE HARLEM RIVER   1913

Like so many of the figures in these paintings (and, for that matter, like those in canvases by the Hudson River artists), the workers are small and insignificant, dwarfed, even crushed, by their surroundings. In two of the show’s most dramatic snowscapes, Richard Hayley Lever’s imposing 1913 “High Bridge Over the Harlem River” and Martin Lewis’s luminous “Railroad Yards, Winter, Weehawken,” painted somewhat later, natural splendor vies for dominance with the engineering. But the people who built and used the structures the paintings celebrate have become invisible. That’s perhaps the point of Robert K. Ryland’s melancholy little oil “The Bridge Pier,” in which a man in a white shirt seems to slump beneath the weight of the city.

Painted during the Great Depression, it looks up at the dark, hulking forms of the Brooklyn Bridge and Manhattan’s Municipal Building and sees oppression. Just 17 years earlier, Jonas Lie had surveyed the same scene — streams of smoke from the river traffic, the gothic towers of the bridge, the Manhattan skyline across the way — and captured it all from above, in the jaunty, joyous “Path of Gold.” Agony and ecstasy, shimmery smoke and hard-edge steel, grim murk and eye-popping color — the early 20th-century city was all these things, and in “Industrial Sublime” we experience it anew.

INNA GARSOIAN  EAST SIDE DRIVE   1940

MARGUERITE OHMAN   VIEW OF QUEENSBOROUGH BRIDGE FROM CENTRAL PARK,
NEW YORK   1940

GLENN COLEMAN   QUEENSBORO BRIDGE, EAST RIVE  1910

The span, now named for former Mayor Edward I. Koch but still called the 59th Street Bridge by most who cross it, seems to have been a favorite subject — along with fresh snow — in the 40 years covered by the 70-plus works in the exhibition. Julian Alden Weir masks the bridge’s outline in a dark Whistlerian haze in 1910. Around the same time, Glenn Coleman crisply renders its red girders above a shockingly white paddle-wheeler, with shadowy spectators admiring both from the riverbank. And in 1912, Leon Kroll emphasizes the bridge’s monumental gray bulk, contrasting it with a dense plume of smoke rising from a tug and a cascade of powdery snow dumped onto a barge by workers who have shoveled it off the streets and sidewalks.

We will feature other images in the Thursday edition.

WEDNESDAY’S PHOTO OF THE DAY

What is this and where is it located
E-mail jbird134@aol.com
 Win a trinket from Kiosk

TUESDAY’S PHOTO OF THE DAY

PEDESTRIAN ELEVATOR TOWER AT 60 STREET AT THE QUEENSBORO BRIDGE

TODAY IS ISSUE # 75!! 

WOW

Thanks for your support and especially to Deborah  who gets every issue on-line at rihs.us

EDITORIAL
I know the popularity of East River and bridge art that are featured in  INDUSTRIAL SUBLIME. The artwork will continue in the Thursday edition.


Please send me your comments and stories about your New York experiences.  We are having ongoing discussions about egg-cremes or egg-creams with Matt Katz.

In the meantime check out our display window in RIvercross.  Eunice Chang has donated many of the wonderful POETRY IN MOTION posters that hung in NYC subway cars. 

JUDITH BERDY
jbird134@aol.com

A LETTER TO THE EDITOR

Just to add to the double feature and (ice-cream) “bonbons”, besides the two films there were newsreels and cartoons. The show began at noon and ended at around 5:00 p.m., depending on the length of the feature films. All for 25 cents admission! And yes, a big draw in the summer is that aside from the local supermarket, it was the only place around that was air-conditioned, in the 1950s. Everyone brought their lunch from home and ate it in the movie theater. The place would reek of salami and tuna sandwiches.

Susan Berk Seligson

Text by Judith Berdy
Thanks to Bobbie Slonevsky for her dedication to Blackwell’s Almanac and the RIHS
Thanks to Deborah Dorff for maintaining our website
Edited by Melanie Colter  and Deborah Dorff


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