Thursday, June 11, 2020 -INDUSTRIAL SUBLIME Part 2

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THURSDAY,  JUNE 11, 2020

The 76th Edition of From Our Archives

WASHINGTON SQUARE PARK, JUNE 9, 2020
BY RON CRAWFORD (C)

INDUSTRIAL SUBLIME, Part 2

Creating Industrial Sublime

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

PART 2 OF 2 PARTS

GEORGE AULT   FROM BROOKLYN HEIGHTS  C 1925-1928

GIFFORD BEAL
ON THE HUDSON AT NEWBURGH   1918

CARLTON THEODORE CHAPMAN
THE EAST RIVER, NYC   1904

GLENN COLEMAN EMPIRE STATE BUILDING 1930-1932

Coleman’s career was in ascendancy when he died, aged 48, of a rare illness in May, 1932. Originally from the Midwest, he came to New York to become an artist. After studying with Robert Henri, he began selling paintings of Manhattan scenes to important patrons like John D. Rockefeller and Edward W. Root, as well as to museums including the Brooklyn Museum, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Musée Luxembourg, Paris and the Detroit Art Institute.

However he was often obliged to supplement his income with routine jobs – he served as an usher at Carnegie Hall, and was a police patrol officer in the community of Long Beach, L.I., where he lived modestly with his wife. He became known for depicting Manhattan skyscrapers in a dramatic Modernist style. The present canvas, one of the largest, represents what was at the time the newest and tallest addition to the skyline, the Empire State Building. The dirigible alludes to the short-lived and rather fantastic plan that would have airships moored to the building’s mast and have passengers disembark – by ladders! – to the observation deck, whence they could proceed, by elevators, to the street.

Coleman’s Estate was handled by his uncle, who donated most of his studio to the Whitney Museum of American Art; this museum held a memorial exhibition in October 1932, coincident with their publication of a monograph, part of a series on American artists. This work was originally donated by the Estate to the Long Beach Public Library, then the only public institution in the community.

COLIN CAMPBELL COOPER     HUDSON RIVER WATERFRONT, NYC   1913-1921

RALSTON CRAWFORD   WHITESTONE BRIDGE  1939-1940

AARON DOUGLAS   TRIBOROUGH BRIDGE  1936

JOHN FOLINSBEE         QUEENSBOROUGH BRIDGE              1915

John Folinsbee was a fine artist being motivated by the beauty of form, color, line and texture and all that was good from the great tradition of the past. Without bothering to make sketches he attacks his canvas with lusty strokes and with astonishing speed the face and form seem to come to life. With a full brush and a broad stroke, the magic texture grew under his hand.

REGINALD MARSH TUGBOAT AT DOCKSIDE 1932

Marsh liked to venture out to Coney Island to paint, especially in the summer time. There he began to paint massed beached bodies.
Marsh emphasizes the bold muscles and build of his characters, which relate to the heroic scale of the older European paintings. Marsh said “I like to go to Coney Island because of the sea, the open air, and the crowds—crowds of people in all directions, in all positions, without clothing, moving—like the great compositions of Michelangelo and Rubens.”

Marsh was also drawn to the ports of New York. In the 1930s, the harbors were extremely busy with people and commerce due to the country’s necessity for economic recovery. The Great Depression brought about a decline in raw materials and therefore the demand for those materials grew dramatically, resulting in bustling harbors in big cities such as New York. Marsh would sketch the seaports, focusing on the tugboats coming in and out of the harbor, and capturing the details of the boats such as the masts, the bells, the sirens, and the deck chairs.

REGINALD MARSH  NEW YORK SKYLINE  1937   WATERCOLOR

JOHN NOBLE   THE BUILDING OF TIDEWATER      1937

John A. Noble John A. Noble (1913-1983)He spent his early years in the studios of his father and his father’s contemporaries, innovative artists and writers of the early part of this century. He moved with his family to this country in 1919, a year which had great significance to him and foreshadowed his life’s work. “It was the greatest wooden ship launching year in the history of the world,” he wrote. “About 1929 I started my crude drawings and paintings,” the artist recalled. “In the wintertime, while still going to school, I was a permanent fixture on the old McCarren line tugs, which had the monopoly on the schooner towing in New York Harbor.

This kept them constantly before my eyes. In the summertime, I would go to sea.” A graduate of the Friends Seminary in New York City, Noble returned to France in 1931, where he studied for one year at the University of Grenoble. There he met his wife and lifetime companion, “the lovely, green-eyed” Susan Ames. When he returned to New York, he studied for one year at the National Academy of Design. From 1928 until 1945, Noble worked as a seaman on schooners and in marine salvage. In 1928, while on a schooner that was towing out down the Kill van Kull, the waterway that separates Staten Island from New Jersey, he saw the old Port Johnston coal docks for the first time. It was a sight, he later asserted, which affected him for life. Port Johnston was “the largest graveyard of wooden sailing vessels in the world.”

Filled with new but obsolete ships, the great coalport had become a great boneyard. In 1941, Noble began to build his floating studio there, out of parts of vessels he salvaged and from 1946 on, he worked as a full-time artist, setting off from his studio in a rowboat to explore the Harbor. These explorations resulted in a unique and exacting record of Harbor history in which its rarely documented characters, industries, and vessels are faithfully recorded.

Although he was raised in artistic circles and quickly gained recognition for his work, Noble always remained intimate with the people of the Harbor. “I’m with factory people, industrial people, the immigrants, the sons of immigrants,” he asserted. “It gives life to it.” Late in his life, Noble recalled his first compelling views of New York Harbor. “I was crossing the 134th Street Bridge on the Harlem River on a spring day in 1928, and I was so shocked–it changed my life. I was frozen on that bridge, because both east and west of the bridge were sailing vessels. And I thought sailing vessels, you know, were gone… There it was, and I couldn’t eat, or anything; I was so excited.” By the time of his death in the spring of 1983, shortly after the passing of his beloved Susan, the sailing vessels he loved were all gone, and the maritime industry in the Harbor had diminished significantly. But Noble’s inexorable interest in the sea had not diminished. Although he felt the loss of many kinds of vessels, he was “just as interested in drawing the building of a great modern tanker, the working of a modern dredge, as…in the shifting of topsails.” In fact, he wrote, “Anywhere men work or build on the water is of interest to me…My life’s work is to make a rounded picture of American maritime endeavor of modern times.”

TWO PAINTINGS BY GEORGIA  O’KEEFE IN 1928 FROM SHELTON HOTEL 

CHARLES ROSEN THE ROUNDHOUSE, KINGSTON, NEW YORK 1927

Charles Rosen (28 April 1878 – 21 June 1950) was an American painter who lived for many years in Woodstock, New York. In the 1910s he was acclaimed for his Impressionist winter landscapes. He became dissatisfied with this style and around 1920 he changed to a radically different cubist-realist style. He became recognized as one of the leaders of the Woodstock artists colony.

THURSDAY IMAGE OF THE DAY

WHAT IS THIS OBJECT?
SEND ANSWER TO JUDITH BERDY 
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WEDNESDAY  PHOTO OF THE DAY

ENTRANCE TO NYPL ROOSEVELT ISLAND BRANCH
The winner is Arlene Bessenoff

FROM OUR READERS

We have been receiving some great photos and comments. Enjoy some of them below.

JUDITH BERDY

LETTER TO THE EDITOR

From Matthew Katz
Responding to the June 8 edition I must take exception to the description of an egg cream (my neighborhood in Brooklyn did not recognize the spelling “creme” as anything this side of the Atlantic) as including “chocolate syrup.” If it doesn’t include Fox’s U-Bet chocolate syrup it is bogus. One must maintain one’s standards! BTW, my wife, who grew up in Denver, Colorado, was introduced to a “Grandma’s Special” by her Brooklyn-born nanna. This was ginger-ale and milk; a pitiful substitute for those benighted refugees living west of the Mississippi and yearning for some taste of the real thing. When she moved to New York and tasted the ambrosia of the real thing she recognized the connection.

From the 1918 flu pandemic     WEAR A MASK OR GO TO JAIL

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


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