Tuesday, June 16, 2020 – 80th Issue

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TONIGHT AT 8 P.M. ON CHANNEL 13

AMERICAN MASTERS Mae West: Dirty Blonde Over a career spanning eight decades, the subversive Mae West broke boundaries and possessed creative and economic powers unheard of for a female entertainer in the 1930s. Tuesday, June 16 at 8p

TUESDAY

JUNE 16, 2020

RIHS’s 80th Issue of

Included in this Issue:

MANHATTAN

WASHINGTON SQUARE

”IMAGES FROM HOMAGE TO THE SQUARE
PICTURING WASHINGTON SQUARE 1890-1965″

BRUCE WEBER  (C)

FERNAND LUNGREN    A WINTER WEDDING-WASHINGTON SQUARE  1897

Born in Hagerstown, Maryland, of Swedish descent, on November 13, 1857, Fernand Lungren was raised in Toledo, Ohio. He showed an early talent for drawing but his father induced him to pursue a professional career and in 1874 entered the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, to study mining engineering.

However, after meeting the painter Kenyon Cox (1856-1919), he was determined to follow a career as a visual artist.[1] At the age of 19, and following a dispute with his father, Lungren was finally permitted to enroll at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in Philadelphia, where he studied under Thomas Eakins (1844-1916) and Robert Frederick Blum (1857–1903). He also studied briefly in Cincinnati and in 1882, he furthered his studies in Paris at the Académie Julian, but only remained there for brief period, abandoning formal study for direct observation of Parisian street life. It was during this period that he painted In The Cafe Illustrator in New York City Illustration from St. Nicholas, (serial) (1873)

In 1877, now twenty years old, and upon completion of his studies, Fernand Lungren moved to New York City. There he rented a studio with the prominent painter and pastellist Robert Frederick Blum. In New York City, he found work as an illustrator for Scribner’s Monthly (renamed Century in 1881) during the period known as ‘the Golden Age of American illustration.’ His first illustration appeared in 1879 and he continued to contribute to Scribner’s Monthly until 1903. He was also an illustrator for the children’s magazine, Saint Nicholas from 1879 to 1904 and later for Harper’s, McClure’s and The Outlook. His illustration work in these periodicals focussed on portraits, landscapes and social scenes, which gave him some notoriety as the illustrator of New York street scenes.[4] In 1878, he helped found The Tile Club, an association of young artists who gathered for the purpose of painting on decorative tiles. Among the members of the club were William Merritt Chase, J. Carroll Beckwith, John Twachtman, Winslow Homer, J. Alden Weir, and Robert Frederick Blum.

PAUL CORNMOYER    WASHINGTON SQUARE   1900

Paul Cornoyer (1864–1923) was an American painter, currently best known for his popularly reproduced painting in an Impressionist and sometimes pointillist style. Born in St. Louis, Missouri, Cornoyer began painting in Barbizon style and first exhibited in 1887. In 1909, he was elected into the National Academy of Design as an Associate Academician. He taught at Mechanics Institute of New York and in 1917, he moved to Massachusetts, where he continued to teach and paint.

Jessie Tarbox Beals
WASHINGTON SQUARE NORTH, 1920
PHOTOGRAPH

was an American photographer, the first published female photojournalist in the United States and the first female night photographer. She is best known for her freelance news photographs, particularly of the 1904 St. Louis World’s Fair, and portraits of places such as Bohemian Greenwich Village. Her trademarks were her self-described “ability to hustle” and her tenacity in overcoming gender barriers in her profession.

In 1893 Beals took a new teaching position in Greenfield, Massachusetts and visited the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago. At the Exposition, Beals’ interest in traveling and photography was sparked having met Frances Benjamin Johnston and Gertrude Käsebier. In 1897, Beals married Alfred Tennyson Beals, an Amherst graduate and factory machinist. In 1899, Beals received her first professional assignment when she was asked by The Boston Post to photograph the Massachusetts state prison.

Beals taught Alfred the basics of photography and the couple set out to work as itinerant photographers in 1900, with Alfred as Beals’s darkroom assistant. That year, Beals also received her first credit line for her photographs in a publication, the Windham County Reformer.

By 1901, the Beals’ funds were depleted and they resettled in Buffalo, New York. Later that year, Beals was hired as a staff photographer by the Buffalo Inquirer and The Buffalo Courier, after impressing the editor with a photograph of ducks waddling in a row entitled “On to Albany.”This position made her the first female photojournalist and was well-regarded by the papers and citizens of Buffalo and worked at the publications until 1904 when she left to take photos of the World’s Fair.[

Photojournalism was physically demanding, often risky work, but Beals could be seen carrying out assignments in her ankle-length dresses and large hats, with her 8-by-10-inch glass plate camera and 50 pounds of equipment in tow.

During one assignment for the lurid murder trial of Edwin L. Burdick in Buffalo, Beals broke a rule that forbade photographs of the trial by climbing a tall bookcase to a window to snap a picture of the courtroom before she was detected.In 1904, Beals was sent to the opening of the Louisiana Purchase Exposition in St. Louis, Missouri. There, Beals persuaded officials to give her a late press permit for the pre-exposition, climbed ladders and jumped into a hot air balloon just to get photographs that interested her.

She was greatly interested in the Indigenous peoples which resulted in capturing many spontaneous images that didn’t necessarily fit into the predominate narrative of racial and developmental progress. She had a different style than most news photographers of the day, focusing on series of pictures that would later be used to write stories, rather than vice versa. Beals’s display of her signature “hustle” earned her the position of official Fair photographer for the New York Herald, Leslie’s Weekly and the Tribune, as well as the Fair’s publicity department, producing over 3,500 photographs and 45,000 prints of the event.

In addition to photographing the various exhibits at the Fair, Beals also captured a candid photograph of President Theodore Roosevelt. This initial encounter earned her a special pass to photograph Roosevelt and the Rough Riders at their reunion in San Antonio, Texas in 1905. A studio on Sixth Avenue In 1905 Beals opened her own studio on Sixth Avenue in New York City. Beals continued to take on a variety of photograph assignments, ranging from shots of auto races and portraits of society figures, to her well-known photographs of Bohemian Greenwich Village and the New York slums Over the years Beals also photographed several presidents and celebrities, including Presidents Coolidge, Hoover and Taft; Mark Twain; Edna St. Vincent Millay; and Emily Post.While Beals’ career flourished, her marriage became troubled.

In 1911, Beals gave birth to a daughter, Nanette Tarbox Beals, most likely from another relationship. Beals finally left her husband in 1917. A studio and a gallery in Greenwich Village She moved to Greenwich Village and opened a new photography studio and gallery in 1920. For a few years, Beals juggled working and caring for Nanette, who also suffered from rheumatoid arthritis and was frequently hospitalized, eventually deciding to send Nanette to camps and private boarding schools throughout the year. Nanette would later go on to live semi-permanently with one of Beals’ old friends.

ERNEST   LAWSON   WASHINGTON SQUARE   1909-1911

GLENN O. COLEMAN    THE ARCH   1927 WHITNEY MUSEUM

Glenn Coleman’s life and art demonstrate the difficulties that often seem to adhere to the artist’s calling. He was born in Springfield, Ohio in 1887, living until only the age of 45, dying on Long Island, New York in 1932 after a period of financial struggle and changing art tastes that effected both his style and subject matter, as well as the response to his art.

Coleman had a talent for drawing, which earned him a position as an apprentice artist for an Indianapolis newspaper while still a teenager. He went to New York City in 1905, where his life became a struggle to find time to paint while trying to survive by working at any job he could find, and studying for a short time with Ash Can artists Everett Shinn and Robert Henri.

Glenn Coleman identified with the poor because he was one of them. Because of this struggle his and theirs he became interested in socialism, selling drawings to the socialist magazine, “The Masses”. His painting were deeply felt reflections of everyday life in the off-beat nooks and crannies of Greenwich Village, Chinatown and the river. Here life was lived in a nearly small town setting, while uptown skyscrapers dwarfed humanity, and all around a great urban metropolis sprawled Strangely, it was the towering architecture of this metropolis, at the expense of his personal depictions of simple, struggling humanity that, in the mid-1920s, began to evolve into the dominant direction of his art. Cubism intruded itself into Coleman’s style, as it had so many other artists, but it was startling to see a move from a manifestation of Ash Can realism to a form of stylized abstraction.

As this transition was taking place, the artist apparently tried to reach back to his earliest artistic concerns, making realistic lithographs from his youthful drawings of people in the city that, unfortunately, failed to attract any interest in the surging, rapidly-changing, hurly-burly of modernist styles. Moving to Long Island in the year of his death, Coleman appeared to want to re-ground himself in nature, painting the landscape there, but he did not live long enough to accomplish this. Coleman was a member of the New Society of Artists, the Society of Independent Artists and the Whitney Studio Club. His work is in the Newark Museum, New Jersey, and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York City. Source: Michael David Zellman, 300 Years of American Art Biography from the Archives of AskART

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FRANK ARTHUR NANKIVELL     ITALIAN PARA

DE IN WASHINGTON SQUARE   1915-1930

Nankivell studied art at Wesley College, Melbourne. He later travelled to Japan and earned a living as a cartoonist in Tokyo where he made the acquaintance of Rakuten Kitazawa, who later became father of the Japanese comic art now known as manga. Nankivell left Japan in 1894 to study art in San Francisco. He left for New York in 1896 where he worked on magazines as a popular and influential cartoonist devoting his work mainly to social subjects and to state and federal political issues. Nankivell remained in New York until 1913. Nankivell later became a member of the New York Circumnavigators Club, which was open only to those who had circumnavigated the globe longitudinally, by land and/or sea. Other members included Ernest Hemingway and Harry Houdini

THOMAS HART BENTON
     THE ARTISTS SHOW, WASHINGTON SQUARE PARK  1946

Thomas Hart Benton (April 15, 1889 – January 19, 1975) was an American painter and muralist. Along with Grant Wood and John Steuart Curry, he was at the forefront of the Regionalist art movement. The fluid, sculpted figures in his paintings showed everyday people in scenes of life in the United States. His work is strongly associated with the Midwestern United States, the region in which he was born and which he called home for most of his life. He also studied in Paris, lived in New York City for more than 20 years and painted scores of works there, summered for 50 years on Martha’s Vineyard off the New England coast, and also painted scenes of the American South and West.

ALFRED S. MIRA     WASHINGTON SQUARE   1943

FOR A BIOGRAPHY OF THIS ARTIST SEE:
https://ephemeralnewyork.wordpress.com/2015/09/28/the-greenwich-village-vision-of-artist-alfred-mira/

LUIGI LUCIONI   SNOW AT WASHINGTON SQUARE   1935

Luigi Lucioni (born Giuseppe Luigi Carlo Benevenuto Lucioni November 4, 1900 – July 22, 1988) was an Italian American painter known for his still lifes, landscapes, and portraits.

MYSTERY PHOTO OF THE DAY

WHAT AND WHERE IS THIS?
Send your submission to JBIRD134@AOL.COM
Win a trinket from the RIHS Visitor Center Kiosk

MONDAY’S PHOTO OF THE DAY

The correct answer is a portion of the Albert Swinden mural from Goldwater Hospital that is now at Tata Innovation Center at Cornell Tech.

EDITORIAL

Washington Square has always been a meeting place, a playground. a place to play your guitar or a chess game. It has been enhanced by historic restorations, new designs and plantings.  The arch glows white and at the foot of Fifth Avenue the “Village” begins.  Recently the site of many BLM demonstrations it holds itself up well and come by and enjoy the park and surrounding neighborhood.

Judith Berdy

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

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
FUNDING PROVIDED BY:
ROOSEVELT ISLAND OPERATING CORPORATION THRU PUBLIC PURPOSE FUNDING

CITY COUNCIL MEMBER BEN KALLOS DISCRETIONARY FUNDS THRU DYCD

IMAGES FROM THE COLLECTION OF THE MUSEUM OF THE CITY OF NEW YORK (C)
MATERIAL COPYRIGHT WIKIPEDIA, GOOGLE IMAGES, RIHS ARCHIVES AND MAY NOT BE REPRODUCED WITHOUT PERMISSION (C)
HOMAGE TO THE SQUARE (C) BRUCE WEBER

Copyright © 2020 Roosevelt Island Historical Society, All rights reserved.Our mailing address is:
rooseveltislandhistory@gmail.com