from WIKIPEDIA The Art Students League of New York is an art school located on West 57th Street in Manhattan, New York City, New York. The League has historically been known for its broad appeal to both amateurs and professional artists. Although artists may study full-time, there have never been any degree programs or grades, and this informal attitude pervades the culture of the school.
From the 19th century to the present, the League has counted among its attendees and instructors many historically important artists, and contributed to numerous influential schools and movements in the art world. The League also maintains a significant permanent collection of student and faculty work, and publishes an online journal of writing on art-related topics, called LINEA.
The journal’s name refers to the school’s motto Nulla Dies Sine Linea or “No Day Without a Line”, traditionally attributed to the Greek painter Apelles by the historian Pliny the Elder, who recorded that Apelles would not let a day pass without at least drawing a line to practice his art.[
History
Founded in 1875, the League’s creation came about in response to both an anticipated gap in the program of the National Academy of Design’s program of classes for that year, and to longer-term desires for more variety and flexibility in education for artists. The breakaway group of students included many women, and was originally housed in rented rooms at 16th Street and Fifth Avenue. When the Academy resumed a more typical—but liberalized—program in 1877, there was some feeling that the League had served its purpose, but its students voted to continue its program, and it was incorporated the following year. Influential board members from this formative period included painter Thomas Eakins and sculptor Augustus Saint-Gaudens.
Membership continued to increase, forcing the League to relocate to increasingly larger spaces. The League participated in the founding of the American Fine Arts Society (AFAS) in 1889, together with the Society of American Artists and the Architectural League, among others. The American Fine Arts Building at 215 West 57th Street, constructed as their joint headquarters, has continued to house the League since 1892[
Designed in the French Renaissance style by one of the founders of the AFAS, architect Henry Hardenbergh (in collaboration with W.C. Hunting & J.C. Jacobsen), the building is a designated New York City Landmark and is listed on the National Register of Historic Places.
In the late 1890s and early 1900s an increasing number of women artists came to study and work at the League many of them taking on key roles. Among them were Wilhelmina Weber Furlong and her husband Thomas Furlong. The avant-garde couple served the league in executive and administrative roles and as student members throughout the American modernism movement Alice Van Vechten Brown, who would later develop some of the first art programs in American higher education, also studied with the league until prolonged family illness sent her home.
The painter Edith Dimock, a student from 1895 to 1899, described her classes at the Art Students League: In a room innocent of ventilation, the job was to draw Venus (just the head) and her colleagues. We were not allowed to hitch bodies to the heads——yet. The dead white plaster of Paris was a perfect inducer of eye-strain, and was called “The Antique.” One was supposed to work from “The Antique” for two years. The advantage of “The Antique” was that all these gods and athletes were such excellent models: there never was the twitch of an iron-bound muscle. Venus never batted her hard-boiled egg eye, and the Discus-thrower never wearied. They were also cheap models and did not have to be paid union rates.
In his official biography, My Adventures as an Illustrator, Norman Rockwell recounts his time studying at the school as a young man, providing insight into its operation in the early 1900s. The League’s popularity persisted into the 1920s and 1930s under the hand of instructors like painter Thomas Hart Benton, who counted among his students there the young Jackson Pollock and other avant-garde artists who would rise to prominence in the 1940s.
In the years after World War II, the G.I. Bill played an important role in the continuing history of the League by enabling returning veterans to attend classes. The League continued to be a formative influence on innovative artists, being an early stop in the careers of Abstract expressionists, Pop Artists and scores of others including Lee Bontecou, Helen Frankenthaler, Al Held, Eva Hesse, Roy Lichtenstein, Donald Judd, Knox Martin, Robert Rauschenberg, James Rosenquist, Cy Twombly and many others vitally active in the art world.
In 1968, Lisa M. Specht was elected first female president of “The League”. The League’s unique importance in the larger art world dwindled somewhat during the 1960s, partially because of higher academia’s emergence as an important presence in contemporary art education, and partially due to a shift in the art world towards minimalism, photography, conceptual art, and a more impersonal and indirect approach to art making.
As of 2010, the League remains an important part of New York City art life. The League continues to attract a wide variety of young artists; and the focus on art made by hand, both figurative and abstract, remains strong; its continued significance has largely been in the continuation of its original mission – to give access to art classes and studio access to all comers, regardless of their means or technical background
Other facilities From 1906 until 1922, and again after the end of World War II from 1947 until 1979, the League operated a summer school of painting at Woodstock, New York. In 1995, the League’s facilities expanded to include the Vytlacil campus in Sparkill, New York, named after and based upon a gift of the property and studio of former instructor Vaclav Vytlacil.
The utilitarian studios at the League 6sgft (C)
INSTUCTORS
Notable instructors and lecturers
Since its inception, the Art Students League has employed notable professional artists as instructors and lecturers. Most engagements have been for a year or two, and some, like those of sculptor George Grey Barnard, were quite brief. Others have taught for decades, notably: Frank DuMond and George Bridgman, who taught anatomy for artists and life drawing classes for some 45 years, reportedly to 70,000 students. Bridgman’s successor was Robert Beverly Hale. Other longtime instructors included the painters Frank Mason (DuMond’s successor, over 50 years), Kenneth Hayes Miller (40 years) from 1911 until 1951, sculptor Nathaniel Kaz (50 years), Peter Golfinopoulos (over 40 years), Knox Martin (over 45 years), Martha Bloom (30 years) and the sculptors William Zorach (30 years), and Jose De Creeft, Will Barnet (50 years) from the 1930s to the 1990s, and Bruce Dorfman (over 50 years). Other well-known artists who have served as instructors include: Lawrence Alloway, Charles Alston, Will Barnet, Robert Beauchamp, George Bellows, Thomas Hart Benton, Isabel Bishop, Arnold Blanch, Louis Bouche, Robert Brackman, George Bridgman, Alexander Stirling Calder, Naomi Andrée Campbell, Robert Cenedella, [14]Jean Charlot, William Merritt Chase, Dionisio Cimarelli, Timothy J. Clark, Kenyon Cox, Jose De Creeft, John Steuart Curry, Stuart Davis, Edwin Dickinson, Sidney Dickinson, Frederick Dielman, Harvey Dinnerstein, Arthur Wesley Dow, Frank DuMond, Frank Duveneck, Thomas Eakins, Daniel Chester French, Dagmar Freuchen, Wilhelmina Weber Furlong, Michael Goldberg, Stephen Greene, George Grosz, Molly Guion,[15] Lena Gurr, Philip Guston, Robert Beverly Hale, Lovell Birge Harrison, Ernest Haskell, Childe Hassam, Robert Henri, Eva Hesse, Charles Hinman, Hans Hofmann, Harry Holtzman, Jamal Igle, Burt Johnson, Wolf Kahn, Morris Kantor, Rockwell Kent, Walt Kuhn, Yasuo Kuniyoshi, Gabriel Laderman, Ronnie Landfield, Jacob Lawrence, Hayley Lever, Martin Lewis, George Luks, Paul Manship, Reginald Marsh, Fletcher Martin, Knox Martin, Jan Matulka, Mary Beth Mckenzie, William Charles McNulty, Willard Metcalf, Kenneth Hayes Miller, F. Luis Mora, Robert Neffson, Kimon Nicolaïdes, Maxfield Parrish, Jules Pascin, Joseph Pennell, Richard C. Pionk, Larry Poons, Richard Pousette-Dart, Abraham Rattner, Peter Reginato, Frank J. Reilly, Henry Reuterdahl, Boardman Robinson, Augustus Saint-Gaudens, Kikuo Saito, Nelson Shanks, William Scharf, Susan Louise Shatter, Walter Shirlaw, John Sloan, Hughie Lee-Smith, Isaac Soyer, Raphael Soyer, Theodoros Stamos, Anita Steckel, Harry Sternberg, Augustus Vincent Tack, George Tooker, John Henry Twachtman, Vaclav Vytlacil, Max Weber, J. Alden Weir, Jerry Weiss, and William Zorach.
NOTABLE ALUMNI
Notable alumni
Art Students League of New York alumni The school’s list of notable alumni includes: Pacita Abad, Edwin Tappan Adney, Karin von Aroldingen, Ai Weiwei, Gladys Aller, William Anthony, Nela Arias-Misson, David Attie, Milton Avery, Elizabeth Gowdy Baker, Thomas R. Ball (a United States Congressman), Hugo Ballin, Will Barnet, Nancy Hemenway Barton, Saul Bass, C. C. Beall, Romare Bearden, Tony Bennett, Brother Thomas Bezanson, Thomas Hart Benton, Isabel Bishop, Dorothy Block, Leonard Bocour, Harriet Bogart, Abraham Bogdanove, Lee Bontecou, Henry Botkin, Louise Bourgeois, Harry Bowden, Stanley Boxer, Louise Brann, D. Putnam Brinley, James Brooks, Carmen L. Browne, Jennie Augusta Brownscombe, Edith Bry, Dennis Miller Bunker, Jacob Burck, Feliza Bursztyn, Theodore Earl Butler, Paul Cadmus, Alexander Calder, Chris Campbell, John F. Carlson, Kathrin Cawein, Paul Chalfin, Ching Ho Cheng, Minna Citron, Margaret Covey Chisholm, Kate Freeman Clark, Henry Ives Cobb, Jr., Claudette Colbert, Willie Cole, John Connell, Allyn Cox, Ellis Credle, Richard V. Culter, Mel Cummin, Frederick Stuart Church, Joan Danziger, Andrew Dasburg, Charles C. Dawson, Adolf Dehn, Dorothy Dehner, Sidney Dickinson, Burgoyne Diller, Ellen Eagle, Marjorie Eaton, Sir Jacob Epstein, Marisol Escobar, Joe Eula, Philip Evergood, Peter Falk, Ernest Fiene, Irving Fierstein, Louis Finkelstein, Ethel Fisher, Wilhelmina Weber Furlong, Helen Frankenthaler, Frederick Carl Frieseke, Wanda Gág, Dan Gheno, Charles Dana Gibson, William Glackens, Elias Goldberg, Michael Goldberg, Shirley Goldfarb, Peter Golfinopoulos, Adolph Gottlieb, Blanche Grambs, John D. Graham, Enrique Grau, Nancy Graves, Clement Greenberg, Stephen Greene, Red Grooms, Chaim Gross, Lena Gurr, Bessie Pease Gutmann, Minna Harkavy, Marsden Hartley, Julius Hatofsky, Ethel Hays, Gus Heinze, Al Held, Carmen Herrera, Eva Hesse, Al Hirschfeld, Itshak Holtz, Lorenzo Homar, Winslow Homer, Thomas Hoving, Paul Jenkins, Alice Sargent Johnson, Burt Johnson, Donald Judd, Matsumi Kanemitsu, Torleif S. Knaphus, Belle Kogan, Lee Krasner, Ronnie Landfield, Adelaide Lawson, Arthur Lee, Lucy L’Engle, Alfred Leslie, Roy Lichtenstein, Tom Loepp, Michael Loew, John Marin, Reginald Marsh, Knox Martin, Donald Martiny, Mercedes Matter, Louisa Matthiasdottir, Peter Max, John Alan Maxwell, Eleanore Mikus, Emil Milan, Lee Miller, F. Luis Mora, Walter Tandy Murch, Reuben Nakian, Louise Nevelson, Barnett Newman, Isamu Noguchi, Sassona Norton, Georgia O’Keeffe, Roselle Osk, Lyn Ott, Tom Otterness, Betty Waldo Parish, Clara Weaver Parrish, Betty Parsons, Phillip Pavia,[18] Roger Tory Peterson, Bert Geer Phillips, I. Rice Pereira, [19]Alain J. Picard, Jackson Pollock, Fairfield Porter, Edith Mitchill Prellwitz, Henry Prellwitz, Robert Rauschenberg, Man Ray, Charles M. Relyea, Frederic Remington, Priscilla Roberts, Norman Rockwell, Louise Emerson Ronnebeck, Jacques Rosas, Herman Rose, Leonard Rosenfeld, James Rosenquist, Sanford Ross, Mark Rothko, Glen Rounds, Luis Alvarez Roure, Morgan Russell, Abbey Ryan,[20] Sam Savitt, Louis Schanker, Mary Schepisi, Katherine Schmidt, Emily Maria Scott, Ethel Schwabacher, Joan Semmel, Maurice Sendak, Ben Shahn, Nelson Shanks, Nat Mayer Shapiro, Henrietta Shore, Jessamine Shumate, David Smith, Tony Smith, Vincent D. Smith Robert Smithson, Louise Hammond Willis Snead, Armstrong Sperry, Otto Stark, William Starkweather, Frank Stella, Joseph Stella, Inga Stephens Pratt Clark, Harry Sternberg, Clyfford Still, Soichi Sunami, Katharine Lamb Tait, Patty Prather Thum, George Tooker, Kim Tschang-yeul, Wen-Ying Tsai, Luce Turnier, Cy Twombly, Jack Tworkov, Edward Charles Volkert, Alonzo C. Webb, Davyd Whaley, Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney, Adolph Alexander Weinman, J. Alden Weir, Jerry Weiss, Stow Wengenroth, Pennerton West, Anita Willets-Burnham, Ellen Axson Wilson, Gahan Wilson, Alice Morgan Wright, Russel Wright, Art Young, Philip Zuchman, and Iván Zulueta.[21][22][23]
NOTABLE ALUMNUS
MILTON AVERY
Milton Avery, Self-Portrait, 1937, drypoint on paper, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Museum purchase, 1971.7
Milton Avery, Nude with Guitar, 1947, oil on canvas, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Gift of Louis and Annette Kaufman, 1977.43.1
Milton Avery was often dismissed as a naïve painter because he did not seem as sophisticated as the elite abstract expressionists who took the stage after World War II. Avery borrowed this figure’s pose from Picasso, and, in fact, Nude with Guitar reflects Avery’s knowledge of modern literature as well as painting. He was fond of Wallace Stevens’s 1937 poem “The Man with the Blue Guitar,” based on Picasso’s famous Blue Period image. The poem praised the power of art to transform everyday moments into transcendent experiences, and the guitar became Avery’s personal symbol of this power, appearing in many of his canvases (Hobbs, Milton Avery, 1990).
“I am not seeking pure abstraction; rather the purity and essence of the idea expressed in its simplest form.” The artist, quoted in Hobbs, Milton Avery, 1990
Milton Avery, Man Fishing, ca. 1938, oil on fiberboard, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Gift of Patricia and Phillip Frost, 1986.92.2
Milton Avery, Sally Avery with Still Life, 1926, oil on cotton, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Gift of Louis and Annette Kaufman, 1977.43.2
BIOGRAPHY
The son of a tanner, Avery began working at a local factory at the age of 16 and supported himself for decades with a succession of blue-collar jobs. The death of his brother-in-law in 1915 left Avery, as the sole remaining adult male in his household, responsible for the support of nine female relatives. His interest in art led him to attend classes at the Connecticut League of Art Students in Hartford, and over a period of years, he painted in obscurity while receiving a conservative art education.] In 1917, he began working night jobs in order to paint in the daytime.
In 1924, he met Sally Michel, a young art student, and in 1926, they married. Her income as an illustrator enabled him to devote himself more fully to painting. The two had a daughter, March Avery, in 1932. For several years in the late 1920s through the late 1930s, Avery practiced painting and drawing at the Art Students League of New York. Roy Neuberger saw his work and thought he deserved recognition. Determined to get the world to know and respect Avery’s work, Neuberger bought over 100 of his paintings, starting with Gaspé Landscape, and lent or donated them to museums all over the world. With Avery’s work of rotating through high-profile museums, he came to be a highly respected and successful painter.[citation needed]
In the 1930s, he was befriended by Adolph Gottlieb and Mark Rothko among many other artists living in New York City in the 1930s–40s.[3] Avery’s use of glowing color and simplified forms was an influence on the younger artists.[1]
The Phillips Collection in Washington, D.C., was the first museum to purchase one of Avery’s paintings in 1929; that museum also gave him his first solo museum exhibition in 1944. He was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1963.
Avery had a serious heart attack in 1949. During his convalescence he concentrated on printmaking. When he resumed painting, his work showed a new subtlety in the handling of paint, and a tendency toward slightly more muted tones.
Milton Avery died at Montefiore Hospital in the Bronx, New York, om January 3, 1965 following a long illness,[6] and is buried in the Artist’s Cemetery in Woodstock, Ulster County, New York. After his passing his widow, Sally Avery, donated his personal papers to the Archives of American Art, a research center of the Smithsonian Institution.[citati
BLACKWELL’S ISLAND PENITENTIARY NOT GUESSED BY ANYONE
CLARIFICATION WE ARE HAPPY TO GIVE WINNERS OF OUR DAILY PHOTO IDENTIFICATION A TRINKET FROM THE VISITOR CENTER. ONLY THE PERSON IDENTIFYING THE PHOTO FIRST WILL GET A PRIZE. WE HAVE A SPECIAL GROUP OF ITEMS TO CHOOSE FROM. WE CANNOT GIVE AWAY ALL OUR ITEMS,.PLEASE UNDERSTAND THAT IN THESE DIFFICULT TIMES, WE MUST LIMIT GIVE-AWAYS. THANK YOU
It was easy to choose an artist that has studied at the Art Student’s League. Try to find an artist who has not, which is more difficult.
Judith Berdy
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 Roosevelt Island Historical Society
WIKIPEDIA (C)
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William Charles Palmer was born in 1906, in Des Moines, Iowa. He studied at the Art Students League under Boardman Robinson, Thomas Hart Benton, and Kenneth Hayes Miller, and studied fresco painting at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts, Fontainebleau, France. During the depression he was taken on at 24 dollars a week to paint murals funded by the Public Works of Art Project.
He was a member of the American Society of Painters, Sculptors and Gravers, and the Audubon Society. He was also a vice-president of the National Society of Mural Painters. He was director emeritus of the Munson-Williams-Proctor Institute School of Art in Utica, New York.[3]
Artist William Palmer working on large drawing for History of Medicine murals for Queens General Hospital in his studio. (Photo by Rex Hardy Jr./The LIFE Picture Collection via Getty Images)
Archives of American Art – William C. Palmer
The final version of the mural.
DESCRIPTION
As of 2009, this 1938 WPA mural by William Palmer entitled “The Development of Medicine” is located in the Elmhurst Hospital Center in Queens. It may have originally been installed in the Queens General Hospital (now the Queens Hospital Center).
“It was stated in a recent book on the WPA – that the panel Controlled Medicine was in effect a plea for and propaganda for socialized medicine. This statement is without any basis of fact, and the author never contacted me for my analysis panel. To put the record straight – the mural Development of Medicine was painted to show the ignorance, superstition and fear of “uncontrolled medicine” – the great historical contributions and discoveries which lead up to the scientific and enlightened medicine and hospital care of the 30s, as shown in Controlled Medicine. The theme of this panel shows the equipment, etc., used by the hospital in prevention of disease and the treatment of the patient. Socialized medicine was not in my vocabulary in 1936, and certainly in doing my research for the work it was never considered or mentioned by any hospital authority. The real purpose of the murals at Queens was to serve two main purposes – one, to give the waiting patients in the “in-coming and out-going patients rooms” something to look at and to inform them of the history and background of treatment – and two, Dr. Kogel, the Superintendent of Queens used the panels in this lectures to student nurses on the history of medicine.”
HAMILTON COLLEGE EXHIBITION 2009-2010
William Palmer (1906-87) was the first member of the Hamilton College studio art faculty, and founding director of the Munson-Williams-Proctor School of Art. He studied at the Art Students League with Boardman Robinson, Kenneth Hayes Miller, and Thomas Hart Benton, and the Ecole des Beaux-Arts, Fontainebleau where he learned the art of fresco painting. Before coming to Clinton in 1941, Palmer achieved national recognition as a WPA/FAP muralist. William Palmer: Drawing from Life features Depression- and WPA-era figure studies, landscapes, and mural studies from the William C. Palmer collection housed at the Emerson Gallery.
Artist William Charles Palmer was born in Des Moines, Iowa in 1906. At eighteen he enrolled at the Art Students League in New York where he studied with Kenneth Hayes Miller, Boardman Robinson, and Thomas Hart Benton. Palmer described Miller as his “great teacher” but it was Benton who instilled in him a sense of individualism and whose interest in mural painting led him to enroll at École des Beaux-Arts, Fontainebleau to study fresco painting. Painted rooms were fashionable when Palmer returned from France in 1927, and the aspiring designer received several private commissions only to have them unravel when the market crashed two years later. Unable to find work, he went to live with his sister in Canada and brought with him sketches from his annual visits to Iowa. To keep busy he turned to them for inspiration and as a basis for exploring new mediums, which sparked his interest in landscape painting, a subject matter that until then he had not taken seriously but thereafter defined his career.
In 1932 Palmer was invited to participate in the New York division of the Public Works Art Project. He produced easel paintings and murals for the program with some success;* President Franklin Roosevelt chose an oil, Manhattan from the Jersey Meadows, for the White House Collection, and a mural, Function of a Hospital, was selected for the elevator waiting room of the new Queens General Hospital. From 1935-40, Palmer received three more WPA mural commissions for post offices in Washington, D.C., Arlington, Massachusetts, and Monticello, Iowa. Palmer’s last years in New York were spent teaching at the Art Students League and as supervisor of the Mural Department of the City of New York, a WPA/FAP program that employed hundreds of artists, including Arshile Gorky, Edward Laning, Balcomb Greene, Philip Guston, and Ilya Bolotowsky.
In 1941 he was invited to Utica to found the School of Art at Munson-Williams-Proctor Arts Institute. During the Institute’s fledgling years, he held a joint appointment as Hamilton College’s first member of the art faculty and Artist-in-Residence. He left Hamilton in 1948 to devote himself full time to the Institute where he remained until his retirement in 1971.
Since his earliest days as an artist, Palmer made a daily sketch from memory. Time and again, he turned to these for new ideas. On view in this exhibition are a selection of his sketches and studies, ranging from quick compositional sketches to final studies for prints, paintings and murals from the late ’20s to the early ’40s. It was during this period that, through the circumstances of the times and a personal penchant for change, Palmer began to define himself as an artist. In these early works, echoes of his teachers, especially Miller and Benton, can be found in the faces of the men and women crowding streets and barn dances, and within his lyrical landscapes. One also sees experiments with different mediums, subject matter, and the picture plane that illustrate the beginnings of his unique voice as an artist.
William Palmer died in 1987. Nine years later, Hamilton College received the William C. Palmer Papers from the bequest of his widow, Catherine. The collection, which contains of a lifetime of sketches and sketchbooks, studies, photographs, letters, catalogs, and lecture notes, is jointly housed at the Emerson Gallery and the Burke Library where it is made available for study.
William C. Palmer, Innumerable Shoppers, 1931, Pen and ink on paper. Collection of Emerson Gallery, Hamilton College. Bequest of Catherine W. Palmer
WORKS BY WILLIAM C. PALMER
William C. Palmer, Manhattan Island from the Jersey Meadows, 1934, oil on canvas, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Transfer from the U.S. Department of the Interior, National Park Service , 1965.18.34 *This painting was chosen by FDR for exhibition in the White House.
William C. Palmer, Iowa Landscape (mural study, right panel of triptych for Monticello, Iowa Post Office), 1940, watercolor and ink on paper, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Transfer from the General Services Administration, 1974.28.322
William C. Palmer, The Last Snow, 1956, oil on canvas, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Gift of the Sara Roby Foundation, 1985.30.57
New Sign Outside Octagon Stone and Design to Replicate Octagon Staircase
JOAN BROOKS WAS THE EARLY BIRD AN SHE GETS THE TRINKET Nina Lublin, Alexis Villefane and Jay Jacobson also got it.
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EDITORIAL
This edition features another artist who worked on WPA murals in New York Hospitals. Previous edition featured art works in post offices. The amazing amount of wonderful work produced in the 1930’s show that government can work to produce a great product and works that have lasted for almost a century.
When reading the biographies I have seen that many of the artists studied at the Art Students League. We will discover the Art Students League in the near future.
Today I was at the Board of Elections at 200 Varick Street at train-the-trainer. Yes, trainers get trained. They I go to train the Coordinator. This morning we learned of all the cleaning and sanitizing that will be in place and we have to do to keep the voters and poll workers safe.
Stay tuned for an announcement of a more convenient Upper East Side Early Voting Site. Early voting is from October 24 to November 1st.
Judith Berdy
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 All image are copyrighted (c) Roosevelt Island Historical Society SMITHSONIAN AMERICAN ART MUSEUM. NEW YORK HEALTH + HOSPITALS WIKIPEDIA HAMILTON COLLEGE
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The Wastewater Treatment Plant is Located on what was Luyster’s Island
Bowery Bay Sewage Treatment Works, copy of drawing “Pump and Blower House”
Bowery Bay Sewage Treatment Works, south face of grit storage building Left: under construction, Right: rendering of completed structure
The Wastewater Treatment Plant is located on what was Luyster’s Island
Untapped Cities reader @moment_NY submitted a photo via Twitter, asking us “Do you know the history of this wall art at 45th St & Berrian Blvd, Queens?” A little digging revealed that this is part of the Bowery Bay Wastewater Treatment Plant, across from Rikers Island. The WPA-style sculptural relief dates back to the original Art Deco building that was part of the Department of Public Works, and you can see the 1940 cornerstone on the right hand side. Elsewhere on the building, you’ll see the glass blocks and curved walls that are characteristic of the public architecture of the time period.
Although the building’s decoration was clearly intended for public as a message of the government’s good works, today the building is fenced off and this grand entrance unused. As such, the building directly encapsulates the evolution of the public’s relationship with government architecture from the Great Depression until now. Another fun note, from Forgotten NY, is that the whole treatment plant sits atop the former Luyster’s Island, another sign of the advance of New York City’s shoreline.
The 1930’s building still exists
The work ethic was impressed on the building
WHAT HAPPENS AT BOWERY BAY
Completion of $3 Million Upgrade to the Bowery Bay Wastewater Treatment Plant Significantly Reduces Nuisance Odors in Astoria
2016
Newly Installed Aluminum Tank Covers and Carbon Filtration System Capture 99% of Odors
New York City Department of Environmental Protection (DEP) Acting Commissioner Steven Lawitts today joined with City Council Member Costa Constantinides to announce that work has been completed on the installation of aluminum covers and odor control units on each of the four sludge tanks located at the Bowery Bay Wastewater Treatment Plant in Astoria, Queens. The $3 million project ensures that nuisance odors emanating from the wastewater treatment plant are captured by the new aluminum covers and removed through an activated carbon filtration process. Work on the project began in 2015 and was completed by Memorial Day.
“Wastewater treatment is a vital process that safeguards the environment and protects public health, and we also work hard to ensure that we are good neighbors to those who live and work in the neighborhoods that surround our plants,” said DEP Acting Commissioner Steven Lawitts. “The completed odor control upgrades at the Bowery Bay facility will directly benefit the residents of northern Queens and I want to thank Council Member Costa Constantinides for the time, energy and efforts he and his staff devoted to partnering with DEP on addressing this important environmental concern.”
Council Member Costa Constantinides, Chair of the Council’s Environmental Protection Committee, said, “As lifetime residents of the neighborhood, my family and I have too much experience with the odor from the Bowery Bay Plant. The new aluminum tank covers and odor control units will help improve the quality of life for all families in the area. Eliminating most of the odor that comes from the plant is a major benefit for our community. I thank DEP for partnering together with us on this $3 million upgrade project and working to complete it on time.”
New Yorkers produce, and DEP collects and treats, approximately 1.3 billion gallons of wastewater a day. Many of the City’s 14 wastewater treatment plants are located in residential or business communities across the five boroughs and DEP works to limit their impact on the surrounding neighborhoods. At the Bowery Bay Wastewater Treatment Plant, there are four holding tanks that have the capacity to store a combined 550,000 cubic feet of sludge. The aluminum covers, which are up to 85 feet wide, capture any nuisance odor and each dual-bed carbon canister filter cleanses up to 21,742 cubic feet of air per minute. The carbon filters capture and absorb the odorous hydrogen sulfide gas molecules produced during the wastewater treatment and sludge digestion process. The City College of New York will work with DEP to document the performance of the carbon filters.
The Bowery Bay Wastewater Treatment Plant went into operation in 1939 and is designed to treat 150 million gallons of wastewater a day. The plant serves approximately 850,000 residents in a drainage area of more than 15,000 acres in northwest Queens.
DEP manages New York City’s water supply, providing approximately one billion gallons of water each day to more than 9 million residents, including 8.5 million in New York City. The water is delivered from a watershed that extends more than 125 miles from the city, comprising 19 reservoirs and three controlled lakes. Approximately 7,000 miles of water mains, tunnels and aqueducts bring water to homes and businesses throughout the five boroughs, and 7,500 miles of sewer lines and 96 pump stations take wastewater to 14 in-city treatment plants. DEP has nearly 6,000 employees, including almost 1,000 in the upstate watershed. In addition, DEP has a robust capital program, with a planned $14 billion in investments over the next 10 years that will create up to 3,000 construction-related jobs per year. For more information, visit nyc.gov/dep, like us on Facebook, or follow us on Twitter.
THIS IS THE PERMIT FROM NYS DEPT. OF ENVIRONMENTAL CONSERVATION”
The NYCDEP Bowery Bay WPCP is a municipal wastewater treatment facility capable of providing secondary treatment to 225 mgd of primarily residential wastewater in Northwestern Queens. The major unit operations of the facility consist of screening, primary treatment, activated-sludge treatment, secondary clarification, sludge treatment, and disinfection of the plant effluent before discharge to the Rikers Island Channel. Solids handling at the plant include cyclone degritting of the primary sludge, gravity thickening of the primary and secondary high-rate anaerobic digestion, and sludge storage and dewatering. The Bowery Bay WPCP operates combustion installations, three methane-abatement systems, three wet scrubbers for the Dewatering building odor-control system, and two dual-system units with two wet scrubbers and carbon adsorption for the centrate odor-control system. In addition, in order to eliminate potential odor from the wastewater treatment process, DEP has upgraded sludge storage tanks #1, #4, #9 and #10 with Facility DEC ID: 2630100008 DEC Permit Conditions Renewal 1/Mod 1/FINAL Page 2 aluminum covers and installed four carbon vessels to treat air emissions from these four tanks. By acceptance of this permit, the permittee agrees that the permit is contingent upon strict compliance with the ECL, all applicable regulations, the General Conditions specified.
We don’t think of wastewater or other unmentionables. This is the Pump and Blower House and the Grit Storage Building. Even these mundane projects were beautifully designed and have been preserved for over 75 years.
JUDITH BERDY
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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 Deborah Dorff All image are copyrighted (c) Roosevelt Island Historical Society unless otherwise indicated
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EXCERPTED FROM BOOK BY DIANA STUART (C) 2003 UNTAPPED CITIES (C) NEW YORK TIMES(C) WIKIPEDIA
FROM THE NEW YORK TIMES (C)
About New York; Art Underfoot, And the Angel Who Guards It By Dan Barry Sept. 6, 2003
The round-faced sleuth with the orange visor knelt to take a closer look at a circular patch of concrete. Where others might see only Manhattan sidewalk, she saw evidence of a form of art theft: the disappearance of yet another of New York City’s glorious manhole covers. She knew what was missing because she had once photographed it, a cast-iron cover adorned with a five-pointed star and a raucous sea of raised dots. It was the handiwork of the old Liberty Iron Works foundry on 10th Avenue. It had been blithely trod upon for generations, and now it was gone. ”This is one of my real tragedies,” muttered the woman, Diana Stuart. No one could challenge her use of the possessive.
Ms. Stuart has devoted the last decade to the adoration of manhole covers. She has whisked them clean like an umpire tending to home plate, photographed them by the thousands, cataloged their whereabouts, researched the long-gone foundries that struck them, led walking tours in their name, and lobbied without success to have them granted landmark status. So associated is Ms. Stuart with their preservation that she holds unchallenged claim to a nickname that may not be as intriguing as the Woman in Red, but is not quite as unsettling as the Pigeon Lady. She is the Manhole Cover Lady.
OUR LOST MANHOLE COVER
At the south end of West Road by the entrance to Southpoint Park, this cover was removed when the street was re-paved for the Cornell Tech campus.
2- But she makes no secret of her crusade to save the ancient manhole covers, coal-chute covers and vault covers that dapple the city surface by the hundreds of thousands, some of them still-active portals to the netherworld. She estimates that a good 10 percent of the 400 covers featured in her book — ”Designs Underfoot: The Art of Manhole Covers in New York City” — have already been paved over or tossed away since its publication in April. To prove that manhole covers equal art, Ms. Stuart conducted a private, head-down tour of Murray Hill, infusing her patter with the urgent tone of someone who seems at constant risk of missing her train.
She strode with the confidence borne of having walked thousands of streets, dodging cars and eluding undesirables, armed only with a camera, a notebook and a whisk broom. As she guided on this rainy morning, she pointed to covers whose raised features may have once had a practical purpose — providing traction for the hooves of horses — but are now the cast-iron expressions of whimsy from the 19th and early 20th centuries. Ship’s wheels and snowflakes, hexagons and honeycombs, chain links and flowers, all meant for more than just horses. Above This was photographed in 2009, probably being removed from a construction site.
STEP ON THE ARTWORK
3- In front of 114 East 37th Street, for example, she spotted a coal-chute cover of an anonymous foundry that sported a raised star, bubble-like dots and a ring of diamond shapes. And on the southeast corner of Madison Avenue and 37th Street, embedded like a jewel in the slate pavement, there glittered — well, not quite — a Jacob Mark Sons cover dating from 1878. Rows of mauve- and gold-colored glass insets, surrounded by an elaborate petal design, lent it a certain grimy class. ”Is it at risk? Yes, definitely,” Ms. Stuart said, her face damp, her voice raised. ”Someone could just come and pierce their equipment right through this.”
Her pleas to the city’s Landmarks Preservation Commission have yielded no support. Robert B. Tierney, its chairman, said that while he admired Ms. Stuart’s commitment, manhole covers are impermanent fixtures by design. Giving them landmark status raises the specter of commission involvement every time Con Ed has to change a manhole cover. ”It may not be something that is a landmark priority,” he said. ”But that does not mean that it’s not important. It’s incredibly interesting.” Ms. Stuart, who feels as though she is racing against time, remains committed to her cause. She promotes her slim volume, which has brought her some fame but no money. She conducts her tours. She leads the Society for the Preservation of New York City Manhole Covers. She is, after all, the Manhole Cover Lady. ”O.K.,” she said, again pointing to the sidewalk. ”This is a very important cover.”
WHAT DO ALL THOSE LETTERS STAND FOR?
Markings Bell System BECo = Brooklyn Edison Company BHRR = Brooklyn Heights Railroad BMT = Brooklyn-Manhattan Transit Corporation BPB = Borough President Brooklyn BPM = Borough President Manhattan BQT = Brooklyn and Queens Transit Corporation BRT = Brooklyn Rapid Transit BS = Bureau of Sewers BSBQ = Bureau of Sewers, Borough of Queens BSBQ = Borough Superintendent of the Borough of Queens CIBRR = Coney Island and Brooklyn Railroad Citizens Water Supply Co. of Newtown ConEdison = Consolidated Edison Con Edison Co. = Consolidated Edison Conrail = Consolidated Rail Corporation CT&ES Co. = Consolidated Telegraph & Electrical Subway Company CWSCo. = Citizens Water Supply Company of Newtown DCW = Brooklyn Department of City Works DEP = Department of Environmental Protection DPW = Department of Public Works DWS = Department of Water Supply ECS Co. LIM = Empire City Subway Company Limited (also abbreviated as ECS Co LTD) EDISON = Edison EEICo. = Edison Electric Illuminating Company FDNY = FDNY GAS = Brooklyn Union Gas HPFS = High Pressure Fire Service IRT = Interborough Rapid Transit JWS = Jamaica Water Supply Company of New York KCEL&PC = Kings County Electric Light and Power Company LIC = Long Island City LIRR = Long Island Rail Road LIWSCo. = Long Island Water Supply Company NY&NJTCo. = New York & New Jersey Telephone Company NY&QEL&PCo = New York & Queens Electric Light & Power Company NYCTA = New York City Transit Authority NYCTS = New York City Transit System NYC & HRRR = New York Central & Hudson River Railroad NYM = New York Municipal Railway Corporation NYRT = New York Rapid Transit Corporation NYTCo. = New York Telephone Company PSC MRC = Public Service Commission-Metropolitan Railway Company QMT = Queens Midtown Tunnel RT NYC = Rapid Transit New York City RT NYRT = New York Rapid Transit Corporation RTS = Rapid Transit System RTS NYC = Rapid Transit System New York City STEALTH COMM = Stealth Communications WSNY = Water Supply of New York Water Supply
WHY ARE MANHOLE COVERS ROUND?
The question of why manhole covers are typically round (in some countries) was made famous by Microsoft when they began asking it as a job-interview question. Originally meant as a psychological assessment of how one approaches a question with more than one correct answer, the problem has produced a number of alternative explanations, from the tautological (“Manhole covers are round because manholes are round.”)to the philosophical. Reasons for the shape might include:
A round manhole cover cannot fall through its circular opening, whereas a square manhole cover might fall in if it were inserted diagonally in the hole.
The existence of a “lip” holding up the lid means that the underlying hole is smaller than the cover, so that other shapes might suffice. (A Reuleaux triangle or other curve of constant width would also serve this purpose, but round covers are much easier to manufacture.)
Round tubes are the strongest and most material-efficient shape against the compression of the earth around them.
A round manhole cover of a given diameter has a smaller surface area than a square cover of the same width, thus less material is needed to cast the manhole cover, meaning lower cost.
The bearing surfaces of manhole frames and covers are machined to assure flatness and prevent them from becoming dislodged by traffic.
Round castings are much easier to machine using a lathe.
Circular covers do not need to be rotated to align with the manhole. A round manhole cover can be more easily moved by being rolled.
A round manhole cover can be easily locked in place with a quarter turn (as is done in countries like France), which makes them hard to open without a special tool.
Lockable covers do not have to be made as heavy to resist being dislodged.
COAL CHUTE COVERS
Like in London, the original street covers were for coal–and were often originally rectangular in shape. New York City still has many covers that lead to former coal chutes, like the one above in a hexagonal shape. This particular one, found in Brooklyn Heights, is a patented “illuminated cover” invented by J.B. Cornell, an ironworks company founded by brothers on Centre Street.
The patent document from 1856 describes glass panes placed between melted brimstone. John B. Cornell writes that the design will be kept clean from the “friction of passing feet,” and that a light rain shower would remove “any considerable quantity of dirt” from the glass panes. For this and various reasons, Cornell believed “in point of illuminating power, and safety against the entrance of moisture, I believe that my improved illuminating cover for openings in pavements &c. has no equal.”
WILLIAM MARCY TWEED BOSS TWEED Clara Bella was the first answer.
I’m so excited!! I’m a big fan from the Bronx, and since March I haven’t been on the island but I cherish your emails. The variety, the detail, and the many photos make them simply wonderful.
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EDITORIAL
Art underfoot. Just be careful between mopeds, Citi-Bike, humans and scooters, it may be safer to look at the photos.
Today we took he ferry to 90th Street and transferred to the Soundview Ferry to the Bronx. We caught an Lyft and off we were to City Island. Lunch was great under a giant tent (on a former parking lot) with delicious lobster and the sides. It was great to be in this cute seaside town, only an hour from home.
For an easy return home the bus to Westchester Square and a 6 train ride to 59th Street.
Time to safely get off the island and enjoy this wonderful weather.
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
All image are copyrighted (c) Roosevelt Island Historical Society unless otherwise indicated
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Rosalind Bengelsdorf, Seated Woman, 1938, oil on canvas, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Gift of Patricia and Phillip Frost, 1986.92.11
One of the youngest members of the American Abstract Artists, Rosalind Bengelsdorf championed abstraction in her writings and lectures as well as in her paintings.
As a teenager, she studied at the Art Students League (1930–34) with John Steuart Curry, Raphael Soyer, Anne Goldthwaite, and George Bridgman, and then for a year at the Annot School. In 1935, she entered Hans Hofmann’s atelier as one of the many scholarship students he took on. The following year, she joined the abstract artists working on WPA murals under Burgoyne Diller’s enlightened leadership. In Hans Hofmann, Bengelsdorf found a true mentor. His dedication to the painting as an independent object matched her growing belief that the picture plane was a “living reality” of forms, energies, and colors. Like Hofmann, Bengelsdorf believed that “the shapes that compose the picture belong to nothing else but the picture.”
She had begun to analyze objects in terms of geometric form under George Bridgman at the league and subsequently at Annot. In a high school chemistry class, Bengelsdorf became fascinated with the idea that space is filled with “myriad, infinitesimal subdivisions.” She saw “the universe as a charged miracle, a vibrating orchestration of the continuous interplay of all forms of matter.” Under Hofmann, who emphasized the interrelationship of objects and the environments they occupy, these impulses merged. For Bengelsdorf, the artist’s task became the description of “not only what he sees but also what he knows of the natural internal function” of objects and the “laws of energy that govern all matter: the opposition, tension, interrelation, combination and destruction of planes in space.”
This meant that the abstract painter was studying the laws of nature, tearing it apart and then reorganizing the parts into a new creation. Despite this emphasis on formalism, Bengelsdorf also believed that abstract art played a larger function within society. She separated artistic concerns from economic ones and championed art’s potential for increasing knowledge and understanding. Satire, motion pictures, posters, and other pictorial solutions addressed some kinds of human concerns; but the larger ones — of the mind, of the possibility for order within life’s experience — these were the domain of abstraction.
In her own paintings, such as Abstraction and Seated Woman, Bengelsdorfwas concerned with these questions. Abstraction, which relates to a WPA mural (now destroyed) Bengelsdorf painted for the Central Nurses Home on Welfare Island, balances simple geometric forms through position and color. Seated Woman, which was featured in the 1939 American Abstract Artists annual exhibition, owes a clear debt to Picasso’s Girl Before a Mirror (1932, Museum of Modern Art) and gives clear evidence of her belief that “energy and form are inseparable.”
After her marriage to Byron Browne in1940, and the birth of their son, Bengelsdorf turned from full-time painting to teaching, writing, and criticism. An articulate and perceptive writer, she often reviewed the exhibitions of work by her friends from the early days of the American Abstract Artists, and continued, through her writings, to champion the cause of abstract art.
They decided that there should be only “one painter in the family,” so Rosalind turned her attention to writing and teaching, only picking up a paintbrush again after her husband died in 1961 (Fraser, “Rosalind Browne, 62; Was Abstract Painter, Teacher and Historian,” New York Times, February 1979).
Rosalind Bengelsdorf, Abstraction, 1938, oil on canvas, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Gift of Patricia and Phillip Frost, 1986.92.10
Rosalind Bengelsdorf believed that “energy and form are inseparable,” and created paintings that expressed her interest in physical science. Here, the round, cell-like shape at the bottom of the image contrasts with the rigid lines that divide the canvas. The bright primary colors and simple shapes express the artist’s wish to “tear … apart” nature into its basic forms and reconstruct the pieces into something new (Bengelsdorf, “The New Realism,” American Abstract Artists, 1938).
“[The artist’s] painting expresses the love of life, the form and color of life—a vibrating response to its powerful energy.” Bengelsdorf, “The New Realism,” American Abstract Artists, 1938
Rosalind Bengelsdorf, Cane Press, Untitled, from the portfolio American Abstract Artists, 1937, offset lithograph on paper, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Gift of Patricia and Phillip Frost, 1986.92.114.3
“THE MURALS THAT NEVER WERE” CENTRAL NURSES RESIDENCE WELFARE ISLAND
Central Nurses’ Residence, Metropolitan Hospital, Welfare Island, 1935. Collection of the Public Design Commission of the City of New York.
The Art Commission reviewed abstract murals by Richard Goldman and Rosalind Bengelsdorf for the Central Nurses Residence. While Richard Goldman’s mural for the fourth floor living room of the Central Nurses Residence sailed through the review process without changes, Rosalind Bengelsdorf faced difficulties with her proposal for the fifth floor living room. It was first disapproved in March 1938. A simplified proposal that included more curvilinear forms was resubmitted in June of the same year. It too was rejected. Finally in November, she offered yet another revision, much less abstract, with visual references to musical instruments and musical notes. It was approved in December 1938. Judging from the material in the Commission’s archives, this was the only abstract mural proposal that the Commission requested be altered. Perhaps not coincidentally, it was also the only submission from a female artist.
The Art Commission reviewed abstract murals by Richard Goldman and Rosalind Bengelsdorf for the Central Nurses Residence. While Richard Goldman’s mural for the fourth floor living room of the Central Nurses Residence sailed through the review process without changes, Rosalind Bengelsdorf faced difficulties with her proposal for the fifth floor living room. It was first disapproved in March 1938. A simplified proposal that included more curvilinear forms was resubmitted in June of the same year. It too was rejected. Finally in November, she offered yet another revision, much less abstract, with visual references to musical instruments and musical notes. It was approved in December 1938. Judging from the material in the Commission’s archives, this was the only abstract mural proposal that the Commission requested be altered. Perhaps not coincidentally, it was also the only submission from a female artist.
Below are the second and third submissions.
BYRON BROWNE
Byron Browne, Abstract Collage, 1933, pen and ink, ink wash, gouache, and paper on paper mounted on paperboard, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Gift of Patricia and Phillip Frost, 1986.92.7
Modernist painter and one of the founders of American Abstract Artists, a New York City organization devoted to exhibiting abstract art. Browne specialized in still life in the style of Synthetic Cubism, influenced by his friends John Graham, Arshile Gorky, and Willem de Kooning.
Joan Stahl American Artists in Photographic Portraits from the Peter A. Juley & Son Collection (Washington, D.C. and Mineola, New York: National Museum of American Art and Dover Publications, Inc., 1995)
Byron Browne was a central figure in many of the artistic and political groups that flourished during the 1930s. He was an early member of the Artists’ Union, a founding member of the American Abstract Artists, and participated in the Artists’ Congress until 1940 when political infighting prompted Browne and others to form the break-away Federation of Modern Painters and Sculptors. Browne’s artistic training followed traditional lines. From 1925 to 1928, he studied at the National Academy of Design, where in his last year he won the prestigious Third Hallgarten Prize for a still-life composition. Yet before finishing his studies, Browne discovered the newly established Gallery of Living Art. There and through his friends John Graham and Arshile Gorky, he became fascinated with Picasso, Braque, Miró, and other modern masters.
The mid 1930s were difficult financially for Browne.(1) His work was exhibited in a number of shows, but sales were few. Relief came when Burgoyne Diller began championing abstraction within the WPA’s mural division. Browne completed abstract works for Studio D at radio station WNYC, the U.S. Passport Office in Rockefeller Center, the Chronic Disease Hospital, the Williamsburg Housing Project, and the 1939 World’s Fair.(2)
Although Browne destroyed his early academic work shortly after leaving the National Academy, he remained steadfast in his commitment to the value of tradition, and especially to the work of Ingres.(3) Browne believed, with his friend Gorky, that every artist has to have tradition. Without tradition art is no good. Having a tradition enables you to tackle new problems with authority, with solid footing.(4)”
Browne’s stylistic excursions took many paths during the 1930s. His WNYC mural reflects the hard-edged Neo-plastic ideas of Diller, although a rougher Expressionism better suited his fascination for the primitive, mythical, and organic. A signer, with Harari and others, of the 1937 Art Front letter, which insisted that abstract art forms “are not separated from life,” Browne admitted nature to his art—whether as an abstracted still life, a fully nonobjective canvas built from colors seen in nature, or in portraits and figure drawings executed with immaculate, Ingres-like finesse.(5) He advocated nature as the foundation for all art and had little use for the spiritual and mystical arguments promoted by Hilla Rebay at the Guggenheim Collection: When I hear the words non-objective, intra-subjective, avant-garde and such trivialities, I run. There is only visible nature, visible to the eye or, visible by mechanical means, the telescope, microscope, etc.”(6)
Increasingly in the 1940s, Browne adopted an energetic, gestural style. Painterly brushstrokes and roughly textured surfaces amplify the primordial undercurrents posed by his symbolic and mythical themes. In 1945, Browne showed with Adolph Gottlieb, William Baziotes, David Hare, Hans Hofmann, Carl Holty, Romare Bearden, and Robert Motherwell at the newly opened Samuel Kootz Gallery. When Kootz suspended business for a year in 1948, Browne began showing at Grand Central Galleries. In 1950, he joined the faculty of the Art Students League, and in 1959 he began teaching advanced painting at New York University.
1. When she met him in October 1934, Rosalind Bengelsdorf Browne recalled that her future husband’s daily diet consisted of a quart of milk, a box of cornmeal, a head of lettuce, and some raisins. See Rosalind Bengelsdorf Browne Papers, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C.
2. Browne was also involved with Léger’s mural project for the French Line terminal building that was canceled after officials discovered Léger’s communist sympathies. See Rosalind Bengelsdorf Browne Papers, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C.
3. The abstract quality of Ingres’s work held special appeal not only for Browne, but for John Graham and Arshile Gorky. Rosalind Bengelsdorf Browne remembered Gorky waving an Ingres reproduction around at the opening of the first American Abstract Artists annual exhibition and proclaiming that the French master was more “abstract” than all the work in the exhibition. See Rosalind Bengelsdorf Browne Papers, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C.
4. Gorky is quoted in Melvin P. Lader, “Graham, Gorky, de Kooning and the “Ingres Revival” in America,” Arts Magazine 52, no. 7 (March 1978): 99.
5. The classical drawings, a group of which was exhibited at Washburn Gallery in 1977, show heads (often of cross-eyed women) and classically garbed and garlanded seated figures. They have important stylistic parallels to John Graham’s paintings and drawings of the period.
6. Quoted in Gail Levin, “Byron Browne in the Context of Abstract Expressionism,” Arts Magazine 59, no. 10 (Summer 1985): 129. Browne’s notebook is in the collection of his son Stephen B. Browne. Theidea of portraying matter visible through telescope or microscope parallels the fusion of scientific and artistic vision discussed by Rosalind Bengelsdorf.
Virginia M. Mecklenburg The Patricia and Phillip Frost Collection: American Abstraction 1930–1945 (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press for the National Museum of American Art, 1989)
Byron Browne worked at a lumberyard to pay his tuition at the National Academy of Design, where he enrolled in 1925. He was inspired by European artists such as Pablo Picasso and Joan Miró and in 1930 burned several of his realistic works as a gesture against conventional painting. He was a founder of the American Abstract Artists and in 1935 led a march protesting museums that did not collect modern work. After World War II, Browne exhibited frequently at the Kootz Gallery, which ardently supported avant-garde American artists. While abstract expressionism dominated New York’s art world, Browne’s paintings, which still showed recognizable figures and objects, failed to draw an audience. The gallery sold all of Browne’s work in a department store sale at “50% off,” dealing a heavy blow to the artist’s career. (Rogers, Byron Browne, A Seminal American Modernist, 2001)
Byron Browne, Cane Press, Untitled, from the portfolio American Abstract Artists, 1937, offset lithograph on paper, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Gift of Patricia and Phillip Frost, 1986.92.114.6
Byron Browne, Head, 1938, oil on fiberboard, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Gift of Patricia and Phillip Frost, 1986.92.9
At first glance, Byron Browne’s Head appears frightening, with its menacing mouth and abstracted features. The pastel colors and the figure’s gaze, however, make it less intimidating and perhaps more human. Browne was greatly inspired by nature and felt his artwork should reflect what he saw in spite of his abstract style. The figure in Head also evokes a primitive mask. This type of mask, predominately from Africa, but also from Asia and Pre-Columbian America, was inspirational for a number of abstract artists during the first half of the twentieth century due to its simplified geometric shapes and sometimes brightly colored designs. Browne became interested in primitive masks while studying at the National Academy of Design in the 1920s. His style was also greatly shaped by European abstract artists, particularly Pablo Picasso, whose works reflected the influence of primitive masks as early as 1907. “I sometimes paint the object more, I sometimes paint the object less, but by all means I must paint the object.” The artist, quoted in Levin, “Byron Browne: In the Context of Abstract Expressionism” (Arts Magazine, Summer 1985)
http://Byron Browne, White Still Life, 1947, oil on canvas, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Gift of Katie and Walter C. Louchheim, 1971.6
Above: “Festival at Hamburg,” a mural study for the Hamburg, Iowa Post Office, by William Edward Lewis Bunn (1910-2009), created while he was in the New Deal’s Section of Fine Arts, 1941. According to SNAC, a collaborative enterprise that includes the National Archives and the University of California, “Wiliam Edward Lewis Bunn was a designer, muralist, and painter in Muscatine, Iowa and Ojai, Calif… During the 1930s he won commissions from the Federal Department of Fine Arts [the U.S. Treasury and the Federal Works Agency] to paint murals in public buildings throughout the Midwest. He also worked as an industrial designer for Shaeffer Pen and Cuckler Steel.” Image courtesy of the Smithsonian American Art Museum.
FROM WNYC STUDIO TO NEW STATEN ISLAND COURTHOUSE
Byron Browne WNYC mural. (Photo courtesy of the Art Commission of the City of New York/FAP-WPA Photo)
Of all the artists, Byron Browne was the only one who tailored his work to fit the studio. He painted directly onto the acoustic tiles that were the soundproofing of the room. The mural (as well as the von Wicht) and some of WNYC’s Warren McArthur furniture had been used as part of 1986/87 Brooklyn Museum show The Machine Age in America, 1918-1941. Unfortunately, the mural did not return to WNYC but was moved to the city office of Management and Budget on the north side of the Municipal Building. Eventually, there were changes to those offices and the work was stored with the Art Commission of the City of New York. The mural was recently conserved and installed in the new Staten Island Courthouse.
The image of the mural was used on annual report cover.
SEATING AREA BEHIND THE NEW 460 MAIN STREET NINA LUBLIN GUESSED THE WATER CONTAINERS USED FOR WEIGHT TESTING OF THE TRAM CABINS
Jay Jacobson came up with a unique answer to the question:
A supply of celebratory adult beverages for huge 8 day festival when retail shops on the Island are leased to merchants who understand that coming to Roosevelt Island is not merely to make money but also to provide a genuine community benefit. One of the vats is filled with sacred extra virgin olive oil.
OOPS ON SATURDAY WE DID NOT MENTION THAT ALEXIS VILLEFANE GUESSED THE SAYRE AND FISHER BRICKS AT THE CHAPEL!!! ALEXIS IS OUR NUMBER ONE PHOTO IDENTIFIER .JAY JACOBSON NINA LUBLIN, JOAN BROOKS AND MANY OTHERS ARE DOING GREAT.
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EDITORIAL
Start with one idea and you never know where you end up. I was looking into Rosalind Bengelsdorf and discovered she was married to to artist Byron Browne.
I had heard that Bengelsdorf had designed murals for the Central Nurses Residence. I discovered images of her three designs on the website of the Design Commission, formerly the Art Commission. You can see the images on the pages here.
We found an image of the WNYC studio on their website. Trying to find an image, we could not find one of the mural in its new home in the Staten Island courthouse. Finally, I located it on the cover of an annual report.
Without the wonderful websites and reference material. you can track down so much with your key board.
TODAY WE USED: WIKIPEDIA THE LIVING NEW DEAL NYC DESIGN COMMISSION WNYC ARCHIVES RIHS ARCHIVES
Judith Berdy
Text by Judith Berdy Thanks to Bobbie Slonevsky for her dedication to Blackwell’s Almanac Thanks to Deborah Dorff for maintaining our website Edited by Melanie Colter and Deborah Dorff All materials in this publication are copyrighted (c)
PHOTOS FROM JUDITH BERDY COPYRIGHT RIHS/2020 (C)
MATERIAL COPYRIGHT WIKIPEDIA, GOOGLE IMAGES, RIHS ARCHIVES AND MAY NOT BE REPRODUCED WITHOUT PERMISSION (C) FOR THIS ISSUE: SEE EDITORIAL ATTACHED
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I cannot believe this Monday is our 150th issue!!! Send us your favorite articles and items that were in the first 149 issues of FROM THE ARCHIVES. Your comments are welcome too. We will feature them in issue #150. Issue #150 is on MONDAY. Send to rooseveltislandhistory@gmail.com
WEEKEND EDITION
SEPTMEBER 5-6, 2020 The 149th Edition
DONALD DE LUE
MASTER IN BRONZE
THE ROCKET THROWER FLUSHING MEADOWS PARK, NY
The “Rocket Thrower” by Donald De Lue commissioned for the 1964 Worlds Fair, in Flushing Meadows Park in Queens in New York
Life and career De Lue studied at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts and later served as an assistant to sculptors Richard Henry Recchia and Robert P. Baker. This was followed by five years in Paris where he continued his study, while working as an assistant to various French artists.
He returned to the United States where he was engaged by Bryant Baker. In 1940 he was elected into the National Academy of Design as an Associate member, and became a full Academician in 1943. In 1941, De Lue won a competition to create sculpture for the U.S. Post Office and Courthouse Building in Philadelphia, and from then on he stopped being an assistant for other artists and only worked on his own commissions and creations.
De Lue’s works can be found in many museums across America. Like many other sculptors of his generation, he executed architectural works. He was also a prolific designer of medals and medallions. De Lue taught at the Beaux-Arts Institute of Design in New York City during the early 1940s. (See Issue #142 on August 28th)
In 1960, he won two Henry Hering Awards, given by the National Sculpture Society for outstanding collaboration between a sculptor and an architect, for the Normandy American Cemetery and Memorial in Colleville-sur-Mer, France, and for the Stations of the Cross at the Loyola Jesuit Seminary in Shrub Oak, New York.
In 1967, De Lue won the American Numismatic Society’s J. Sanford Saltus Award for Outstanding Achievement in the Art of the Medal, known as the Saltus Award. Beginning in 1964, for many years De Lue was a Trustee of Brookgreen Gardens, as well as Chairman of the Art Committee. In his later years, De Lue and his wife Naomi (who served as a model for many of his statues) lived in the Leonardo section of Middletown Township, New Jersey, a small shore town with a bayside beach and long-distance view of lower Manhattan.
De Lue cited the 23rd Psalm and the words “He leadeth me beside the still waters…” as the inspiration by which he arrived in Leonardo from New York City. Although he continued to maintain his NYC apartment, it was in his Leonardo studio that many of his largest statues were made. One of the last was a commission by a private individual intended for the Alamo in San Antonio, Texas. The bigger-than-life statue of Bowie, Travis and Crockett was considered “too violent” by the Daughters of the Republic of Texas for placement in a sacred chapel.
A compromise was sought, that the statue be installed outside the building in the large courtyard rather than inside. DeLue and his patron, a wealthy Texan, preferred the statue be installed in the interior space for which it was made. Unfortunately, the impasse was never resolved in De Lue’s lifetime. Donald and Naomi De Lue are buried in Manalapan Township, New Jersey at the cemetery at Old Tennent Presbyterian Church.
PHOTO NY DAILY NEWS (C) 2013
JUSTICE AND LAW PHILADELPHIA FEDERAL BUILDING 1941
THE ALCHEMIST UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA 1940
NORMANDY AMERICAN CEMETERY COLLEVILLE-SUR-MER, FRANCE
The loggias and colonnade are made of Vaurion, a French limestone from the Cote d’Or region. Centered in the open arc of the memorial facing the graves area is a 22-foot tall bronze statue, The Spirit of American Youth Rising from the Waves, created by the American sculptor Donald De Lue. The statue stands on a rectangular pedestal of Ploumanach granite from Brittany, France. Encircling the pedestal of the statue on the floor in bronze letters is the inscription: MINE EYES HAVE SEEN THE GLORY OF THE COMING OF THE LORD.
ICARUS
Donald De Lue, Icarus, modeled 1934, signed 1945, plaster with metallic patination, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Bequest of the artist, 1989.29
JACOBI HOSPITAL, BRONX, NY
Donald De Lue Untitled, 1954 incised white marble relief 11′ x 7′ Main entrance lobby (Abraham Jacobi Hospital Building)
One of the most popular portrait series of medals in the world, the Hall of Fame for Great Americans Series honors the most famous Americans chosen by highly selected judging committees and sponsored by New York University. The first election was held in 1900 — when a building was erected to house the Hall and an ongoing collection of statues. Elections were held every five years thereafter. Bronze statues of the honorees were installed within outside niches along the open colonnade at the University Heights campus. It partly surrounds a Pantheon style building created by architect Stamford White that has served as a library and auditorium over its first century. The Medals.
In 1962 a coalition was formed to sponsor and market fine art medals to honor these same famous Americans. The coalition consisted of New York University, the owner of the Hall of Fame; the National Sculpture Society, which would furnish an art committee; the Medallic Art Company, which would manufacture the medals; and the Coin and Currency Institute which would market the medals.
The Art Committee was formed of five members with sculptor Donald De Lue as chairman; this committee issued commissions to American sculptors who expressed an interest in creating one or more of the medals. (Those sculptors who had created the bust were given first choice to do the medal.) Over the next 13 years, 96 medalswere created by 42 sculptors, predominantly members of the National Sculpture Society.
Rules for the medal design were simple. It had to bear a portrait on the obverse, significant scene from that subject’s accomplishment for the reverse. The lettering HALL OF FAME FOR GREAT AMERICANS AT NEW YORK UNIVERSITY must appear on the medal, either side was permissible. While the design was left to the artist, each submission had to pass the approval of the Art Committee composed of the artist’s sculptural peers. Medals were struck in two sizes. A large 3-inch (76mm) size in bronze only, and a small 1 3/4-inch (44mm) in bronze and silver. The silver was serially numbered.
Medalist Laura Gardin Fraser had selected two medals to create — Mary Lyon and Gilbert Stuart — but died before completing the models. Sculptor Karl Gruppe finished the two medals as close to her designs and style as possible. The two Wright Brothers, with different statues and years of election, appear on one medal, by Paul Fjelde. Later status. In 1973 and 1976 the last 20th century elections were held and seven new honorees* were elected into the Hall (which would fill in every niche in the colonnade). In 1973 New York University sold their University Heights Campus to City College of New York along with the building and the statues forming the Colonnade. The statues, and the Hall of Fame itself, were in limbo for awhile. Bronx Community College, which now occupies the campus, is present stewardship of the Hall.
Since 1977 no elections have been held, no new statues erected or medals issued. However, visitors to New York City can still travel to University Heights in the Bronx and walk the Colonnade, viewing the magnificent statues overlooking the Hudson River. Or they can build a set of fine art medals created by some of the most talented medalists of the 20th century with high relief portraits and stunning medallic art. * For 1973: Louis Brandeis, George Washington Carver, Franklin Delano Roosevelt and John Phillip Sousa. For 1976: Clara Barton, Luther Burbank and Andrew Carnegie.
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SAYRE AND FISHER BRICK THAT WAS PLACED ON THE REVERSE IN THE CHAPEL. IT IS ON THE NORTH WALL NEAR THE EXIT
A little information about the bricks in the Chapel of the Good Shepherd:
Sayre and Fisher Brick Company was established in 1850 by James R. Sayre, Jr., and Peter Fisher,and later became one of the USA’s leading manufacturers of building brick, fire brick, and enamel brick.
In 1876 the area around the village then known as Wood’s Landing was renamed Sayreville, after the company’s co-founder. It eventually acquired most factories along the Raritan River, and by 1905 operated a two-mile-long complex with 13 separate yards. By 1912, production reached 62 million bricks a year, providing employment for a large part of the local population, some of whom lived in company housing.
The complex included a power plant, granary, bakery, slaughterhouse, coal yard, ice plant, general store, machine shop, and blacksmith shop. Among the structures built with bricks from the company are the Empire State Building, Rockefeller Center, the base of the Statue of Liberty, and the Brooklyn Academy of Music.
Brick manufacturing declined in the Great Depression, but recovered and stayed profitable into the 1960s. The Sayre and Fisher plant closed in 1970. While most of the industrial buildings were razed, the reading room and some housing buildings remain. The water tower has been restored.
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EDITORIAL
When researching artwork at other municipal hospitals, we discovered the work of Donald De Lue. Turns out we found another great artist and his work. Our H+H system has an amazing collection of artworks and we will feature more in the future.
Enjoy the story of the backwards brick at the Chapel. Next time you are there, see if you can locate it.
Judith Berdy
Funding Provided by: Roosevelt Island Operating Corporation Public Purpose Funds Council Member Ben Kallos City Council Discretionary Funds thru DYCD Text by Judith Berdy
CREDITS:
NEW YORK TIMES NEW YORK DAILY NEWS SMITHSONIAN AMERICAN ART MUSEUM WIKIPEDIA NYC PARKS DEPT. Thanks to Deborah Dorff for maintaining our website Edited by Deborah Dorff ALL PHOTOS COPYRIGHT RIHS. 2020 (C) PHOTOS IN THIS ISSUE (C) JUDITH BERDY RIHS
I cannot believe this Monday is our 150th issue!!! Send us your favorite articles and items that were in the first 149 issues of FROM THE ARCHIVES. Your comments are welcome too. We will feature them in issue #150. Issue #150 is on MONDAY.
Elizabeth Kolligs works on restoring Vertis Hayes’s “Pursuit of Happiness” at Harlem Hospital.Credit…Karsten Moran for The New York Times
At Harlem Hospital, Murals Get a New Life
From the NY Times (C): By Robin Pogrebin Sept. 16, 2012 This article is from 2012 and the mural pavilion is easy visible from the street
When the Works Progress Administration commissioned murals for Harlem Hospital Center in 1936, it easily approved the sketches submitted by seven artists, which depicted black people at work and at play throughout history. The hospital, however, objected, saying four of the sketches focused too much on “Negro” subject matter and that blacks “may not form the greater part of the Community” in years to come. Protesters rallied around the art, though, lodging complaints as high as President Franklin D. Roosevelt, and the murals ultimately prevailed.
Over the years, those wall paintings deteriorated or were obscured by plaster. Now they have been restored and brought front and center as part of a new, $325 million patient pavilion for the hospital, on Lenox Avenue at 135th Street that will be unveiled on Sept. 27. The WPA’s Federal Art Project, created in 1935 to support and employ artists, commissioned more than 500 murals for New York City’s public hospitals.
Harlem Hospital’s were perhaps the first major federal government commissions awarded to African-Americans.
The artists — the last of whom, Georgette Seabrooke, died last year — were not well known and their murals portrayed ordinary people going about their daily lives. Vertis Hayes’s “Pursuit of Happiness” panel traces the African diaspora from 18th-century African village life to slavery in America to 20th-century freedom; from agrarian struggles in the South to professional success in the industrialized North.
Ms. Seabrooke’s “Recreation in Harlem” depicts children roughhousing, a couple dancing, a group of women chatting. After decades of renovations and building changes, some of the murals had all but disappeared. But they were rediscovered in 2004 during a campus modernization project by the architecture firm HOK. At that point, all conservators could see of the Seabrooke mural was the left-hand corner where the artist had signed her name.
The new pavilion at Harlem Hospital will showcase murals.The murals’ new home is a 192,000-square-foot building — called the Mural Pavilion — that connects the existing Martin Luther King Jr. Pavilion to the Ron Brown Building. The Mural Pavilion contains new intensive care units, surgery rooms, clinics, imaging spaces and an emergency department.
Part of the hospital’s mandate to the architects was to save the murals, and the cost has been considerable, topping $4 million, which had to be raised privately. “We were going to preserve these national treasures,” said Deborah Thornhill, the hospital’s associate executive director for strategic planning. “They’re an important part of the history of the hospital, the community and the country.” Where the murals had been visible only to staff members and patients, now they have a gallery all to themselves, visible from the street.
Digital enlargements of three of the murals adorn the building’s 12,000-square-foot glass facade. These color images — printed on the glass using ceramic ink — are a city block long and five stories high. “All the murals tell wonderful stories,” said Chuck Siconolfi, HOK’s senior principal for health care. “We said, ‘Let’s go beyond displaying these murals and make them emblematic of the whole community and its role in American life.” “This was not only a cultural device but a therapeutic device,” he added.
“They are as much a tool in the delivery of care as any radiological device or any scalpel.” Because the digital copies of the murals are backlit, the facade essentially becomes a light box, “to the point,” Kenneth Drucker, HOK’s director of design, said jokingly, “where there could be some traffic accidents on the street.
The facade can also be appreciated from inside the building, the architects said, since column-free corridors are directly behind it, and patients can look into the gallery from adjoining waiting areas and hallways. “When you talk to people about the murals, they listen politely,” Ms. Thornhill said. “It’s only when they walk in the gallery and see how awesome they are that you get the ‘wow’ moment.”
The other murals include Charles Alston’s “Magic in Medicine” and “Modern Medicine,” a diptych that highlights both traditional and modern healing practices in Africa and the United States. A ritual Fang reliquary sculpture from Gabon, in Central Africa, for example, is juxtaposed with a microscope. Ms. Thornhill said Mr. Alston featured Myra Logan, whom he would later marry, as a nurse in the painting; she was an intern at the time and eventually became a surgeon. Mr. Alston also included the microbiologist Louis Pasteur and a surgeon modeled after Louis T. Wright, the first African-American physician appointed to the hospital and a friend of the artist. “The artist wanted to share the importance of African-American and white physicians working together toward a common goal,” Ms. Thornhill said.
More than 75 years ago, in response to the initial rejection of the murals by the hospital superintendent, the Harlem Artists Guild issued a statement with the Artists Union — copies of which were sent to Mayor Fiorello H. La Guardia and members of President Roosevelt’s cabinet in addition to the president himself. The hospital had rejected the murals, citing the extent of the “Negro subject matter,” the possible demographic change in the neighborhood in years to come and the hospital’s perception that the murals would offend some blacks. Publicity about the controversy aroused support for the artists. The hospital’s commissioner eventually reversed his decision after determining that “there was no offense to Negroes in these paintings.”
The current restoration of the murals was overseen by the city’s Public Design Commission, which questioned whether it was appropriate to display the murals so prominently because, as a matter of history, they had previously been located largely out of public view.
The surviving son of Ms. Hayes testified before the commission that it was not only appropriate “but the correction of an injustice to have hidden them in a back corridor,” Ms. Thornhill said. Although the hospital raised $4.2 million to restore the murals, it is still seeking funds to finish the work; Ms. Seabrooke’s mural — the most conservation intensive — still needs $400,000 worth of work. “It was a struggle for the artists to create them,” said Denise C. Soares, the hospital’s executive director. “And it was our honor to conserve their legacy.”
The new pavilion at Harlem Hospital will showcase murals. Credit…Karsten Moran for The New York Times
“MODERN SURGERY AND ANESTHESIA” ALFRED CIMI
Alfred Cimi’s Modern Surgery and Anesthesia is the only fresco in the Harlem Hospital Center. Crimi, an accomplished fresco artist trained in Italy, was the only non-African American commissioned for the project. A fresco is a challenging technique in which watercolor is applied rapidly to wet lime plaster. As it dries, the colors become fixed in the plaster. Modern Surgery and Anesthesia was created in an alcove in the former Physician’s Dining Room.
“RECREATION IN HARLEM”
GEORGETTE SEABROOKE
A detail of Georgette Seabrooke’s “Recreation in Harlem.”Credit…Karsten Moran for The New York Times
“IN PURSUIT OF HAPPINESS” VERTIS HAYES
Vertis Hayes’s eight-panel mural spans both walls of the first-floor corridor of the New Nurses Residence. The work chronologically follows an arc of African American history, transporting the viewer from Africa to America, from an African village to an American city peopled by African Americans in zoot suits and white nurse’s dresses. The mural also suggests the migration of African Americans from their agrarian lives in the South to the industrialized North, an experience of personal significance for the artist who himself migrated from Atlanta to New York. Hayes’s work deploys numerous motifs of progress, which, for many artists of the period, was symbolized by capitalism and Western civilization. In this mural, Hayes describes the irresistible force of progress symbolized by a giant cog. Most likely, he borrowed this symbol from another African American artist, Aaron Douglas, who uses a cog in his 1934 muralAspects of Negro Life, also created under the patronage of the WPA for the 135th Street branch of the New York Public Library.
Crocodile 1st century BC- 1st century AD Red granite
In ancient times crocodiles lived in great numbers on the banks of the Nile. Ancient Egyptians had an ambivalent attitude toward these animals, as they did toward many other species. Crocodiles were the most dangerous creatures in the Egyptian environment, and so embodied the essence of evil. On the other hand, they were also believed to incarnate the ba (soul) of the creator god Sobek. In this role crocodiles represented cosmic and regenerative powers, and might accompany deities such as Isis.
During Hellenistic and Roman times the cults of the Egyptian gods Isis and Serapis, along with elements of their Egyptian iconography including the crocodile, spread widely throughout the Mediterranean and reached Rome itself. Placed in the context of Roman art, crocodile images served primarily to evoke the Nilotic environment. This superb sculpture serves the same function today at the temple of Dendur.
Text from the Metropolitan Museum of Art label.
TEMPLE OF DENDUR METROPOLITAN MUSEUM (HE WAS GREETING VISITORS)
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My neighbor Anne Cripps asked me a question this morning about the Harlem Hospital murals. I hope this issue is the answer. The project was done in 2012 by Evergreene Studios. Working in an active hospital, which was under construction and restoration at the time revealed a wonderful art experience after many years of planning and restoration.
Harlem is a municipal hospital owned and operated by the NYC Health + Hospitals. This hospital, like Coler treats all persons without question of immigration status or ability to pay.
Judith Berdy
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 Roosevelt Island Historical Society WIKIPEDIA (C)
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For those of you who have not been commuting recently there are some images to remind you of your traveling world. You may work from home even longer after seeing these.
“Locomotive Standing,” a lithograph by Harold Faye (1910-1980), created while he was in the WPA’s Federal Art Program, 1939. Image courtesy of the General Services Administration and the Gibbes Museum of Art.
“Locomotive Standing,” a lithograph by Harold Faye (1910-1980), created while he was in the WPA’s Federal Art Program, 1939. Image courtesy of the General Services Administration and the Gibbes Museum of Art.
“Long Island Railroad,” an oil painting by Earl John Colville (1878-1970), created while he was in the WPA’s Federal Art Project, 1937. Image courtesy of the General Services Administration and Gregory Halpern.
“Wall Street Station,” a lithograph by Elizabeth Olds (1896-1991), created while she was in the WPA’s Federal Art Project, ca. 1935-1938. Image courtesy of the General Services Administration and the Baltimore Museum of Art.
Dox Thrash, Railroad Yard, ca. 1933-1934, aquatint, etching and pencil on paper, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Museum purchase, 1981.11.2
Jack Savitsky, Train in Coal Town, 1968, oil on fiberboard, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Gift of Herbert Waide Hemphill, Jr. and museum purchase made possible by Ralph Cross Johnson, 1986.65.137 Jack Savitsky’s Train in Coal Town depicts a coal-fired passenger train traveling between Pottsville and Silver Creek, two well-known coal towns in Pennsylvania. Behind the smoky plume of the locomotive stand a blue-gray coal breaker and eight mill houses—the very houses that make up the painting’s border. Savitsky conveys the sameness and unending work of the company town through his use of repetitive patterning and decorative elements. However, the lively colors and cheerful rural setting also reflect an energetic spirit within the miner community. Title Train in Coal Town Artist Jack Savitsky Date 1968 Location Smithsonian American Art Museum Luce Foundation Center 3rd Floor 22A Dimensions
Karl Fortess, Island Dock Yard, 1934, oil on canvas, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Transfer from the U.S. Department of Labor, 1964.1.94
Trains, trucks, and industrial buildings were what Karl Fortess envisioned when the Public Works of Art Project suggested that he depict “the American Scene.” The artist left his home in the picturesque artists’ colony of Woodstock, New York, and traveled ten miles to Kingston to make this painting. Kingston had long been a thriving Hudson River port town that supplied Pennsylvania coal and local brick, stone, and cement to New York City. The Depression slowed shipping, but a newly invented concrete mixture stimulated the local cement business. Fortess’s pictorial research at Kingston was demanding, as he noted, “Inclement weather and bad roads have made it impossible to go into Kingston as often as necessary.”
Fortess described his painting as “a view of the Kingston Point railway yard, showing track intersections, [a] station, freight trains, . . . shacks, and [a] background of buildings with a suggestion of a plain and barren winter trees [on] a grey day.” The artist emphasized the angular geometry of the structures. He played the predominant shadowy gray colors against spots of intense red, yellow, and blue. Trucks and trains hurry to and fro, but the action proceeds without the presence of a single visible human figure.
Theodore C. Polos, Train, n.d., lithograph, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Transfer from D.C. Public Library, 1967.72.210
Steve Ashby, Train in Landscape, n.d., carved wood with applied wood pieces, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Gift of Herbert Waide Hemphill, Jr., 1998.84.4
“I wake up with an idea that won’t let me get back to sleep. So I get up and make that idea.” Steve Ashby converted most of his ideas into objects in the early 1960s after his wife had died and he retired from his years of work as a farm hand and gardener. Ashby’s favorite subjects were figures and animals, often inspired by the agrarian activities of Fauquier County, Virginia, where his ancestors had been slaves. Some of his figures were wind-activated to perform various activities that ranged from the domestic to the pornographic. Others include parts that move when handled. Lynda Roscoe Hartigan Made with Passion: The Hemphill Folk Art Collection in the National Museum of American Art (Washington, D.C. and London: National Museum of American Art with the Smithsonian Institution Press, 1990) A descendant of Virginia slaves, Steve Ashby spent his entire life in Delaplane, Virginia. Ashby and his wife rented a former schoolhouse and enjoyed a modest lifestyle with their adopted son. Ashby had a lifelong interest in carving but began making the figures he called “fixing-ups” in the early 1960s, after his wife had passed away and his son no longer lived at home. These works were slapdash and highly expressive, comprising found objects and personal items such as clothing, jewelry, and hair. Ashby sometimes used photographic cutouts to create faces and frequently bestowed his sculptures with moving parts.
Reginald Marsh, Locomotives, Jersey City, 1934, oil on canvas mounted on fiberboard, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Bequest of Felicia Meyer Marsh, 1979.127.1 Locomotives, Jersey City is from a series of paintings Reginald Marsh did in the 1930s that focuses on modes of transportation. Here, four mighty trains power along the tracks, while the smoke and steam emitted from the smokestacks trail behind. In the distance, Marsh painted a cloud of smoke using a thin oil wash, creating a backdrop that is both delicate and dense. Together, the distant smoke clouds and those coming from the locomotives obscure much of the sky. The painting’s gritty colors reflect the urban environment of Jersey City, which was a manufacturing center in the years preceding World War II. Railroads, however, were the biggest employer and owned a third of the city’s nearly fifteen square miles. It was here that the national train networks terminated (Andrew Jacobs, “A City Whose Time Has Come Again,” New York Times, April 30, 2000).
Lily Furedi, Subway, 1934, oil on canvas, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Transfer from the U.S. Department of the Interior, National Park Service, 1965.18.43
In this painting Lily Furedi boldly did something that few dare to do: she looked at people on the subway. She took the viewpoint of a seated rider gazing down the car at her fellow passengers. The Hungarian-born artist knew of the subway riders’ customary avoidance of staring at one’s fellow riders; most people in her painting keep to themselves by hiding behind a magazine or newspaper, or by sleeping. Those who violate the unwritten rule do so furtively. A woman takes a quiet sidelong glance at the newspaper read by the man next to her, while a man steals a peek at a young woman applying lipstick. Only two women in the foreground, who obviously know each other, dare to look directly at each other as they talk companionably.
Furedi takes a friendly interest in her fellow subway riders, portraying them sympathetically. She focuses particularly on a musician who has fallen asleep in his formal working clothes, holding his violin case. The artist would have identified with such a New York musician because her father, Samuel Furedi, was a professional cellist.
Home time ,some news to read too I like this painting by artist Lily Furedi 1896-1969 ‘Subway’ painted 1939.
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EDITORIAL
Exciting things are happening at Coler. Thru a wonderful program ARTS IN MEDICINE, Coler will have a new three part mural painted in the main corridor. ARTS IN MEDICINE is funded by the Laurie M. Tisch ILLUMINATION FUND.
Members of the Coler residents, staff and others are on a committee to choose the artwork and theme. After approval the mural panels will be painted by the residents and then the panels will be applied to the walls.
By the first week in November their will be an unveiling and hopefully members of the island community will be able to attend. (The nursing home is still closed to outside visitors).
Coler is one facility that is receiving a mural this year. The others are Jacobi, Queens Hospital,Gouveneur Hospital, Seaview, Lincoln and Elmhurst Hospital
Judith Berdy
2019 Murals at Municipal Hospitals. Photo NYC H+H
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 TEXT AND IMAGE COURTESY OF THE ANNEX GALLERIES. All image are copyrighted (c) Roosevelt Island Historical Society SMITHSONIAN AMERICAN ART MUSEUM.
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Hayley Lever, East Gloucester, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Gift of Mr. and Mrs. William S. Benedict in memory of her parents, Sophie and Carl Boschwitz, 1977.110.2
HAYLEY LEVER
Lever was born in Bowden, South Australia on 28 September 1875, the son of Albion W. Lever. He excelled in painting classes at Prince Alfred College under James Ashton and on leaving school continued to study under Ashton at his Norwood art school. He was a charter member of the Adelaide Easel Club in 1892.
Lever’s maternal grandfather Richard Hayley, owner of Bowden Tannery, died in 1882,and the subsequent inheritance was sufficient for Lever to finance a trip to England in 1899 to[ further his career in painting. He moved to St. Ives, a fishing port and artistic colony on the Cornish coast. The town’s reputation as a centre for marine painting was largely due to Julius Olsson, who became a prominent British seascape painter. In St. Ives, Lever shared a studio with Frederick Judd Waugh, and studied painting techniques under the Impressionists Olsson and Algernon Talmage.
Lever also painted in the French port villages of Douarnenez and Concarneau, Brittany, directly across the English Channel from St. Ives. In late 1904 Lever made a trip back to Adelaide, where his mother was dying of tuberculosis. During his twelve-month stay he staged several exhibitions, painted seascapes and taught.
In 1906, upon returning to Europe, he married Aida Smith Gale in St. Ives’ Parish Church. In 1908, Lever did a series of paintings called Van Gogh’s Hospital, Holland expressing the profound influence he felt from that artist. In 1911, Ernest Lawson, an Impressionist painter, persuaded Lever to move to United States, saying he would have greater success there. Lever arrived in New York City in 1912 and painted views of the Hudson River, Times Square and Central Park. Upon discovering the American east coast, he painted in Gloucester, Massachusetts for several summers and at Marblehead, Massachusetts. Both artists developed spontaneous, bold painting styles, and Lever was accepted into Lawson’s circle of friends: Robert Henri, William Glackens, John Sloan and George Bellows.
He exhibited with this group regularly, but eventually left New York to settle in Massachusetts. From 1919 to 1931, Lever taught art classes at the Art Students League of New York where he maintained a Gloucester studio and often traveled to paint on Nantucket and Martha’s Vineyard. He offered this message to his students: “Art is the re-creation of mood in line, form and color. If I were confined to my own back yard for the rest of my life, I’d still have more pictures in my mind than I would have time to paint. Art is nothing but having a good time.” Lever went to Pittsburgh in 1922 as an art juror for the Carnegie International exhibition.
In 1924, Lever was commissioned to paint a portrait of the presidential yacht, USS Mayflower, which was subsequently presented to President Calvin Coolidge in the Cabinet Room of the White House. By 1930, Lever had moved to Caldwell, New Jersey, staying there until 1938, when he moved to Mount Vernon, New York. While living in New York, Lever painted marines and landscapes in New Jersey, New England, New York and the Canadian Maritimes.
Throughout his life, he traveled and painted extensively, including Nova Scotia and Grand Manan Island in Canada, The Bahamas and Florida, while often returning to Europe. In 1933, Hayley was named Director of the Green Mountains summer art school at Smugglers Notch in Stowe, Vermont. Lever also taught painting classes at the Forum School of Art in Bronxville, New York from 1934 to 1935.
In later life, Lever was inflicted with arthritis in his right hand, which prevented him from further travel and forced him to concentrate on still-life subjects instead. As his arthritis advanced, he taught himself to paint with his left hand. However, following the death of his wife Aida in 1949, Lever was confined to his home, where he continued to paint from 1953 until his death.
Hayley Lever died on 6 December 1958 at his home in Mount Vernon, New York. News of his death surprised some: Lever had all but disappeared from public view over two decades earlier, despite once having been enormously popular and critically acclaimed. Even so, he had continued to paint in the intervening years to such a degree that colleagues and dealers alike were confounded by the cache of unsold, and largely unseen, paintings in his Mount Vernon barn. Since his death, he has been recognized as one of the leaders of American Impressionism in the 20th century.
WIKIPEDIA
Hayley Lever, Interior with Table Top, ca. 1900, crayon on paper, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Gift of Nion McEvoy, 2014.39.4
Figures on a Dock by Hayley Lever (1876–1958) Oil on canvas 20 x 23⅞ inches Signed lower right: Hayley Lever Questroyal Fine Art
66th Street, Looking West, New York, 1935 by Hayley Lever (1876–1958) Oil on board 8⅞ x 11⅞ inches Signed and dated lower left: Hayley Lever 35; on verso label: 66th St Looking West. / Park Ave Corner Hayley Lever. / New York 1935 Questroyal Fine Art
Cornwall, England, 1905 by Hayley Lever (1876–1958) Oil on canvas 9½ x 12½ inches Signed and dated lower left: Hayley Lever / 1905 Questroyal Fine Art
Waterfall, Woodstock, NY by Hayley Lever (1876–1958) Watercolor on paper 14⅜ x 17⅜ inches (sight size) Questroyal Fine Art
East river, 1938 Watercolor on paper
Richard Hayley Lever is not considered an exceptional artist, although some of his paintings are very pretty and appear in the collections of important museums. They are rarely displayed, however. Perhaps his brightest moment came in 1924, when President Calvin Coolidge commissioned him to paint a picture of the presidential yacht, the Mayflower. The dour Coolidge always took an awkward photograph, and the one wherein he accepts the painting is the same. Born in Australia in 1876, Hayley Lever studied painting in England. He became captivated by the wild sea and countryside at Cornwall, a peninsula at the southwest corner of England. Just before World War I, he left England for New York where he became friendly with George Bellows, John Sloan, and other artists who comprised the “Ashcan School.”
Richard Hayley Lever 1876-1958 President’s Yacht “Mayflower” at Marblehead at Night, with President Coolidge Aboard Doyle Galleries
MOUNT VERNON, NEW YORK
LEFT The electric company building in Mt. Vernon, N.Y. appears in Hayley Lever’s paintings below. (Westchester County Historical Society) RIGHT City Scene, painting of downtown Mt. Vernon, N. Y. (Richard Hayley Lever, 1943) (www.1stdibs.com) Courtesy Through the Hourglass.com (c)
LEFT Hayley Lever’s painting of the Mt. Vernon, N. Y. train station, in the style of the Ashcan School, 1930s (www.1stdibs.com) RIGHT Railroad Yards, Mt. Vernon, N. Y. (Richard Hayley Lever, 1940s)
RICHARD HAYLEY LEVER, American (1876-1958), Lighthouse with Boats, oil on panel, unsigned., 12 x 15 3/4 inches
Island House 555 Main St. JOAN BROOKS #1 NINA LUBLIN #2 ALEXIS VILLEFANE #3
EDITORIAL
How did I find Hayley Lever? When we were publishing “Images of America-Roosevelt Island” back in 2003, one of our members Maria Harrison was working at Spanierman Galleries on East 58th Street. I saw the exhibit and have a copy of the book about the artist. I have been looking at the long neglected book on my shelf. Lever’s story and art are interesting, varied and remind me of my favorite impressionists.
There is a watercolor of the Queensboro Bridge included, with simple lines showing the south end of our island.
Reading about his life with surprise that he was virtually unknown in his day. After his death, a treasure trove of works were discovered over 2,000 in all.
Enjoy his story and his art.
JUDITH BERDY
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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 Deborah Dorff All image are copyrighted (c) Roosevelt Island Historical Society unless otherwise indicated
Hayley Lever Carol Lowrey Spanierman Gallery, LLC 2003 (c)
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The Blackwell Island Lighthouse is a mysterious remnant of Roosevelt Island’s distant past. Before the slender East River island came to be owned by the city in the 1820s, it was owned by the Blackwell family and hence bore the family name. The lighthouse was commissioned by the city, not the Coast Guard, in 1872. The tower was meant to help illuminate the New York City Insane Asylum for incoming boats. James Renwick, Jr., the architect of the island’s nearby Smallpox Hospital (which still stands in ruins) and St. Patrick’s Cathedral, designed the tower and it is likely that patients were used for labor.
The mystery which surrounds the lighthouse is that of two possible asylum inmates whose names are associated with it. Legend says that before the lighthouse was constructed, asylum patient John McCarthy was building a clay fort to defend against British invasion on the site. When the lighthouse was to be built, his fort was destroyed. Supposedly what happened next was that another patient, Thomas Maxey, a self-styled architect, mason, carpenter, civil engineer, philosopher, and philanthropist built the lighthouse tower. Despite this version of events, a plaque at the lighthouse’s base, which disappeared in the 1960s, credited the lighthouse construction to McCarthy, leading historians to conjecture that either Maxey and McCarthy were the same person or that neither ever even existed.
The lighthouse was decommissioned in the 1940s and became a landmark in the 1970s. Today the site is run by the Roosevelt Island Operating Corp. The grounds surrounding the tower are open to the public but the lighthouse tower remains closed.
LITTLE RED LIGHTHOUSE
The Little Red Lighthouse is perhaps one of New York City’s most famous. The vibrantly colored beacon sits underneath the George Washington Bridge in Fort Washington Park on the shore of the Hudson River. Officially named the Jeffery’s Hook Lighthouse, it was originally erected across the river in New Jersey in 1880 then moved its current location in 1921.
The 40-foot tall structure has 48 cast-iron steps inside which will take you all the way to the top for stunning views of the New York skyline and the Hudson River. Though its color is its most famous feature, the lighthouse wasn’t always red, and no one knows exactly when or why it was painted! The Little Red Lighthouse found its way into the heart’s of New Yorkers
In 1942 when writers Hildegarde Swift and Lynd Ward published The Little Red Lighthouse and the Great Gray Bridge. In 1931, the completion of the bridge made the lighthouse obsolete and the Coast Guard planned to demolish it. The book helped to endear the little lighthouse to the public who ultimately saved the lighthouse.
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EXECUTION ROCK
The ominously named Execution Rocks Lighthouse sits on a rocky stretch of reef in the Long Island Sound, not far from City Island and Hart Island in the Bronx. Legend has it that the moniker comes from executions carried out on the island by the British before the American Revolution. The British allegedly would chained prisoners to the rocks at low tide and let them drown when high tide came in, but there is no evidence to support this. The official origin story of the name comes from the treacherous, rocky terrain of the area which has led to many boats being “executed” as they tried to pass.
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ROMER SHOAL LIGHTHOUSE
The Romer Shoal Lighthouse, a landmarked structure placed at its current location in 1898. Before becoming a beacon in the water the steel structure was used at the Staten Island Lighthouse Depot to test fuel, wicks, bulbs and other equipment. Before the lighthouse was moved to its current spot, two other structures marked the location of the dangerous shoal, or hidden ridge, beneath the water. The Romer part of the name has been contested, though the most likely story is that it was named after Wolfgang William Romer, a Dutch military engineer and cartographer who mapped New York’s waterways in the 18th-century.
The lighthouse was manned by a crew of three men while in operation. It was automated in 1966. After a severe storm caused damage to the lighthouse in 1992, the Coast Guard wanted to replace it but Joe Esposito, keeper of the Staten Island Lighthouse at the time, wouldn’t allow it.
In 2011 the lighthouse was put up for auction and purchased by John Scalia. The lighthouse has sentimental value to Scalia who grew up looking at it from his home on Staten Island. It was also the first structure his immigrant parents saw as they journeyed to Ellis Island. Today, Scalia leads an organization of “Romer Keepers” who are working to restore the lighthouse which has sustained significant damage from the passage of time and storms like Superstorm Sandy. UNTAPPED CITIES
PRINCES BAY LIGHTHOUSE
The Princes Bay Lighthouse was erected in 1828 in response to increased shipping traffic in New York City. The original structure consisted of a rubblestone tower which reached a height of just over thirty feet tall. It was replace in 1864 by a new brownstone tower and a two-story keeper’s house was completed next to it in 1868. The two structures are connected by a fifteen-foot-long passageway, which doubled as an oil room. Material from the original house was used to build a new barn and stable.
In 1926, the lighthouse was sold to the Mission of the Immaculate Virgin in a public auction. The mission was a residence and school for orphans which already occupied the land surrounding the lighthouse. One way the mission customized the lighthouse to their needs and taste was by adding a statue of the Virgin Mary to the top of the tower. New York State and the Trust for Public Land bought the structure and surrounding land from the Archdiocese of New York in 1999 and it is now part of Mount Loretto Unique Area. The lighthouse has been renamed the John Cardinal O’Connor Lighthouse in honor of the Archbishop of New York who and it currently serves as the residence of the local forest ranger. UNTAPPED CITIES
KINGSBOROUGH LIGHTHOUSE
Located near the eastern tip of the peninsula below Sheepshead Bay in Manhattan Beach, the Kingsborough Lighthouse is the newest lighthouse in New York City. Built by the Coast Guard in 1990 and originally named the Marine and Academic Center, or MAC, the structure is part of the Kingsborough Community College campus. The flashing white light beams outward from 114 feet above sea level and shines out eleven miles.
The light is housed in a metal point at the top of a building which serves as space for classes and conferences, as well as cultural events and performances as part of On Stage at Kingsborough programming. One of the most popular series hosted at the site is the annual series of intimate jazz concerts, Jazz at the Lighthouse. With floor to ceiling windows which look out to the water, the lighthouse is a great place to enjoy a show.
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NEW DORP LIGHTHOUSE
This Staten Island lighthouse takes its name from the surrounding town which was a Dutch settlement. New Dorp is the anglicized version of the Dutch phrase for “New Town.” The lighthouse tower sticks out from the center of the keeper’s house to cast its light across Lower New York Bay and Sandy Hook, New Jersey.
When the lighthouse was built, the only other nearby establishment was the Moravian Cemetery to the east. The path through the woods to get to the lighthouse wasn’t even wide enough for a horse and wagon, so keepers would use the roads of the cemetery. The town became more populous through the decades and in 1964 the lighthouse was abandoned and boarded up. It sold at auction in 1974 to a local Staten Island resident, John Vokral, who restored the structure, though no light shines out from the tower anymore. It remains a private residence.
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SANDY HOOK LIGHTHOUSE
The Sandy Hook Lighthouse in New Jersey is the oldest continuously operating lighthouse in the United States. Serving as the entryway into New York Harbor, the lighthouse was built in 1764 on Sandy Hook, a stretch of land which juts out dangerously (for ships) into the Atlantic Ocean. In order to help pay for the purchase of land and construction of the lighthouse a lottery was held. 10,000 tickets were but the profit didn’t raise enough money to fun entire project. It did however allow for the purchase of four acres on Sandy Hook from its current owners at the time, Esik and Richard Hartshorne. A second lottery raise the remaining funds.
Since New Yorkers were the ones to raise the money, it was originally called the New York Lighthouse. The Sandy Hook Lighthouse was designated as a National Historic Landmark on its bicentennial in 1964 and transferred to the National Park Service in 1996. In 2014 it underwent a restoration and is open to the public for tours. Because of shifting sands, the lighthouse now sits more than a half mile inland from its original spot, and interesting reversal of shore erosion.
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Yesterday was a perfect day to head of to the Metropolitan Museum. The museum has admissions procedures very well organized. Quick temp check, no food or drinks allowed, not package check. Once you are in the museum there are one way signs in certain areas which means that you end up in area you usually do not visit. To get to the American Wing I travelled thru Egypt and had a brief rest at the Temple of Dendur. Some of the smaller rooms are shut off, but there is lots to see. My old favorites in the Impressionist galleries still are wonderful. Other areas have new exhibits and the 150th anniversary tells the stories of the donors and benefactors that filled the Met with treasures. In today’s world the stories are interesting and enlightening.
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
All image are copyrighted (c) Roosevelt Island Historical Society unless otherwise indicated
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