Spanierman Gallery, LLC is pleased to announce New York City: Over 100 Years of Art, an exhibition and sale, including works by Paul Ching-Bor, Colin Campbell Cooper, William Glackens, Arthur C. Goodwin, Childe Hassam, Vincent Janelli, Louis Aston Knight, Hayley Lever, George Luks, John Marin, Reginald Marsh, Jerome Myers, Edith Mitchill Prellwitz, Charles Green Shaw, John Sloan, Joseph Stella, Allen Tucker, John Whorf, Guy Carleton Wiggins, and many more. Over the course of the nineteenth century, New York City was transformed from a rural settlement of country lanes and quiet harbors to a bustling metropolis, with a richly diverse population, streets clanging with traffic, and architectural novelties, most notably the skyscraper, which became the symbol of the “new New York.”

As the city grew, so did its population of artists. However, throughout most of the century, the majority did not portray urban subjects. At mid-century, they focused on landscapes, celebrating the distinctive beauty of the country in panoramic scenes of wild and pastoral sites. In the 1870s and 1880s, they emulated European artistic trends, to which many were exposed firsthand during long sojourns in foreign art capitals and artists’ colonies. By the 1890s, the majority of our artists had returned home and had begun to focus on American motifs. Many preferred to paint the countrysides where they traveled or summered in styles influenced by the French Barbizon and Impressionist painters. Still others depicted figures, either in quiet interiors or in the sunlight. The city, with its crowds, noise, danger, and tall buildings, was a subject that most avoided. John Twachtman summed up the perspective of the day in his reference to New York as a “den of iniquity.” As the new century dawned, however, a few artists began to see New York as a source of inspiration and beauty.
Chief among them, Childe Hassam was not only one of the first to paint the city in earnest; as a leading exponent of Impressionism in America, he was also the finest Impressionist interpreter of New York, and his fascination with the subject lasted throughout his long career. Hassam usually painted the more immediately appealing aspects of New York life, depicting the squares where fashionable New Yorkers gathered and avenues enveloped in flurries of falling snow. Sunset View of New York Skyline from Brooklyn (1911), in this exhibition, is one of his few images of the city’s skyline. Painting from Brooklyn, he depicted a northwest view across the Hudson River at sunset, portraying the city romantically subdued to a harmonious silhouette. Other Impressionist artists followed Hassam’s lead in featuring the city’s older architectural forms as a way of recording them for posterity. At the same time, by capturing them as part of everyday New York life, their works reflected the blend of old and new that underscored the diversity of the city at the turn of the century. For example, in Hunter College, New York City (ca. 1915), Colin Campbell Cooper created an Impressionist depiction of the sunlit, wisteria-overgrown Neo-Gothic building where women from all ranks of life were 1given the opportunity to receive high school and college educations. Louis Vogt’s St. Paul’s Chapel (1892), a bird’s eye view of this Georgian church, built before the Revolutionary War, includes the crowds and carriages that never ceased passing by this pictureque chapel on the busy thoroughfare of lower Broadway (The chapel is the oldest public building in continuous use in Manhattan.) Hassam’s legacy is further reflected in the scenes of Manhattan streets and avenues in the snow by Guy Carleton Wiggins. Manhattan Winter (1934) exemplifies Wiggins’s love of days when whirling snowflakes and a hazy atmospheric filter gently softened the severe geometry of the city’s skyscrapers and office buildings.

Whereas the Impressionists tended to seek genteel themes in their urban depictions, in the early twentieth century a group of realist artists known as the Ashcan School were drawn to the vitality and character of New York life in all of its varied aspects. Instead of shying away from the gritty and chaotic qualities of the city, they painted smoky industrialized harbors, immigrant life in tenement districts, lively cafés and theaters where the public gathered, and the ordinary people of the city carrying on their everyday lives. The main exponents of this new approach were the Eight, a group of painters led by Robert Henri, who felt that New York artists should not escape to the country to find subjects. “We are not here to do what has already been done,” Henri said, and he urged his friends to paint what they saw around them in the belief that the best art must come from direct experience, not from copying what artists have done in the past. A member of the Eight, George Luks is best known for images of the streets and slums of New York’s Lower East Side. In The Hansom Cab Driver (mid-1920s), he created a sympathetic, unidealized portrait of a kindly, ruddy-faced livery driver who wears a white top hat, a dark coat with large brass buttons, and a dashing white scarf. Other Ashcan works in the show include John Sloan’s pen-and-ink drawing of a job applicant seeking work at Christmas time (1910), Jerome Myers’s ink and watercolor drawings of New York shoppers Grocery Shopping on 1st. Ave (ca. 1930s) and bathers at Rockaway Beach (ca. 1920s), Hayley Lever’s ink and watercolor images of the New York waterfront Peck Slip, New York City (ca. 1915-30), and James Daugherty’s lively caricaturesque charcoal drawing, Hester Street, New York City (1933).

The Ashcan School began the aesthetic appreciation of New York that has continued ever since. For modernist painters, the city symbolized the dynamic spirit of an age of progress and industrial expansion. Among the momentous works of the new age was Joseph Stella’s five-paneled, Cubo-Futurist-inspired New York Interpreted (ca. 1920-22; Newark Museum, New Jersey), which captured the quintessential aspects of the New York experience in the modern era. A study for this work in oil, pastel, watercolor, ink, and pencil, which is divided into vertical lines as in Stella’s panel portraying skyscrapers, is featured in the exhibition. Here the surface, worked with flowing blended colors and energetic vertical rhythms, conveys the excitement this Italian-born artist felt for the city that he had made his home. John Marin’s exuberant, abstract watercolor Buildings, Downtown, New York (ca. 1925) convey the artist’s desire to capture “life in motion” and express the generative forces at work in New York City. Other modernist artists used city forms as the inspiration for abstract arrangements, as may be seen in Allen Tucker’s Apartment Building, New York City (ca. 1920). New York’s skyline continued to fascinate artists as is reflected in Reginald Marsh’s watercolor New York City (ca. 1931), Vincent Janelli’s crisp, realist New York Skyline from Newark, New Jersey (1934), and Edith Mitchill Prellwitz’s atmospheric Brick and Vapor, New York City (1939).

Aware of the rich legacy of artistic representations of New York, artists to this day have sought to find the means to record their emotive responses to the city in their work. Dedicated to this goal since moving to New York in 1996, the Chinese-born artist Paul Ching-Bor creates watercolors of urban architecture as a vehicle for expressing the city’s intensity, loneliness, ambition, and drive. In his images of the Queensborough Bridge at Fifty-Ninth Street and the East River, the subjects which have lately gripped him the most, Ching-Bor creates unusual watercolors in which dark, heavy surfaces, pierced with soft, streaked, and glimmering light, and the vertical thrusts, countered by plunging diagonals, are diagrams of the city as much as of the human psyche. Unlike the works of Marin and other predecessors, for Ching-Bor, the bridge is less a symbolic motif than a form that coalesces with his subconscious and direct responses to the city.

The images that artists have created of New York over the course of a little more than a century have taken an important role in the American artistic tradition, shaping our vision of our greatest and most complex city and of our nation’s identity. Robert Shackelton stated in 1917: “Never in history has there been such a magnificent city.” Indeed, the strength of these depictions lies in both their historical evocations and in the continued vibrancy of New York today.