Industrial Sublime: Modernism and the Transformation of New York's Rivers, 1900-1940, at the Hudson...

8/13/2019 Industrial Sublime: Modernism and the Transformation of New York's Rivers, 1900-1940, at the Hudson River Mus…

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As seen in theJ/F issue of

Previewing Upcoming Events, Sales and Auctions of Historic Fine Art


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INDUSTRIAL


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“Industrial Sublime” is such

a simple, descriptive, useful

idea that it deserves to be

broadcast far and wide in any appraisal

of American art—especially art in

New York City—from 1900 to the

onset of World War II. The termoffers a way of looking at American

painting in the 20th century as a

continuation rather than a break from

the nature-centered 19th century,

typied by the Hudson River School.

It embraces artists and styles ranging

from American impressionism through

modernism and precisionism and

historical moments from the Gilded

Age, through World War I, the Jazz

Age and the Great Depression. Seeing

the rapid rise of the urban, industrialnation as “sublime” allows the two

edges of the word—awe-inspiring and

terrifying—to inform and inuence

one another. “Sublime” hearkens back

to 19th-century canvases that sought to

capture soaring American landscapes

in the East and West, but “Industr ial

Sublime” contains its opposi te: the

growing suspicion throughout the

period of the grinding effects of

industrial growth on humanity and the

environment.

Recent exhibitions at the Hudson

River Museum have focused on

changes in artistic conceptions of

New York’s waterways, especially the

Hudson River, over time. Conning

SUBLIME

Modernism and theTransformation of NewYork’s Rivers, 1900-

1940, at the HudsonRiver Museum

by James D. Balestrieri

Gifford Beal (1879-1956), On the Hudson

at Newburgh, 1918. Oil on canvas, 36 x 58½

in. The Phillips Collection, Washington, D.C.

Estate of Gifford Beal, courtesy Kraushaar

Galleries, New York.


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the geography to this vital economic ribbon links

city and country, present and past, the man-

made and the natural worlds. How artists saw the

Hudson River tel ls us a great deal about how,

at var ious times, America saw itself . The broken

surface of the restless Hudson, tidal and brackish,

salt and fresh, becomes a mirror for American

aspiration and American doubt.

In the background of Gifford Beal’s On theHudson at Newburgh, painted in 1918, the Hudson

Highlands—celebrated by Hudson River School

painters like Thomas Cole and John Frederick

Kensett—rise in lavender light, solemn and

silent as, at right, men march to the waiting

train to ship out for the elds of France in

tight, faceless, automaton formation. Multistory

commercial buildings and row houses, as well

as the locomotive and steamship at anchor,

effectively bar the people from the hills across

the river. Seeing the family from the back, the

woman holding one child while another stands

at her side, denies us access to their emotions,

which one would expect range from patriotism

to the very real fear that these men marching

off may not return. The palette is sentimental

but limited and the pastels lend a subtle twilight

air of unease—perhaps, admittedly, the product

of hindsight—as men depart on man-madecontrivances to wage man-made war.

Purpose is at the heart of Jonas Lie’s Path of

Gold . Sun breaking through a gray sky paints a

bright ribbon on the river. Nothing of nature

impedes the progress of the tugs, barges and

lighters headed up and down the East River to

the factories, the city’s wharfs , the sea. The nature

of the river itself is subordinate to its utility

as an artery of commercial activity. Billows of

smoke from the docks and buildings that line

Jonas Lie (1880-1940), Path of Gold , ca. 1914. Oil on canvas, 34 x 36 in. Collection of the High Museum of Art,Atlanta, Georgia. J. J. Haverty Collection, 49.40.


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both shores defy the cold of the day. The span of the

Brooklyn Bridge resembles the gentle curvature ofthe ear th. This is the world. The paint strokes and

drawing are short, quick, layered. This is life in the

big city. Lie’s two other works in the exhibition

suggest a city at rest, bathed in mystery, and a city

at the level of the river that runs on the unromantic

labor of those who ply her. The three together form

a powerful triptych in the exhibition.

A nature god cleft in twain—perhaps a river

spirit—dominates Railroad Yards, Winter, Weehawken,

by Martin Lewis. Like an Easter Island head, this

needle, nger, phallus, of the Weehawken Rocks, the

beginning of the Palisades—a primordial intrusion of

basaltic cliffs that line the lower Hudson—stands in

shadow, mute above the might of industry splayed out

below and before it. Cold, blue cold. The sun strains

to shed diffuse light. No gures appear from near to

far, yet the stone’s dominance is entirely undermined

by the way it is broken and leaning away from the

rail yards, river and city. Lewis’s point of view infers

that the tiny electrical pole beside the tracks below

George Ault (1891-1948), From Brooklyn Heights, ca.1925-

28. Oil on canvas, 30 x 20 in. Collection of the Newark

Museum, Newark, New Jersey, purchase of The General

Fund, 1928, 28.1802.

Glenn Coleman (1887-1932), Empire State Building,

ca. 1930-32. Oil on canvas, 84 x 48 in. Collection of Max Ember.


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has somehow split the rock. There is a

strong suggestion that nature’s moment

has passed, but also an Ozymandias

warning about vanity and hubris.

Far and near, close and distant.

Human beings dwarfed or absent in

a sublime natural landscape. Scale.

Hallmark of the Hudson River School.

Far and near, close and distant. Human

beings dwarfed or absent in a sublime

industrial landscape. Scale.

Georgia O’Keeffe’s East River from

the Shelton, painted from her room on

the 13th oor, forces perspective to nd

the geometry of mystery and terror

in the urban scene. In the foreground,

low buildings loom, mirrored through

smoke across a blood-red river. Above,

the corona of a dark sun sends feeble

rays through daylight gloom. The

faint circles that surround the sun,

reections in the hotel window, are

abstract tears. Shortly after she painted

this, O’Keeffe put New York in her

rearview mirror and headed for New

Mexico.

Precisionist, even art deco in the

top three-fourths of Empire State

Building , Glenn Coleman’s emphasis on

line, plane, and pattern in the clouds,

zeppelin and skyscrapers that dominate

the canvas gives way to an earlier style

and design reminiscent of Maurice

Prendergast in the layers of life that

he crams into the foreground at

bottom. The sun obscures most of the

windows in the Empire State Building.

The clouds are regular and identical,

crullers turned out on an assembly

line. The only way to reach the world’s

tallest building appears to be through

the spire, by zeppelin.

In the foreground, left to right:

a plumber’s shop, with toilet seats

artfully arranged around a porcelain

throne in the window. “EER” in Old

English: “BEER.” A corner saloon.

Beside that, a space, a ramshackle

fence that may have delineated a

small garden. Behind that, a solid

construction fence. Long wooden

props hold up the walls of the

plumber’s shop, saloon and apartments

above, cracked in the demolition. The

space reveals the 33rd Street station

on the old elevated train, a faded

Victorian beauty with its archways

and curlicues and slatted cupola. A

steam crane with a wooden shed, like

something out of Mike Mulligan and

His Steam Shovel , sits at a crazy angle,

in stark contrast to the tall, sleek

model at middle left. A man watches,

slumped on the fence. Silhouettes of

passengers stand behind the second

fence. Then, at r ight, a sign in Greek

and part of a sign in what looks to be

Hebrew. The Hot Dog man, beside

his cart, waits for absent, vanished

Aaron Douglas

(1899-1979),

Triborough Bridge,

1936. Oil on canvas,

28¼ x 32½ in.

Courtesy Amistad

Research Center,

New Orleans,

Louisiana.


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Van Dearing Perrine (1869-1955), Palisades, 1906. Oil on canvas, 41 x 68 in. Susan Perrine King and Shawn King,

executors Van Dearing Perrine Estate.

Martin Lewis

(1881-1962),

Railroad Yards,

Winter, Weehawken,

ca. 1917. Oil on

canvas, 21 x 25 in.

Courtesy The Old

Print Shop, Inc., New

York, New York.


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customers. The clues are all there.

This is an immigrant neighborhood

making way for the modern, which

is as remote as a cruller cloud.

Between the viewer and the tenement

neighborhood stands a beautiful

wrought iron gate and fence and a bit

of grass at lower left, another symbol

of an about-to-be-lost past, an already

fenced in, zoo-like past, about to

be transformed. The sign in Greek,

translated, means something close

to the word “squeeze” or “tighten,”

which nicely describes the dynamic.

By 1936, the year Aaron Douglas

painted Triborough Bridge , the Great

Depression was half a decade old. If

barriers existed between the majority

of New Yorkers and the Empire State

Building, here generations of humanity

are conned and surrounded, restricted

to an island between a road and a

bridge ramp, while above, the tracks

of the Elevated Railway bar any view

of the sky. Bare trees and muted colors

reinforce the lonely feeling that none

of these people know one another.

Each is an island. The painting is an

emblem of claustrophobic alienation.

Going back now, to 1906, Van

Dearing Perrine’s Palisades is both a

warning and an antidote. Perr ine, who

lived in a small house on the Palisades,

remained committed to the Hudson

River’s natural splendor throughout

the Industrial Sublime period. His

sketch club offered a refuge for many of

the artists whose works appear in this

exhibition. You look up at the Palisades

in Perrine’s painting, even as you look

up at the Empire State Building in

Coleman’s canvas. The line of trees

at the base of the cliffs, coming to an

arrow just left of center, is an invitation,

and the faces in the rocks, sunlit as if by

re, retain all of their majesty.

But industry coveted the rock of

the Palisades: good city-building stuff.

Artists and others rose to oppose

exploitation and development. In

Maxwell Anderson’s 1937 play, High Tor ,

the main character, a free spirit named

Van from an old Dutch family owns

some unspoiled land—called “High

Tor”—above the Hudson. A New York

City quarry wants it. On a cliff looking

down on the Hudson, he observes,

Charles Rosen (1878-1950), The Roundhouse, Kingston, New York , 1927. Oil on canvas, 301 / x 40¼ in. Collection of the James A. Michener Art

Museum, Doylestown, Pennsylvania, gift of the John P. Horton Estate.


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“That’s the Chevrolet factory, four miles down,

and straight across, that’s Sing Sing. Right from here you can’t tell one from another; get inside,

and what’s the difference? You’re in there, and you work,

and they’ve got you. If you’re in the factory

you buy a car, and then you put in your time

to pay for the goddamn thing. If you get in a hurry

and steal a car, they put you in Sing Sing rst,

and then you work out your t ime. They graduate

from one to another, back and forth, those guys,

paying for cars both ways.”

America may be an industrialized

nation, but industry is no longer

sublime. The factory and the prison are

one in design and intent.

When you nish looking at the

paintings in Industrial Sublime and

leave the Hudson River Museum,

walk over and look at the river.

In the foreground, an elegant red

brick smokestack and power plant

that might have been in any of the

paintings in the exhibition. Distinctly

non-utilitarian, romanesque ornaments

place it early in the industrial sublime,

in the 1910s or ’20s. Defunct now, just

a shell, it would need landmark status

to save what’s left from demolit ion.

Beside them, newer, boxy, functional

apartment buildings already in need

of repair or replacement. Across the

braided current, the Palisades rise.

We’re here to stay, the rocks say, and

they—along with High Tor—are, now

that they’re protected, for as long as

they stay that way.

Industrial Sublime: Modernism and

the Transformation of New York’s Rivers,

1900-1940 , will be on view at theHudson River Museum, Yonkers, New

York, through January 17, 2014, then

at the Norton Museum of Art, West

Palm Beach, Florida, March 20 to

June 22, 2014.

Richard Hayley

Lever (1875-1958),

High Bridge over the

Harlem River , 1913.

Oil on canvas, 50

x 60 in. Collection

of Kristine and

Marc Granetz.

Photography by

Spanierman Gallery,

LLC, New York, NewYork.

About James D. Balestrieri

Jim Balest rier i isdirector of J. N.Barteld Galleries

in New York City.He also writes theScottsdale Art Auctioncatalogue and, duringthe sale, can be foundscreaming out phone

bids. Jim has written plays, verse, prose, andscreenplays. He has degrees from Columbiaand Marquette universities, attended the American Film Inst itute and has an MFAin Playwriting from Carnegie-Mellon. Hehas an excellent wife and three enthusiasticchildren who, he insists, will work in nance or science, though they are taking anunhealthy interest in the arts.

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