As seen in the
January/February issue of
Previewing Upcoming Events, Sales and Auctions of Historic Fine Art
INDUSTRIAL
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SUBLIME
Modernism and the
Transformation of New
York’s Rivers, 19001940, at the Hudson
River Museum
by James D. Balestrieri
“I
ndustrial 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 term
offers a way of looking at American
painting in the 20th century as a
continuation rather than a break from
the nature-centered 19th century,
typified 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, industrial
nation as “sublime” allows the two
edges of the word—awe-inspiring and
terrifying—to inform and influence
one another. “Sublime” hearkens back
to 19th-century canvases that sought to
capture soaring American landscapes
in the East and West, but “Industrial
Sublime” contains its opposite: 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. Confining
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 manmade and the natural worlds. How artists saw the
Hudson River tells us a great deal about how,
at various 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 the
Hudson 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 fields 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-made
contrivances 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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George Ault (1891-1948), From Brooklyn Heights, ca.192528. Oil on canvas, 30 x 20 in. Collection of the Newark
Museum, Newark, New Jersey, purchase of The General
Fund, 1928, 28.1802.
both shores defy the cold of the day. The span of the
Brooklyn Bridge resembles the gentle curvature of
the earth. 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, finger, 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 figures 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
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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Aaron Douglas
(1899-1979),
Triborough Bridge,
1936. Oil on canvas,
28¼ x 32½ in.
Courtesy Amistad
Research Center,
New Orleans,
Louisiana.
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 floor, forces perspective to find
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,
reflections in the hotel window, are
abstract tears. Shortly after she painted
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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 right, 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
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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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.
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
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Building, here generations of humanity
are confined 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. Perrine, 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
fire, 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,
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, New
York.
“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 first,
and then you work out your time. 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 finish 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 demolition.
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 the
Hudson 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.
About James D. Balestrieri Jim Balestrieri is
director of J. N.
Bartfield Galleries
in New York City.
He also writes the
Scottsdale Art Auction
catalogue and, during
the sale, can be found
screaming out phone
bids. Jim has written plays, verse, prose, and
screenplays. He has degrees from Columbia
and Marquette universities, attended the
American Film Institute and has an MFA
in Playwriting from Carnegie-Mellon. He
has an excellent wife and three enthusiastic
children who, he insists, will work in
finance or science, though they are taking an
unhealthy interest in the arts.
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