As seen in the J/F issue of

Previewing Upcoming Events, Sales and Auctions of Historic Fine Art

INDUSTRIAL

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SUBLIME

Modernism and the Transformation of New Yorks Rivers, 19001940, at the Hudson River Museum
by James D. Balestrieri

ndustrial Sublime is such a simple, descriptive, useful idea that it deserves to be broadcast far and wide in any appraisal of American artespecially art in New York Cityfrom 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 wordawe-inspiring and terrifyingto 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 Yorks waterways, especially the Hudson River, over time. Confining

Giord Beal (1879-1956), On the Hudson at Newburgh, 1918. Oil on canvas, 36 x 58 in. The Phillips Collection, Washington, D.C. Estate of Giord Beal, courtesy Kraushaar Galleries, New York. 45

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 Beals On the Hudson at Newburgh, painted in 1918, the Hudson Highlandscelebrated by Hudson River School painters like Thomas Cole and John Frederick Kensettrise 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 uneaseperhaps, admittedly, the product of hindsightas men depart on man-made contrivances to wage man-made war. Purpose is at the heart of Jonas Lies 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 citys 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. 46

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. Lies 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 twainperhaps a river spiritdominates Railroad Yards, Winter, Weehawken, by Martin Lewis. Like an Easter Island head, this needle, finger, phallus, of the Weehawken Rocks, the beginning of the Palisadesa primordial intrusion of basaltic cliffs that line the lower Hudsonstands 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 stones dominance is entirely undermined by the way it is broken and leaning away from the rail yards, river and city. Lewiss 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. 47

Aaron Douglas (1899-1979), Triborough Bridge, 1936. Oil on canvas, 28 x 32 in. Courtesy Amistad Research Center, New Orleans, Louisiana.

has somehow split the rock. There is a strong suggestion that natures 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 OKeeffes 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, OKeeffe 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 Colemans 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 worlds tallest building appears to be through the spire, by zeppelin. In the foreground, left to right: a plumbers 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 plumbers 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. 49

Charles Rosen (1878-1950), The Roundhouse, Kingston, New York, 1927. Oil on canvas, 301/ x 40 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 Perrines Palisades is both a warning and an antidote. Perrine, who lived in a small house on the Palisades, remained committed to the Hudson Rivers 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 Perrines painting, even as you look up at the Empire State Building in Colemans 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 Andersons 1937 play, High Tor, the main character, a free spirit named Van from an old Dutch family owns some unspoiled landcalled High Torabove 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.

Thats the Chevrolet factory, four miles down, and straight across, thats Sing Sing. Right from here you cant tell one from another; get inside, and whats the difference? Youre in there, and you work, and theyve got you. If youre 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 whats left from demolition. Beside them, newer, boxy, functional apartment buildings already in need of repair or replacement. Across the braided current, the Palisades rise. Were here to stay, the rocks say, and theyalong with High Torare, now that theyre protected, for as long as they stay that way. Industrial Sublime: Modernism and

the Transformation of New Yorks 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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