Chen Yao
The spectacle of New York City was an important subject for American visual artists, as it was in the literary works of William Dean Howells and Theodore Dreiser about turn-of-the-century American urban life. This spectacle was best represented in the works of Childe Hassam and other American Impressionists as well as by John Sloan and his fellow artists of the Ashcan School. Even though there were considerable differences in the subject matter, techniques, and com-positions of these two schools, their works provides important visual examples for our understanding of the social and cultural context of fin-de-siècle New York. I will illustrate the two artistic styles relative to representing the spectacle of a newly modernized New York City, and one emerging visual element (the skyscraper) that began to permeate these visual artworks.
Pastoral Realism
During the early days of the Progressive Era in the U.S. (1890s to 1920s), in contrast to the vast number of depictions of New York City in overseas travel sketches circulating in the mass media, the urban scene was quite a rare subject for American artists who were still obsessed with an entrenched utopian idea of an agricultural society. Intellectuals held ambiguous feelings about New York City; some treated the city as a positive symbol of American values while others considered the negative effects of its social segregation and disorder. The former was demonstrated in the theories of Frederic C. Howe, while the latter was pre-sented in the literary works of Henry James.
Numerous articles published in Scribner’s and Harper’s during the turn of the century began to provide literary evidence of the increasing emphasis on the beauty of the urban scene and the pleasures of promenading.1 Impressionist and Realist painters who once studied in Europe and worked as occasional illustra-tors would all have been quite familiar with the idea of the flâneur and would have also considered the visual record of the urban scene as the indispensable subject of their oeuvre. As Sadakichi Hartmann wrote in 1900, “any person with his eyes open, and with sympathy for the time, place, and conditions in which he lives, has only to take a walk or to board a trolley, to find a picture worthy
1 See Mariana G. Van Rensselaer, “Fifth Avenue with Pictures by Childe Hassam,”
Century Magazine 47 (Nov. 1893): 5–18; Royal Cortissoz, “Landscape of Man-hattan,” Scribner’s Magazine 18, no. 5 (Nov. 1895): 531–43; H.G. Dwight, “An Impressionist’s New York,” Scribner’s Magazine 38, no.5 (Nov. 1905): 544–55; and Harrison Rhodes, “New York: City of Romance,” Harper’s Weekly 119, no. 714
of depiction almost in every block he goes,” and he encouraged local artists to discover the beauty of New York.2
By the end of the 19th centu-ry, American Impressionists, as exemplified in the work of Chil-de Hassam and William Merritt
Chase, preferred a poetic rendering of the urban scene, which corresponded with the burgeoning City Beautiful Movement, wherein New York City was depicted as a lovely and harmonious environment where people could stroll, as in an urbanized Arcadia.3
Chase became a frequent visitor to Prospect Park after moving to Brooklyn in 1886. His series of paintings of Prospect Park were considered an important mile-stone for American Impressionism. Chase was also the first metropolitan artist to appreciate the hitherto almost untouched field of landscape in and about the city. The mother and child theme, with its notion of privacy and intimacy, is reminiscent of Claude Monet’s pictures of his garden. As an urban environment, the “big city” park is at once public and private, but Chase stresses the privacy (Fig. 1). Chase hardly included men in his images of New York’s parks, so these urban landscapes were treated as domesticated nature. If Frederick Law Olmsted was the designer of Central Park, Chase’s works undoubtedly endowed the park with the artistic aura of a public leisure space. Charles De Kay confirmed the innovation of Chase’s effort in depicting the city park, in his 1891 article “Mr.
Chase and Central Park,” where he wrote that he considered that Chase had succeeded in discovering Central Park, not geographically or topographically, but artistically.4
There was no other American Impressionist more enthusiastic in depicting the cityscape of New York than Childe Hassam. In 1889, when Hassam finished his studies in Paris and returned to the United States, he did not go back to his home town of Boston but settled instead in New York City. For the artist in 1870s New York, the heart of the city was the area that extended north from Tenth Street to Madison Square and west from Fourth to Sixth Avenues. The most
2 Sadakichi Hartmann, “A Plea for the Picturesqueness of New York,” Camera Notes 4 (October 1900): 91–97.
3 See Childe Hassam, “New York the Beauty City,” New York Morning Sun, February 23, 1913, sec. 4, 16, and Ulrich W. Hiesinger, Childe Hassam: American Impressionist (Munich and New York: Prestel, 1994), 181.
4 Charles De Kay, “Mr. Chase and Central Park,” Harper’s Weekly 35 (May 1891):
Fig. 1. William Merritt Chase, Park in Brook-lyn, ca. 1887. Parrish Art Museum, Water Mill, NY, Littlejohn Collection.
important landmarks of the art com-munity located within these boundaries included the National Academy of De-sign at 23rd Street and Fourth Avenue, the Metropolitan Museum at 14th Street and Sixth Avenue (where it was in 1879), the 10th Street Studio Building west of Fifth Avenue, the Century Club at 109 East 15th Street, the Union League Club on Madison Square, and the Lotos Club on Fifth Avenue at 22nd Street. Has-sam’s New York residence was on the corner of 17th street and Fifth Avenue, which was not far from Union Square and Madison Square.5
Many of the urban subjects that Hassam created between 1889 and 1893 were published to accompany Van Rens-selaer’s article “Fifth Avenue with Pictures by Childe Hassam” for The Century (see footnote 1), which included Washington Arch, Spring (Fig. 2). The painting depicts the city awakening after a chilly winter. Trees with scattered foliage in the middle ground were applied to distinguish the high-class fashionable lady and other strollers at right from the workers and cabdrivers at left. The well-dressed woman rambling around made a striking contrast with the dustman and wag-oner. In Hassam’s early work in Boston and Paris, as well as in his urban scenes after settling down in New York City, we can see that the artist concentrated on the urban dweller’s personal experience in the process of intense building and ur-banization. The eye-level foreground description presented Hassam as a witness on the scene, observing the specific details of urban life and all its amusements. A similar scene of urban promenading is recorded in Hassam’s Sunday on Fifth Av-enue. We can see crowds of people flocking to the Avenue, probably just leaving church. A man on the left is doffing his hat in salute while a mother and child head toward the viewer. Interestingly, this depicted moment corresponds quite well with a literary narration of a Sunday by James D. McCabe, writing almost twenty years previously. In Lights and Shadows of New York Life, McCabe wrote:
“The churches close their services near about the same hour, and then each pours
5 On the importance of urban cityscapes and industrialization in turn-of-the-cen-tury American art, see Patricia Hills, “The City, Industry, and Urban Life,” in Turn-of-the-Century America: Paintings, Graphics, Photographs, 1890–1910 (New York: Whitney Museum of American Art, 1977), 145–61. See also Linda Hene-field Skalet, The Market for American Painting in New York, 1870–1915, PhD diss.
Fig. 2. Childe Hassam, Washington Arch, Spring, 1890. The Phillips Collection, Washington, DC.
its throng of fashionably dressed people into the avenue. The congregations of distant churchgoers all find their way to the avenue, and for about an hour after church the splendid street presents a very attractive spectacle.”6 In this painting, the detail worthy of most attention is the vague church pinnacle in the distance, which can be recognized as St. Patrick’s Cathedral, one of the most prestigious churches at that time. Just like Hassam’s preference for including the Congrega-tional Church in his New England scenes, religious symbolism is still reflected as an engrained Anglo-Saxon Protestant ethos that Hassam treasured quite deeply.
Hassam’s Late Afternoon, New York, Winter (Fig. 3), now in the collection of the Brooklyn Museum, belongs to a series of stylistically transitional works for Hassam. The skyscraper in the distance points to his predilection for this new urban symbol. If we compare this snow scene with Alfred Stieglitz’s photographs or Everett Shinn’s snow scenes, we notice that Hassam somehow aestheticizes and alleviates the chilly weather by employing pale blue or pure black color against the light background, with sporadic dabs of artificial light, transforming a medley of dots and dashes into a perfect harmony. He displayed a dreamlike snowy fairyland and created an ensemble that makes a perfect visual parallel to Van Rensselaer’s descriptions of the city in her essay “Picturesque New York”:
“You stand at the corner of Twenty-third Street. Here you will be happiest in winter, for then a carpet of snow may give a key-note of color repeated in the white fronts of certain big shops. This is not a beautiful view, but it is a pictur-esque one, and picturpictur-esque in a bold, careless, showy way quite characteristic of New York.”7 For Hassam, a snow scene could relieve the bleak social side during the fin-de-siècle and reveal a pastoral urban scene instead.
Both Chase and Hassam’s early New York scenes were seeking a pastoral re-alism when depicting this metropolis. Both the inclusion of green spaces, such as parks, and the visibility of church pinnacles serve as a buffer to ameliorate the
6 James D. McCabe, Lights and Shadows of New York Life; or, The Sights and Sen-sations of the Great City (Philadelphia: National Publishing Co., 1872), 446. See also William H. Gerdts, Impressionist New York (New York: Artabras, 1996), 48.
7 Mariana Griswold Van Rensselaer, “Picturesque New York,” Century Magazine Fig. 3. Childe Hassam, Late Afternoon, New York,
Win-ter, 1900. Brooklyn Museum of Art. Dick S. Ramsay Fund.
potential dangers of the urban environment and provide the enclosed safety of a domestic-like urban experience. There were few lowlife denizens or threatening and bold gazes from strangers in their paintings. With the beautiful ideal of spa-cious urban space filled with air and sunshine, individuals could still realize their singularity and enjoy their privacy without showing any distinct alienation or social dissonance as was frequently depicted in the works of French Impression-ist painters such as Edgar Degas and Gustave Caillebotte. By the end of the 19th century, through an idyllic and reminiscent lens, Hassam’s and Chase’s treat-ments of New York City were an alternative to confronting the irrevocable and ceaseless transformation of the city. By ignoring the influx of immigrants and emerging social disparities, they succeeded in collecting the remnants of a poetic and picturesque New York. Combining a pastoral flavor with urban life is in itself a way of blending the idealization of agricultural nostalgia with quotidian contemporary life. Instead of highlighting forms of social detachment brought on by various processes of modernization, Hassam and Chase strove for a kind of formal and conceptual harmony which was already on the verge of collapse.
Upward Thrust: The Presence of the Skyscraper
In his Panoramic View of New York (1876), Joshua H. Beal used photography to eternalize a last impression of New York City’s skyline while it was still domi-nated by church pinnacles. New York’s first era of high rises began with the con-struction of the Washington Building in 1885 and the erection of the skyscraper became a visible demonstration of modernity ever after. Several debates over the aesthetic issues raised by the ascendancy of skyscrapers had become a focus of controversy relative to urban problems. Some defenders of the genteel tradition, including Henry James and George Santayana, argued for protecting the older, academic neo-classicism inherited from Europe and they saw soaring skyscrap-ers as a visual revolution against traditional values. They considered them to be closely related to aggressive forms of materialism and commercialism.
Santayana once described the polarities of the American character this way:
“One-half of the American mind, that not occupied intensely in practical af-fairs,…floated gently in the backwater, while, alongside, in invention and indus-try and social organization, the other half of the mind was leaping down a sort of Niagara Rapids.”8 The division is symbolized in American architecture, where we can see neat reproductions of the colonial mansion—with some modern com-forts subtly introduced—standing beside skyscrapers. Royal Cortissoz expressed his concern, in his essay “Landmarks of Manhattan,” that the burgeoning of the skyscraper would eventually make the once impressive church obscure. He wrote, “St. Paul’s never surprises the foreigner who finds it down in the heart of busy London, the roots of the past go so deep all over that neighborhood, yet it is doubtful if many Americans can never apprehend the survival of old Trinity at
8 George Santayana, The Genteel Tradition: Nine Essays by George Santayana, ed.
the head of Wall Street, in the midst of immense buildings that have sprung up like mushrooms, without thinking, if they think at all, of the utter and amazing incongruity of the church.”9 This kind of anxiety was also expressed by Chase, who was disappointed by new buildings that made an overly striking contrast in their formal styles with classical architecture. He criticized the phenomenon this way: “It is most discouraging to find one bit after another of the old archi-tectural artistic productions wiped out of existence….The skyscraping monsters have smothered quite out of existence as objects of beauty many of the mighty landmarks of this city.”10
Though the defenders of traditional architectural aesthetics held their views, and while the debate about overwhelming commercialization echoed continu-ously, the visual potential of the elevated viewpoints of the skyscraper became an irresistible trend, permeating mass media during the middle period of the Pro-gressive Era. Popular periodicals established a favorable climate for the depiction of skyscrapers. Some popular magazines including The Century and Scribner’s, remarked on the value of skyscrapers, including the newly constructed modern skyline of Manhattan and the panoramic views of the port and skyscrapers under construction. In addition, in the periodicals The American Amateur Photographer and Camera Work, the latter edited by Alfred Stieglitz, the skyscraper was also a frequently published subject.11
John Van Dyke’s The New New York, published in 1909 and illustrated by Joseph Pennell, has long been considered one of the most interesting works illus-trating the social and cultural context from 1880s until the first World War.12 Al-though he had ambivalent feelings about modern architecture, Pennell didn’t see skyscrapers as intrusions into New York’s skyline. He and Hassam were among the foremost early devotees of the modern skyscraper city.
In order to fully capture the soaring skyscraper in the 1890s, there were more vertical compositions in the works of Hassam during the early years of the 20th century. He moved away from human-centered, eye-level perspectives and sub-stituted more elevated viewpoints. In contrast to Chase’s strikingly negative comments on the skyscraper, Hassam took a more ambivalent attitude toward
9 Cortissoz, “Landmarks of Manhattan,” 533.
10 Quoted in Abraham David Milgrome, The Art of William Merritt Chase, PhD diss. (University of Pittsburgh, 1969), 101–2.
11 See Meir Wigoder, “The ‘Solar Eye’ of Vision: Emergence of the Skyscrap-er-Viewer in the Discourse on Heights in New York City, 1890–1920,” Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 61, no. 2 (June 2002): 152–69, and Alvin Coburn, “My Best Pictures and Why I Think So,” Photographic News 51, no. 579 (Feb. 1907): 83. See also Sadakichi Hartmann, “The ‘Flat-Iron’ Building–An Es-thetical Dissertation,” Camera Work 4 (Oct. 1903): 36–40; reprinted in Sadakichi Hartmann, Critical Modernist: Collected Art Writings, ed. Jane Calhoun Weaver (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991), 140–46, and Roland Rood, “The Origin of the Poetical Feeling in Landscape,” Camera Work 11 (July 1905): 21–25.
12 John Van Dyke, The New New York: A Commentary on the Place and the People
them. On the one hand, he admitted that they demonstrated a particularly ad-mirable American character, while he also could not remain blind to the dis-junction of people and space caused by this kind of modernization. Therefore, Hassam could explore both the formal beauty of the skyscraper as well as its effects of unrest and estrangement.
Rather than representing any particularly famous new buildings of that time, Hassam loved the formal and general spectacle that the skyscraper created. As he said: “If taken individually a skyscraper is not so much a marvel of art as a wildly formed architectural freak.... It is when taken in groups with their zig zag outlines towering against the sky and melting tenderly in the distance that the skyscraper are truly beautiful.”13 This description of Manhattan’s skyline was best epitomized in Hassam’s painting October Haze, Manhattan (1910), already in William T. Evans’s private collection before its first public showing at New York’s Lotus Club. During an interview in 1913, Hassam proclaimed, “New York is the most beautiful city in the world. There is no boulevard in all Paris that compares to our own Fifth Avenue…and even London, which I consider infinitely more beautiful than Paris, has nothing to compare with our own Manhattan Island when seen in an October haze or an early twilight mist from Brooklyn Bridge.”14 October Haze, Manhattan was a visual representation of these descriptions of New York. In order to emphasize an aesthetic pleasure and poetic mood, Hassam abstracted himself from the Manhattan skyline and ignored any architectural exactness. His evocative, expressive, and subjective properties of color and light could be termed proto-abstract. The staccato, rippling brushstrokes along with the shadows of skyscrapers evoked the viewer’s imagination of this metropolis and expressed Hassam’s personal devotion to the city.
In Hassam’s Lower Manhattan (1907) and Fifth Avenue in Winter (1919), the artist used the extreme vertical thrust of tall buildings and numerous disembod-ied pedestrians to reveal the sharp contrast between human bodies and archi-tecture under high-speed modernization. The ant-like swarming of the crowd shows a sense of social unease and estrangement. What Hassam implied here was the impersonality and bustle of urban existence—the heedless jostling of the free-floating human atoms that endlessly surged through the streets. In conse-quence, the accelerated pace of the upward-thrusting skyscrapers would eventu-ally engulf the people who lived there. At the heart of Modernism is the myth of an environment so mechanized and regularized that it mandates a dehumanized experience of the world. Though Hassam had an artistic understanding of and sensitivity to the haphazardness of the new century, and the accumulation of the commercialized spectacles that might eventually disturb the slower gentility that he valued, his attitude was still elitist and conservative. He chose to depict har-monious environments by intentionally ignoring congested urban scenes filled
In Hassam’s Lower Manhattan (1907) and Fifth Avenue in Winter (1919), the artist used the extreme vertical thrust of tall buildings and numerous disembod-ied pedestrians to reveal the sharp contrast between human bodies and archi-tecture under high-speed modernization. The ant-like swarming of the crowd shows a sense of social unease and estrangement. What Hassam implied here was the impersonality and bustle of urban existence—the heedless jostling of the free-floating human atoms that endlessly surged through the streets. In conse-quence, the accelerated pace of the upward-thrusting skyscrapers would eventu-ally engulf the people who lived there. At the heart of Modernism is the myth of an environment so mechanized and regularized that it mandates a dehumanized experience of the world. Though Hassam had an artistic understanding of and sensitivity to the haphazardness of the new century, and the accumulation of the commercialized spectacles that might eventually disturb the slower gentility that he valued, his attitude was still elitist and conservative. He chose to depict har-monious environments by intentionally ignoring congested urban scenes filled