New York’s Siren Call

From the 18th century to well into the 20th, anyone in America who was serious about being an artist got what training they could in the few stateside academies available for the purpose.  After that, the expectation was that you somehow got yourself off to Europe, preferably Paris, to learn the craft properly.

By the 19th century there were alternatives to this.  One such was a career in commercial art leading to an interest in painting.  The chief example of that would be Winslow Homer, who made the transition from graphic art to fine art with the minimum of formal training.  

Having this formative experience, in particular with newspaper illustration, lead to profound changes in American art and a discernible difference to mainstream European art. 

John Sloan’s New York edited by Heather Campbell Coyle and Joyce K Schiller 

John Sloan, like Winslow Homer, learned on the job, starting out in Philadelphia as a commercial artist and newspaper illustrator.  He continued as such after moving to New York City in 1904.  His development as a painter was largely down to the influence of Robert Henri, who along with Sloan’s fellow ex-pat Pennsylvanians, George Luks, William Glackens, and the Ohioan George Bellows, were significant members of what became known as the Ashcan School.  This was a group of painters, who focused on the urban scene and particularly on poor, immigrant and working-class subjects.  Literary equivalents would be found in the works of Stephen Crane, Theodore Dreiser and Frank Norris.  

John Sloan’s New York was published in 2007 to accompany a traveling exhibition of the artist’s work.   The text is comprised of five essays covering various aspects of the artist’s life, milieu and art practice.  They all focus on the particularities of the way Sloan interreacted with his environment. As regards to the artist still functioning, in effect, as a reporter, Molly Hutton’s contribution brings in to play the concept of Sloan as a flaneur.  Someone who, as in Baudelaire’s definition of 1863, is an urban wanderer, voyeuristically un-observed, taking in the passing theatre of the street.  In Sloan’s case, and that of others of the Ashcan School, it is seldom the New York equivalent of Baudelaire’s elegant boulevards of bourgeois Paris that the artist is wandering along and observing, but rather the crowded streets of Manhattan’s Lower East Side.   The immigrant slums located there were on the doorstep of the Greenwich Village and Chelsea neighbourhoods in which Sloan resided.

At that time, first half of the Twentieth Century, those areas of downtown New York were still havens of affordable bohemian life for people in the creative arts.  John Sloan’s home town of Philadelphia was only 80 miles from New York City and possessed its own historic artistic identity, but then, as throughout the 20th century, New York presented more opportunity.  Opportunities not just commercially, but also those afforded by the permissive liveliness of its mix of cultures and art disciplines.

Sloan, along with Robert Henri and other members of the group, taught for many years, particularly at The Art Students League, where they were a major source of inspiration for the succeeding generation of Social Realist painters.  Notable among those; Isobel Bishop, Reginald Marsh, Ben Shann and the Soyer brothers, Raphael, Moses and Isaac.

The essays comprising John Sloan’s New York are written in an accessible manner, eschewing the dense and difficult academic art-speak that usually blights this kind of publication, and provide a fascinating and insightful look at an important artist’s life and times.          

 Some suggested further reading about New York slums and the immigrant experience.

Novels:

Maggie: A Girl of the Streets 1893 by Stephen Crane

Call It Sleep 1934 Henry Roth

A Tree Grows in Brooklyn 1943 by Betty Smith

Elizabeth Street 2010 by Laurie Fabiano

The Golem and the Djinni 2013 by Helene Wecker  (the author, in a novel that has two creatures of fantasy as its main characters, has done her homework diligently and creates a convincing background world of immigrant life in 1890’s New York.)  

Non-fiction:

How the Other Half Lives 1901 by Jacob Riis (ground breaking documentation of the slums of New York)

The Art Spirit 1923 by Robert Henri (collected notes, articles, letters and recorded instruction, inspirational for artist and non-artist alike). 

Ninth Street Women by Mary Gabriel 

Following five artists, Lee Krasner, Elaine de Kooning, Grace Hartigan, Joan Mitchell, and Helen Frankenthaler from the 1930s through to the 1960s; Ninth Street Women, published 2019, brings to life, in great detail, a period in American art whose achievements have not since been equalled.  It also redresses how most histories of that time have side-lined the female artists involved.

Of those five, Lee Krasner emerges as the most important.  Her inclusion in the Royal Academy’s 2016 comprehensive survey exhibition of Abstract Expressionism, followed by the 2019 retrospective at the Barbican, certainly opened eyes in Britain.  Bringing her out from the shadow of husband Jackson Pollack, the show at the Barbican, exposed just how restlessly innovative and protean she was.  And the Royal Academy show illustrated how her work more than holds up when placed next the feted male big beasts of the movement.  She was, in contrast to the other four women mentioned, of the same generation as those male artists.  What becomes very apparent in Ninth Street Women is how important she was to the New York art scene both before and after the fourteen years spent with Pollack.

Equally important to that scene, though with nowhere near the talent that Krasner possessed, was Elaine de Kooning.   As a couple, and individually, she and husband Willem de Kooning, were the centre of gravity of the downtown New York art world from the 1940s through into the 1960s.

The much younger Mitchell, Hartigan and Frankenthaler were members of the second generation and while the equal to any other of that grouping, their work has the feel of mannerism about it.  Somewhat akin to Michelangelo, Raphael and Da Vinci’s overwhelming effect on succeeding generations; Pollack, Rothko and especially de Kooning made things difficult for those who followed on from them.

That said, Frankenthaler was influential in her technical innovations, and while Hartigan was heavily indebted to Willem de Kooning. Her break through painting of 1954, Grand Street Brides, is a monumental tour-de-force that takes off from his Women series, and Picasso’s Demoiselles d’Avignon, and made a convincing case for the reintroduction of the human figure into the avant-garde of visual art.

Covering a period of the 1930s through the 1950s, Ninth Street Women, in over 700 pages heavily supported by notes, examines the artistic lives of the five women mentioned; and through their stories creates rounded and detailed chronicle of the whole Abstract Expressionist movement.

One of the things that comes across quite forcibly in this history is what is often overlooked in retrospect, overshadowed perhaps by the huge success that many of these artists eventually enjoyed, is how precarious and penurious their lives were for most of that thirty-year period.  That they were able to survive and produce the innovative work they did, was down to not only the heroic level of sacrifice made for the sake of their art, but also that downtown Manhattan was still an area with cheap, if sometimes illegal, living and work space.  That was a situation relatively unchanged from the Ashcan School’s time.  It was not to last all that much longer.

Further reading:

There is a huge amount of literature on the Abstract Expressionists, in the form of criticism, history and monographs.

Curiously, given the heroic quality of the work and the outsize personalities of many of the artists, there is not much, if anything, in the way of fiction on the subject to recommend.  A bit of a heads up to any novelists out there.

On the subject of the second generation, I would recommend Irving Sandler’s The Triumph of American Painting1970.  Sandler was a habituate of the scene and writes with an insider’s authority.

And perhaps just for the sheer entertainment it affords, Tom Wolfe’s The Painted Word 1975.  In it Wolfe has a real go at the whole critical edifice built up around the modern art world. An edifice whose construction began in the 1940s, particularly with the writing of Clement Greenberg on Abstract Expressionism, and is something, in an evolved form, still going strong today.   

Just Kids by Patti Smith

In 1967, aged 20, Patty Smith dropped out university in her native south New Jersey and headed for New York City. Not an uncommon decision at any given time for a young person with artistic ambitions, but in the febrile late 60s, almost an obligatory one.

There she meets Robert Mapplethorpe (hailing from the out-lying borough of Queens), with whom she forms a relationship and together they set themselves up in downtown Manhattan.  Greenwich Village and the surrounding neighbourhoods in 1967 were awash with ‘hippies’ caught up in excitement and excesses of the counter-culture and young left-wing anti-war political activists bent on revolution.  Smith and Mapplethorpe didn’t overly engage with either but instead looked to pick up on the older artistic bohemian culture still in operation.  This grouping had evolved in the 1950s out of the Abstract Expressionist visual art movement and grew to encompass music, dance, theatre, photography and importantly, poetry.  This became known as the New York School and within its multidisciplinary cross-fertilized world, the more traditional formats of painting and sculpture began to take a back seat.

Following on the success of Abstract Expressionism came a rapid succession of movements and ‘isms’ in the visual arts.  The combination of a particular linear view of history, the expansive post-war boom in higher education and a sense of America’s cultural and economic, as well as political pre-eminence in the world, had served to institutionalize the ‘avant garde’.

Underlying this was the ascension of Clement Greenberg’s reductive and object-oriented take on art as the sine qua non of critical thought on the subject.  By the mid-sixties this had led to Minimalism as the entrenched academic, and economically rewarding, style.  The Greenbergian model made much more sense for institutions and markets than Harold Rosenberg’s competing existential ‘Action Painting’ analysis of the breakthrough art of the 1940s with its focus on expressionism and the process aspect of art production.

Running in opposition to, or in the ignoring of, the Minimalism mainstream where various ‘underground’ movements.  The commonality amongst these disparate groupings and strategies was a move away from the unique art object in stasis towards a more conceptional framework.  This often involved the introduction of a viewpoint from disciplines outside of the traditional visual art one; i.e. literature, theatre and music.  There was, as well as the increasing focus on the issues of gender and sexual orientation, a developing penchant for the transgressive. 

This then was the downtown art scene in which the young ambitious outsiders, Smith and Mapplethorpe, found themselves in.  Just Kids, published in 2010 and winner of a National Book Award, is in its intent, a memorial to Mapplethorpe (who died of AIDS related causes in 1989). In it the author recounts their rise in a few short years from artistes maudit to feted celebrities; music and poetry in Smith’s case and photography in Mapplethorpe’s.  Then as now, Mapplethorpe’s renown rests as much on the technical brilliance and finesse of his work as on the disturbingly explicit sadomasochism content of some of it. 

The book reads like a who’s who of the movers and shakers of the edgy and arty downtown of the 1970s.  Patty Smith, even before her fame, seems to have met everyone worth meeting and as a result Just Kids stands as fascinating chronicle of that place and time.

That time, the 1970s, marked the beginning of the end of an affordable downtown Manhattan as an environment that allowed young artists the opportunities to develop and, more importantly, form the associations that would go on to become movements and schools.  By the 1980s New York City had recovered from the economic malaise of the 70s and entered into boom years, largely fuelled by the financial services sector.  Middle-class flight to the suburbs was, to some degree, reversed and artist enclaves like SoHo (south of Houston Street) became rapidly gentrified.  Somewhat ironically, as the artistic vibe that made it cool and interesting to hip wealthy urbanites, was displaced along with the artists that had generated it.  Those artists were pushed into other neighbourhoods, inevitably given the acronymic designations, TriBeCa etc, so invaluable for the purposes of gentrification.  This push continued outward   through the 1980s and 90s, westwards across the Hudson River to Hoboken and Jersey City and eastwards to Long Island City and south from there into Brooklyn.  By the turn of the century indigent aspiring young artists were hard pressed indeed to find anywhere in the metropolitan area the cheap living and work space required for them to become the next Sloan, Krasner or Mapplethorpe. 

Further reading.

Novels:

Blood and Guts in High School 1984 by Kathy Acker

Actually, almost anything by this author, both for its transgressive content, the trend starting in 1960s that her work in some ways represents a cumulation and for the practice of appropriation, popular with artists and writers in the 1980s.

Bright Lights Big City 1984 by Jay McInerney

The darker side of the 1980s ‘yuppie’ boom years in New York City.

The Bonfire of the Vanities 1987 by Tom Wolfe

Wolfe’s satirical novel that pretty much sums up 1980’s New York.

The Flamethrowers 2013 by Rachel Kushner

The author, in this novel, does a pretty good job of imaginatively recreating the New York art scene of the 1970s.

Non-fiction:

The Basketball Diaries 1978 by Jim Carroll

The poet’s recounting of his teenage years in the 1960’s gives a sense of the edgy character, and characters, of the underbelly of the bohemian scene.

New York School Painters & Poets 2014 by Jenni Quilter

A comprehensive history of the movement with an emphasis on its culture of collaboration.

Fred W McDarrah New York Scenes 2018

Village Voice photographer, McDarrah’s work from the 1950s through the 1970s documents the downtown scene in all its multifaceted glory.