Look With Your Ears, Episode 3: The Urban Sublime

Winslow Homer’s “Eight Bells,” from 1886, is a truly glorious painting.  It’s a crown jewel in the Addison’s collection for good reason, a dynamic, detailed masterpiece, brimming with man, sky, and sea, and considered a paradigm of its genre.  But…what exactly is its genre?  Is it a landscape, with so much of the canvas taken up by the spectrum of clouds, and churning ocean waves?  Is it a battle scene, with the sailors in the foreground in their glistening wet hats, feeling the first rays of sun after a storm they’ve resolutely survived?  The tempestuousness of nature is painted with the tenderness and dimensions of a portrait; the natural sunlight then acts as the painting’s light source, breaking through the clouds and both illuminating and giving volume to the scene’s natural and manmade details: the white caps of the waves, the men’s instruments, their weathered oilskins, the glints of moisture on the boat’s hull.  So… what kind of genre is this?  More than anything, it feels like a painting about the equilibrium of all its competing parts.  You don’t often see this kind of détente between human beings and the natural world, between us and it.  It’s a rare, and ephemeral thing to witness a moment where man and nature feel so calmly, and evenly, matched.

Because really, is there any relationship in art more fraught, and more metaphorically loaded, than the one between human beings and their environment?  True, you wouldn’t think so at first.  I mean, it certainly has its share of competition.  After all, the history of art is a soapy paradise, overflowing with jilted Rococo lovers, with biblical Renaissance anguish, with the classical heartbreak of gods and goddesses.  Landscape painting, on its surface, lacks the same kind of, shall we say, popcorn drama.  But go a little deeper.  Consider the specificity and the immersive quality of a place.  The representation of environments in art history almost always have a deeper meaning beyond capturing the beauty of a poppy field or a haystack or a sunset; so often they’re commenting on what exists, what no longer exists, what has been displaced, what once was.  Nature is often another full-bodied character in the painting’s drama, engaging with, taunting, or resisting the human figure.  It’s a foil, it’s a foe, it’s a beast to be tamed, it’s a painful lesson in humility.  Landscapes can capture the calm before the storm, the pregnant pause, the battle, the aftermath, the sublime.  Think about the most prominent movements of landscape painters: Romantic painters pitted humans against nature, where the storms and roiling waves about to sink the protagonist often served as a metaphor for his own inner demons, for the part of our own nature that eludes our rational control.  Hudson River School artists found quiet sovereignty over nature in the human scale, where even distant storms and brambles could be cultivated and softened – I mean, just think about what story they were telling themselves.  Early 20th century European Expressionists romanticized a utopian and often under-dressed version of non-Western Shangri-la-like cultures as a means of channeling their anxiety about modernity and industrialization.  And of course, this whole time we viewers are still just looking at depictions of sky, land, and sea.  They can be beautiful, or threatening, or eerily empty, or even a little boring.  So you have to go deeper.  You have to keep in mind that when it comes to a painting about natural world, much like that roiling ocean itself, there’s an entire universe teeming beneath the surface.

It’s a particularly late 19th and early 20th century concern, and a particularly American concern, to bring these metaphorical ideas about the natural world into the built environment, into the modern city.  America is, of course, an enormous place, equal parts rural and urban, co-existing side-by-side.  And so, it’s no surprise that American artists have a lot of experience navigating, identifying, and reconciling the relationship between the rural and the urban, and how human beings interact with both.  And in this episode, we’re going to join them.  We’re calling it the Urban Sublime, an exploration of the American city as seen through the eyes of all the romance, potency, and metaphor that art history has traditionally focused on landscape.  We’ll be looking at a handful of works by Edward Hopper, Robert Frank, Berenice Abbott, Charles Sheeler, and Martin Wong, artists who occupy different time periods and perspectives, and who work in a variety of media, but all of whom are looking at the city itself through this lens, where fresh concrete has as much potential as a fresh snowfall, where skyscraper windows appear as overwhelming as the boundless sky; where the urban echoes the land; and where the human scale is itself recalibrated as a city that we built suddenly outmatches us, and what that means for the story of modernity that we tell ourselves.

Let’s pull out the big guns and start with Edward Hopper.  His painting, “Manhattan Bridge Loop” from 1928, taps into many of his most familiar tropes: a city presented in high contrast, with schematic blocks of light and deep shadows, and the lone figure turned away from us, a figure who is given less, or at least little more, attention than the detailed lamppost in the foreground.  Hopper’s paintings are ostensibly about the modern American city, but are intrinsically and intimately about stillness and alienation, which is perhaps most authentically about the modern American city, as ironic as that seems given how fast-paced and densely populated they are.  And in this way, Hopper’s paintings are less metaphorical than a deep emotional response to modernity, the move from rural to urban America, especially as he experienced it in his own life, guided by his teacher, Robert Hen-rye’s philosophy that “it isn’t the subject that counts, but how you feel about it.”  Hopper always prized his own deeply-felt interior perspective as his lens; “my aim in painting,” he wrote in a letter to the Addison museum, “is always using nature as the medium, to try to project upon the canvas my most intimate reaction to the subject.”  And in the same way that emotion can both sharpen and blur our perspectives in equal measure, Hopper’s paintings tend to contain deep juxtapositions between his work as a graphic illustrator and his poetic artistic interpretations, between specificity and generality, between the sharpness of the shadows cast from the fire escapes and the complete anonymity of the figure.  We see exactly this in his most famous painting, “Nighthawks” from 1942, where we can see through the diner window exactly how much coffee is left in each urn, and yet are given no indication of how any of the painting’s protagonists relate to one another.  A Hopper painting, especially his clearly demarcated cityscapes, tells us the time of day based on the way the specific way that light hits, and the precise location based on the landmarks.  The only thing they don’t tell us is who, and why.  And so we’re left to fill that in ourselves.  Which, if you’ve ever moved to a big city alone, you can relate to, viscerally.  Often, the bigger the city, the lonelier, quieter, and more interior the experience.

Unless, of course, you’ve happened to be captured at the fever pitch of your given moment by the photographer Robert Frank.  At first blush, his photograph “Parade, Hoboken, New Jersey” from 1955, one of the seminal images from his iconic series “The Americans,” appears to capture the same sense of isolation and alienation in the American city that Hopper does: two figures watch a parade from their separate windows, their faces blurred and anonymous.  And yet, where Hopper’s work embodies stillness, even this frozen moment of Frank’s is rife with energy, not the least of which comes from the flapping American flag that bisects the top of the image.  And this sense of crackling energy, both physical and metaphorical, connects the figures, even in their isolation from one another.  The Americans was the result of Frank, a Swiss-born émigré and documentary photographer, receiving a Guggenheim fellowship in 1955 to photograph America through the eyes of an outsider, to turn a more objective eye onto an antsy, passionate post-war culture that was mired in race and class consciousness, and attempting to redefine the American dream, one community, and one individual, at a time.  Frank shot over 27,000 images on his journeys crisscrossing the country to arrive at the final set of 83 black-and-white photographs, the entirety of which is owned by the Addison, which is shot in a deliberately loose, grainy style that captured the both the casual characters, places, pageantry, specificity, and humanity of an America barely able to sit still, of the deeper tensions rippling beneath the surface.  Just by way of example, consider the multiplicity of interpretations for that flag.  Like Jasper Johns, whom we looked at in episode one, Frank is well aware of both its striking graphic visuals and its deeper meaning, both of which shapeshift depending on the viewer.  And this manmade symbol, too, is so dependent on the fundamental energy of the natural environment, the air itself, to keep it as alive, dynamic, and untamed as the polity it flies over.

And this brings us to Berenice Abbott, also a photographer, also a documentarian, and also, like Hopper, a transplant to New York City in the highly industrialized days of the first decades of the 20th century, when 10the landscape was being built at a breathless pace.  The work of a documentary photographer like her, who, in her case, also trained extensively as an artist and sculptor, had particular cultural resonance following the Great Depression.  This blend of a journalistic and artistic eye was invaluable, and she was given federal funding in the form of an WPA grant, that is, a Works Progress Administration grant, which, as part of the New Deal, funded public works, including photojournalism.  There were several such New Deal entities that did this – another, the Farm Security Administration, stated the aim of “tell[ing] the story of America to Americans.”  And most famously funded a photojournalism project that included the tightly-shot portraits of rural farmers, like Dorothea Lange’s “Migrant Mother” or Walker Evans’ “Portrait of Allie Mae Burroughs” – both now iconic portraits, both of which are in the Addison’s collection, that intended to humanize a rarely-seen socioeconomic class in more urban parts of the country.  But in Abbott’s case, her photos of New York introduced the city itself to its rarely-seen, or at least rarely-documented, socioeconomic class.  Similar to the Ashcan School of painting, her photography focused particularly the role that architecture and infrastructure played in both creating and maintaining this inequity.  Her photograph “Canyon: 46th Street and Lexington Avenue, Looking West” from 1936, at first blush – and, as we’ve seen, it’s always ‘at first blush’ in the case of the urban sublime – is a beautifully-composed upward glance at the rising skyscrapers, with clearly focused lines, patterned windows, and a high-contrast monochrome that both plays with the light and the building materials.  It evokes the natural world; it feels like looking up from the bottom of a canyon, both in how oppressive and majestic it is.  But, as always, there is a deeper narrative beyond the first blush.  Abbott, who had spent several years in France studying and championing the photographer Eugene Atget’s documentation of a disappearing Paris, found the literal rise of the buildings as a clear indication of a disappearing New York, overwhelming and dwarfing the human scale.  This photograph in particular aimed to critique the Port Authority’s proposal to increase the concentration of business activity through “improvements” to transportation; she turned her camera on the facades of Grand Central Station at precisely the moment it appears the most overbearing, the most dehumanized.  In Abbott’s hands, and ultimately in the series she released in 1939, titled “Changing New York,” it’s clear that when it came to the humans versus the built environment, like a small Romantic vessel and the monstrous sea, the two sides were hopelessly unmatched.

Of course, one artist’s overbearing is another artist’s thrill.  In exploring the art of Charles Sheeler, who worked with both photography and painting, the two mediums influencing one another, you get the sense that everything about a skyscraper that puts Berenice Abbott off actually turns Sheeler on.  It can be exciting to look upwards at something too high, too beyond our natural scale, like a subversive form of acrophobia.  And this is especially true when, again, there are layers beneath the surface that speak to something equally exciting about the American city: its speed, its boldness, its dizzying heights.  In Sheeler’s painting “Ballardvale” from 1946, named for the industrial area of Andover, Massachusetts that he visited when he was an artist-in-residence at the Addison, he depicts an abandoned mill as strong, chromatically unmodulated, a triumphant “confluence of soaring geometries,” in the words of curator Carol Troyen, with a towering smokestack that rises up like a church spire.  Sheeler’s style became known as Precisionism, a movement that represented the urban landscape in simplified, sharp-edged shapes, emphasizing a 0k104ind of impersonal flatness that glorifies the form.  And it’s what we see here: any of this mill’s dilapidated details are smoothed out in favor of the same schematic boldness we see in Hopper’s unbroken blocks of light.  Yet the way that Hopper and Abbott capture a sense of elegiac [ele-JAY-ic] nostalgia for what industry has displaced, Sheeler, like Frank, harnesses its energy, and renders its presence, graphic and celebratory as the backdrop of a superhero comic, even when it’s a building that progress has already left behind.

So we’ve looked at the urban sublime through the lens of loneliness, of energy, of oppression, and of nostalgia.  But assuming we’ve accepted the existence of the city itself, what does it then allow for, and create?  What life and identity does New York City, for example, sustain and cultivate?  This brings us to our final artist, Martin Wong.  Wong, a Chinese-American painter born in 1946, and died of AIDS-related complications in 1999, tends to be spoken in the same breath as Keith Haring, David Wojnarowicz, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, and other fellow openly-gay artists who thrived in the late-70s and 80s, whose work overtly referenced both the thrill and complexity of queerness, and the devastation of the AIDS crisis that tragically claimed them all, when they were heartbreakingly young.  But what delineates Wong in particular, and for our purposes, was his love affair with New York’s Lower East Side and its graffiti, its crumbling tenements, and its powerful, diverse sense of community, all of which he depicted with “poetic realism,” in the words of critic Roberta Smith.  In this painting, “Portrait of Miguel Pinero” from 1982, Wong taps into it all: his dear friend and sometimes partner, the Puerto Rican avant-garde writer and poet Pinero, who died of AIDS in 1988, set against the now-familiar backdrop of skyscrapers that rise upwards, but here, feel like home, the appropriate set dressing for the only world that affords them their identities, their liberation.  The uniform windows of the buildings are referenced as the painting continues upwards, unfurling like a Chinese scroll, into the sign language at the top that Wong paints to depict a poem by Pinero.  The city frames and even embraces the warmth and poignancy of this relationship; where Hopper uses the city’s boundless expanse to emphasize our loneliness, Wong reins it in as though to emphasize our intimacy.

And this juxtaposition, this irreconcilable reality, where the city itself is as impossibly large as the ocean is deep, as unknowable as Jupiter’s moons, and yet, containing every human scale imaginable, is why our relationship with our environment, natural or manmade, is so powerful, so tempestuous, and so unevenly matched, depending on the perspective, depending on the day.  And so let’s embrace the drama.  Let’s take on the roiling sea.  There is, after all, always something sublime just beneath the surface.