When author William Helmreich was a child growing up in Manhattan, he and his father played a game called “Last Stop.” They would choose a subway line at random, ride it to the end, and explore a neighborhood they had never seen before. Decades later this inspired Helmreich to walk every block of all five boroughs, a journey that became his book The New York Nobody Knows.
Helmreich reminds me of George Bellows, an American Ashcan School artist who loved to walk the unfashionable streets of New York City “to see things, to feel things, and to dope them out for the public.” Bellows hoofed it over to the river wharfs, gritty construction sites, and Lower East Side neighborhoods of 1900s Manhattan.
The subject matter of his pictures is rarely pretty, but his bravura handling of paint is unfailingly beautiful, especially his elegant use of complementary colors.
There is a constant and foolish demand that pictures all be pretty. As if Shakespeare had always gone around writing love sonnets.
George Bellows, 1910
Bellows liked to walk east on 59th Street to watch the construction of the Queensboro Bridge, a legendary structure featured in The Godfather, The Dark Knight Rises, Manhattan, and many other hit movies. The bridge opened in 1909 at a cost of eighteen million dollars and fifty lives.
The underside of progress
Hundreds of tenements and single-family brownstones were demolished to make room for the new bridge. The Lone Tenement depicts the eerie emptiness under the structure, where a dozen people huddle around a fire to keep warm while a few others play stickball. Bellows made the figures so small and remote, their personal stories shrink in significance.
Next to the fence, two dead trees point the finger of blame squarely at the Queensboro Bridge overhead. In the background, bright sunlight illuminates the East River, where a steamship zips past an old schooner in dry dock.
The last remaining row house stands alone in poignant isolation. Or does it? The scale of the building seems odd. Is it real? Perhaps it’s an architectural ghost sent to remind us of all the homes that were torn down and the deeply human stories that took place inside them.
Is the painting about a place? Or about people?
Half a century earlier a French artist named Èdouard Manet walked the streets of Paris, watching as Napoleon III demolished more than 27,000 buildings in the center of the city.
All of the rebuilding led to lots of moving. Families who had lived in Paris’s oldest neighborhoods for generations, who had all their friends and acquaintances there, loaded their belongings onto moving carts to be taken away.
Stephane Kirkland, “Paris Reborn,” 2013
Napoleon’s massive urban renewal program was a heavy-handed enterprise led by Georges-Eugène Haussmann, a civil engineer who erased a much-loved Paris we will never know. He built a cleaner, more handsome city at immense human cost.
In The Old Musician, Manet shows us the type of people who were pushed out of the central city to the edge of town. A street musician is entertaining people who clearly do not have the money to tip him: a barefoot girl holding an infant, two urchins, and two street-corner philosophers.
Manet placed the six figures in an empty landscape to unite them by their bohemianism, rather than a physical setting. They represent human endurance in the face of rapid urbanization. Off in the distance, several featureless gray brushstrokes represent the demolition of Paris.
The bushy-haired man holding a violin is actually a street musician named Jean Lagrène, who played the organ-grinder for tips. He occasionally worked for Manet as an artist’s model, cashing in on his swarthy cheekbones and aquiline nose.
The art of the flâneur
The French have a word for men who stroll around town for hours at a time: flâneur. It derives from the Old Norse verb flana, which means to wander with no particular purpose. I’m reluctant to apply the term to Bellows and Manet because they walked with resolve.
The Lone Tenement and The Old Musician are serious paintings with a strong point of view. They record the human cost of destroying neighborhoods in the name of progress.
In Blue Morning and Excavating Penn Station, Bellows depicts the construction of the original Penn Station in midtown Manhattan. More than five hundred homes and businesses were demolished to make way for the much-needed transportation facility.
To my knowledge, Bellows and Manet never complained of artist’s block. They knew the world itself is never blocked, it generates new ideas all the time.
I’m always amused by people who talk about a lack of subjects for painting. Wherever you go, subjects are waiting for you. The men of the docks, the children at the river’s edge, summer romance, amateur boxers, old people, young people. You can learn more by painting one street scene than you can by working in an atelier for six months.
Some day, when I have the time, I may travel and see the world. But I do not expect to find better pictures than those that have been brought to me right here.
George Bellows, 1917, 1920
Sadly, George Bellows never got to see the world. His appendix ruptured, killing him at the age of forty-two and depriving us of a major artist at the peak of his career.