Itinerario - A day in New York. Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza

31 December: open from 10.00 to 15.00. 1 January: museum closed.

By María Corral and Elisa Sopeña

There is something in the New York air that makes sleep useless.
Simone de Beauvoir

This A Day in New York itinerary takes us through a selection of masterpieces at the Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza to the heart of this unique and unrepeatable city. A source of inspiration for painters, writers, photographers and film-makers, we shall stroll through its neighborhoods and museums, meet its characters and enjoy its history. This is an opportunity to turn travelers, and discover the throb and thrill of this fascinating city.

Tour artworks

John George Brown

Not on display

John George Brown

Tough Customers

1881

Childe Hassam

ROOM E

Childe Hassam

Fifth Avenue at Washington Square, New York

1891

Fifth Avenue at Washington Square, New York — View details of the work

Childe Hassam

Fifth Avenue at Washington Square, New York

ROOM E

Following his return from Paris in 1889, Hassam lived at 95, Fifth Avenue, a few steps from Washington Square. He chose to live on a part of Fifth Avenue that resembled the tree-lined boulevards of Paris.
[...]
It was also the abode of New York’s social elites, who had begun to move there in the 1860s, and to this day continues to be one of the grandest and most expensive streets in the world. The stretch of Fifth Avenue overlooking Central Park would come to be known, as from the 1920s, as Millionaire’s Row, because of the many rich New York families who built their stately mansions there; a good example of such buildings was the Vanderbilt family palace. Fifth Avenue, the second longest street in New York after Broadway Avenue, extends for almost nine miles. Its history of splendour began in 1862, when Caroline Schermerhorn Astor took up residence on the south-eastern corner of 34th Street, at a spot which later, in 1893, would become the legendary Hotel Astoria.
[...]
Hassam’s canvas probably depicts the painter’s block of brownstones, and perhaps the sidewalk in front of his studio apartment. Nearby, on Washington Square, the Washington Arch would soon be completed. Designed by Stanford White and built in white marble to commemorate the centenary of George Washington’s investiture as president of the United States, the monument was suggested by the Arc de Triomphe on the Champs-Elysées in Paris. During the early 1890s Hassam painted a number of views of Fifth Avenue in all kinds of weather and soon became well known for them. The fashionable thoroughfare would fill with every type of carriage, from spacious berlins, opensided surreys and elegant four-horse landaus to small buggies and slim coupés driven by coachmen. Ladies who were well aware of the importance of dress and decoration floated down the boulevard wearing bustles and long white mitts, under the protection of parasols, on their way to modernity. In the words of Edgar Allan Poe, who spent his last few years in New York, “the display of wealth served the same purpose as the old heraldic emblems of royalty”.
Childe Hassam also illustrated an article on Fifth Avenue by Marianna G. Van Rensselaer for The Century Magazine in 1893, and in 1899 published Three Cities, a book including reproductions of the vistas he had painted of his favourite cities: Paris, New York and London. In 1919 he bought a house on Long Island, which became his permanent summer home, and it was there that he painted many of his last canvases of the city.
Full text available at the downloadable guide in pdf.

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William Merritt Chase

ROOM E

William Merritt Chase

In the Park. A By-path

ca. 1889

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William Merritt Chase

In the Park. A By-path

ROOM E

In 1889, William Merritt Chase sent several paintings of parks to the Paris World’s Fair. These small-sized, unpretentious pictures depicted different nooks and corners of settings in everyday life, and did so in an innovative way, often adopting Impressionist ideas such as a close attention to nature and the use of the changing effects of light. The refreshing scenes of city parks came at an important stage in the painter’s career, and earned him recognition from the critics and the public. The scenes, painted soon after the great exhibition of French Impressionism that Durand-Ruel had organised in New York in 1886, introduced a fundamental change in the work of Merritt Chase, who began to devote his efforts to this mode of open-air painting.
For several years, Chase made small, quickly executed studies in Prospect Park, Brooklyn; and after moving to Manhattan he began to paint Central Park. Critic Charles de Kay – the brother of New York painter Helena de Kay – observed that “[Chase] has hit upon a discovery which is yet to be made by a very great proportion of the inhabitants of New York. He has discovered Central Park. Not that most New York people do not know there is such a place, and are not more or less proud of it, but comparatively few of them ever go into it, and when they do go, they rarely see anything”. Indeed, through his painting the artist succeeded in bringing to the foreground the first great public park in the United States, and turned each of his scenes into a tribute to city parks as part of the North American environment.
[...]
The part of Central Park that is depicted in Chase’s picture is a by-path running along the remaining foundation wall of Mount Saint Vincent, a convent for the Sisters of Charity situated in the northeast corner of the Park near 105^th Street and Fifth Avenue. In 1847 the Roman Catholic Order purchased the area that was originally the site of McGown’s Tavern, built in the 1750s. The convent, which included a boarding school for several hundred female students, was incorporated as park land in 1859 under Olmsted and Vaux’s development of Central Park. The building served briefly as a military hospital during the Civil War, and then the old convent building reverted to a tavern that catered to the wealthy carriage trade. Mount Saint Vincent burned to the ground in 1881, but was soon rebuilt as another saloon, now named the McGown’s Pass Tavern. It was torn down in 1917 by the New York reform mayor, John Purroy Mitchel, who desired to maintain the natural qualities of the park. The foundation wall, but not the pathway that is seen in the picture, still remains today. The models used by Merritt Chase were his wife, Alice Gerson, whom he had married in February of 1887, and their eldest daughter, Alice Dieudonnée – nicknamed Cosy – who was about two and a half at the time. She and her sister Dorothy were often painted by the artist.
William Merritt Chase was a key figure of the New York art world during this period. A teacher at the Art Students League, and the founder of the New York School of Art, he was one of the most distinguished tenants at the famous Tenth Street Studio Building in Greenwich Village.
Full text available at the downloadable guide in pdf.

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John Sloan

ROOM 32

John Sloan

Throbbing Fountain, Madison Square

1907

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John Sloan

Throbbing Fountain, Madison Square

ROOM 32

John Sloan had arrived in New York in 1904 following his friend and mentor Robert Henri, one of the fathers of American modernity, who had begun to teach at the New York School of Art. He was immediately attracted to the bustle the elevated trains, the busy life of avenues and streets – which he began to depict in his paintings. Working as an illustrator for The Philadelphia Inquirer and The Philadelphia Press he had developed a keen eye that would allow him to depict with accurate detail and liveliness the day to day existence of some of the most popular districts in Manhattan. Like Henri, Sloan advocated a new kind of realism in North American art; both men wished to break away from the humdrum themes of the National Academy of Design, and paint contemporary life as the Impressionists had done earlier An event took place in New York in 1908 which was to be a turning-point for North American art: the exhibition The Eight at the William MacBeth Gallery on 27^th Street. The show became a gesture of defiance aimed at the Academy by Robert Henri and his inner circle. As a member of the Academy’s jury, Henri was incensed at the constant rejections of the work of John Sloan, and concluded that he must find a way to publicly express his position of open rebellion. The show, which opened on 3 February, 1908, exhibited works by Henri, Sloan, Arthur B. Davies, William James, Glackens, Ernest Lawson, George Luks, Maurice Prendergast and Everett Shinn. It became one of the milestones in the birth of American modernity. Because of the realism of Sloan’s work and the themes of the group as a whole, in the mid 1830s The Eight were renamed the Ashcan School. The work of these painters implied a thematic, rather than a stylistic, revolution in the history of American art.
[...]
In Throbbing Fountain John Sloan reveals to us a motif which the artist found particularly captivating. A year before painting the picture, he had already mentioned the famous New York square in his diary: “The fountain in Madison Square, which men and women stare at raptly, in some cases feeling its sensuous charm”. In 1906, Sloan and his wife had moved to 23^rdStreet West, near the spot that is depicted in the picture. The artist strolled through Manhattan for several hours every day, and frequently found inspiration in his own neighbourhood.
[...]
Full text available at the downloadable guide in pdf.

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George Grosz

ROOM 37

George Grosz

Metropolis

1916 - 1917

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George Grosz

Metropolis

ROOM 37

[...]
When Grosz arrived in New York he liked it much more than he’d been led to expect by the films he’d seen about the city. But he had dreamed about it many years previously. Walter Mehring, who met Grosz in 1916, referred to the latter’s painting Metropolis as “Reminiscences of the Entrance to Manhattan”, owing perhaps to the fact that many of the preparatory drawings for the painting were imaginary renderings of New York.The Austrian poet Theodor Däubler, in an early article about the painter, had already noted that “his conception of the big city is really apocalyptic” when describing a drawing of 1916 entitled Memory of New York.
To Grosz, American cities were a dream; he didn’t know them, but had come to love them through books. An indefatigable reader since childhood of the novels of James Fenimore Cooper (cowboys and Indians appear several times in his paintings) Grosz idolised Chicago gangsters, and sometimes posed for friends wearing a gun and mobster hat. Americanism was in his case an expression of protest against German conservatism. In 1914 he enlisted as a volunteer and spent time in the trenches, an experience that was to mark his entire generation. America became an enemy nation, its soldiers parading through Berlin after the Armistice. But Grosz’s admiration for the United States was unshakeable, and in 1916 even prompted him to change his name from Georg to George Grosz, which he would use for the rest of his life. The fascination of European intellectuals for everything American stemmed from their perception of America as a true symbol of modernity.
In 1932 Grosz was invited to the United States as guest professor by the New York Arts Students League; a year later, he had already taken up definite residence in the country. Deprived of his German passport in 1938, he became an American citizen. He accepted temporary employment at a drawing school while waiting for commissions to start coming in from the big magazines – Harper’s Bazaar, Vanity Fair, The New Yorker, Esquire – which were going through their golden period at the time. He was famous for his illustrations in Germany and the whole of Europe, and made a lot of money from his work. In the United States, whose visual culture was much more powerful and up-to-date, his success seemed to be guaranteed. He returned once more to Germany to gather up his family, sell his house and studio and liquidate his assets, before moving back to America to begin a new life. He later learned that a few days after sailing from Germany the Gestapo had come in his search. The relief of escaping the dung heap his native country and the rest of Europe had by now become gave the artist the highest hopes.
[...]
Metropolis, which had been included in a German public collection in the midtwenties, was sold by the Nazi regime to Curt Valentin, a German art dealer who emigrated to America taking the picture with him. Thus it came to pass that Grosz recovered his iconic painting in the city of New York.
Full text available at the downloadable guide in pdf.

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Reginald Marsh

ROOM J

Reginald Marsh

Battery Park

ca. 1926

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Reginald Marsh

Battery Park

ROOM J

The Battery is a public park located on the southern tip of Manhattan Island, offering a privileged view of the port of New York.
[...]
Because of its location, its history and the vistas it has to offer, Battery Park attracts many New Yorkers. It was the place chosen by Reginald Marsh to paint one of his first oils on canvas. In his paintings, drawings and photographs the artist, who came from a well-to-do family, always preferred to depict scenes from the everyday life and leisure time of the working classes. His art transports us to the New York of the 1920s and 1930s, and it was during this period that he painted The Bowery, Coney Island, the subway or 14th Street. Marsh’s depictions of burlesque shows, jazz clubs, dance halls, crowded beaches, and men and women strolling through the streets of Manhattan, became immediately popular because they struck a very familiar chord with New Yorkers. His style, fresh and attentive to detail, was clearly influenced by his period as an illustrator, and his paintings featured numerous elements of daily life, such as billboards announcing the ‘freak shows’ on Coney Island, or signs announcing cheap hotels and barber shops. The artist was endowed with an extremely keen sense of observation, a sharp wit and an enormous ease for making acute social and satirical comments in his pictures of city life. The attention to detail exhibited in his work is a common characteristic of the documentary style of artistic expression during the period. [...]
The painting at the Museo Thyssen- Bornemisza shows a view of Batter Park with steamboats in the background. Three women clad in the fashion of the 1920s enter the sunny setting, where the effect of the wind is very accurately conveyed by the billowing smoke from the tug boats in the harbour and one of the women holding on to her hat in the breeze. The picture is painted in the open air, something Marsh would do in his early compositions, while in later work he relied on sketches and photographs that he took himself and greatly altered in the creative process in his studio to produce results that were not literal copies, since the artist considered photographs to be mere sketches, a kind of visual annotation rather than a finished work of art. The themes in his photographs fit into the same documentary category as those of his contemporaries Berenice Abbott, Dorothea Lange and Walker Evans, but the use Marsh made of his own photographic images for the purposes of painting is closer to the technique of Ben Shahn or Ralston Crawford. Although the artist never considered himself a photographer, the quality of his photographic work as a reflection of an unrepeatable period in the history of New York places him among the indispensable master photographers of the time. In fact, three of Reginald Marsh’s photographs were included in the exhibition 70 Photographers Look at New York, organised by Edward Steichen at the Museum of Modern Art in 1957.
Full text available at the downloadable guide in pdf.

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Edward Hopper

ROOM 45

Edward Hopper

Hotel Room

1931

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Edward Hopper

Hotel Room

ROOM 45

Edward Hopper was born in 1882 in Nyack, New York State. The small town is located on the left side of the Hudson River, about twenty-five miles to the north of New York City. He studied at the New York School of Art under William Merritt Chase, John Sloan and Robert Henri. Hopper travelled to Europe several times, and soon developed an interest in Continental art and culture, which were two of his passions. Among his other interests, some of his favourite themes included sailing, baseball, cycling, photography, Darwinism and Irish immigration.
Hopper came to New York in 1908, but did not take up permanent residence in the city until 1910. His first studio was on 59th Street East, near the work-place of his master Robert Henri, whose studio was located in the environs of the Queensboro Bridge, an iconic site in New York which the artist painted in 1913.
[...]
At the 1913 Armory Show Hopper sold his first painting, Sailing, for 250 dollars to a cloth manufacturer from Manhattan. That same year he moved to his second studio, at his home on the north side of Washington Square, in an area that had been built in the Greek Revival style in the 1830s. The building in which he took up residence had been refurbished in 1884 to house the studios of artists, and among Hopper’s neighbours were Edmund Wilson, John Dos Passos and E. E. Cummings.
Ensconced in the safety of his new studio, which was in part a retreat and in part a watch-tower, Hopper was to capture the life of the bustling metropolis. From his rooftop he could view Fifth Avenue (where his paintings would be displayed for the first time at a show devoted to his work) and it was here, at his workshop and home in the Village, where most of his canvases – including the one selected here – were painted. Josephine posed for her husband in this apartment, in a rather cold place, far from the open fire, which provided adequate lighting. Looking at the scene in Hotel Room we may almost fancy we find ourselves before a passage in Manhattan Transfer, the novel by John Dos Passos, that has been transformed into painting. The painter’s wife could be playing the solitary, pensive character of Ellen, described in the second chapter of the novel, while the room she sits in might well be one of the suites in the Breevort Hotel, the establishment frequented by New York’s bohemian set, which was demolished in 1954.
Edward Hopper only left his New York home to spend his summers in New England. He built himself a house in Cape Cod, and this became his retreat by the sea, which he alternated with his Manhattan apartment.
[...]
Manhattan’s Whitney Museum of American Art houses the Hopper Legacy, a collection that was donated by the painter’s heirs in 1970 and includes 3,150 paintings, drawings, studies and etchings, together with the artist’s diaries. At the same time, the city of New York itself is a constant reminder of Hopper’s painting, whose imprint is present wherever we cast our eye, from the High Line elevated park to the old tracks of former trains.
Although Hopper visited Paris three times, and was a tireless traveller, his home and his world were always in New York, the city he knew best and most loved.
Full text available at the downloadable guide in pdf.

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Max Weber

ROOM 41

Max Weber

Grand Central Terminal

1915

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Max Weber

Grand Central Terminal

ROOM 41

Born in Russia but a naturalised american citizen, Weber was one of the great synthesisers of European art innovations at the beginning of the 20^thcentury. The artist, who had emigrated to New York with his parents when he was ten years old, completed his American training thanks to a fruitful stay in Paris, and managed to achieve a unique and quite personal painting style which transmits the dynamic qualities of the huge city.
Grand Central Terminal represented the frantic bustle of a growing town. The station had been built to replace and update the old depot after a horrific accident involving two trains that collided in the Park Avenue tunnel and caused the death of seventy people. The tragic event led the New York authorities to impose a definite ban on steam engines within the city, and to the creation of a power-driven railway system which required the whole network, and the terminal station itself,to be completely rebuilt. The new terminal opened its doors to the public at midnight on the 1^st of February, 1913, and was described by the newspapers as one of the “glories of the metropolis”. The station also provided renewed commercial thrust to the Midtown Manhattan area, where many new shops, restaurants, offices and hotels opened up for business. The competition for the design of the new main building was won by Reed & Stem, who were in charge of all the functional features of the project for the wealthy Vanderbilt family, the owners of the station, while the Warren & Wetmore architecture studio were responsible for designing the Beaux Arts building that is seen from the street. The result was a great architectural achievement that is divided into two storeys, both of them below ground, with 26 railway tracks on the lower level and 41 tracks on the upper level. The terminal includes a total of 44 platforms, marble floorings, sumptuous chandeliers, and a central dome, decorated by French painter Paul César Helleu, representing a view of the constellations against the night sky.
[...]
Max Weber’s painting Grand Central Terminal focuses on the façade of the building, which dominated downtown Manhattan before the arrival of the city’s skyscrapers. Built in limestone, the façade features three great arches that are separated by paired Corinthian columns supporting the entablature, the slightly curvilinear frontispiece that rounds off the pattern on each side, and the clock with the sculpture of Mercury at the crown of the whole structure. Weber’s aim in the painting was to plastically express the feeling of sheer energy and speed of the rush hour by means of an interpretation of the building’s façade. The picture’s style evidences the impact upon the artist of Marcel Duchamp’s Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2, which Weber had seen at the Armory Show in 1913. The formal Cubist reduction of the human figure in Duchamp’s canvas becomes extremely dynamic when captured in the successive postures adopted by the body as it descends the stairs; the painting was considered the most scandalous exhibit at the celebrated show, and deeply affected Weber. Grand Central Terminal also displays technical similarities to Gino Severini’s The North-South (1912) depicting a bustling metro station in Paris.
[...]
Full text available at the downloadable guide in pdf.

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Piet Mondrian

ROOM 43

Piet Mondrian

New York City, 3 (unfinished)

1941

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Piet Mondrian

New York City, 3 (unfinished)

ROOM 43

The Second World War had driven Piet Mondrian to London in 1938, and two years later – aghast at the bombings of the British capital, and the invasion of Paris by the Nazis – he decided to accept the invitation to America from his friend Harry Holtzman, to whom he wrote: “I’m ready to come”. On 23 September, 1940, Mondrian boarded the Samaria, on the Cunard Line, which left from the port of Liverpool and arrived in New York on the 3^rdof October. Piet Mondrian would spend the last years of his life in New York. The exodus of European artists during the war was massive; in their new physical and intellectual environment, they all experienced a transformation that changed the nature of their production.
In 1941, soon after his arrival in America, Mondrian gave a written account of his artistic credo: “The metropolis reveals itself as an imperfect but concrete determination of space. It constitutes, in itself, the expression of modern life. It produces abstract art: the definition of the splendour of dynamic motion. [...] A work of art is only ‘art’ ina smuch as it defines life in its one immutable aspect: pure vitality”.
The giant quadrangle of the city, which spread over more than twelve miles covering the island like a rational maze of streets and avenues, is transformed in Mondrian’s painting into a grid of straight lines, rectangles and primary colours in the series entitled Studio-Wall Compositions, which was found after the artist’s death in his last studio, on 59^th Street. All his late work seems to be a tribute to the orthogonal design of Manhattan.
[...]
This uniform mesh was developed on the basis of a crosswise pattern of avenues, running from north to south, and streets, running from east to west. The resulting grid determined the size of the city’s blocks. The entire network then adapted to the shape of the island, producing 12 avenues and 155 streets.
New York also experienced a spectacular process of evolution in the third dimension. The erection of ever higher buildings, encouraged by technological discoveries and advances, led to a freefor- all, apparently limitless race to the sky which in fact had to be curbed through regulation in 1916. Skyscrapers changed the appearance of the city forever.
However, it was not only town planning, architecture and the city lights of Manhattan that seduced Mondrian. He was also an enthusiast of music and dancing. The artist had an enormous collection of jazz records,regularly attended Josephine Baker’s Ballets Nègres, and was a passionate follower of the Ballet Russes of Sergei Diaghilev. An admirer of the films of Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers, his musical leanings were described by his friend Theo van Doesburg’s widow as follows: “It is well known that Mondrian was a devotee of social dancing, and had left the waltz behind to take foxtrot and tango lessons; whatever the music that was being played, he would perform his dance steps in an extremely personal and highly stylised fashion”.
[...]
Dance probably served as a stimulus to his depiction of the frantic pace of life through the use of adhesive tape and primary colours on white canvases. The shiny surface of these materials created a contrast that highlighted other textures in the paintings. When attached and detached, the tapes also produced sounds in synchronisation with the movements of the body.
[...]
In 1942, Arnold Newman photographed Piet Mondrian in his studio at no. 353, 56^thStreet East. A room without furniture, an easel and a drawing table is all that we see. Mondrian had whitewashed the walls, upon which only hung red, yellow and blue-coloured squares of paper. The artist proudly displays his work in New York, a city that was full of attractions for a painter whose art would explode after his arrival in the Promised Land.
Full text available at the downloadable guide in pdf.

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Mark Rothko

ROOM 47

Mark Rothko

Untitled (Green on Maroon)

1961

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Mark Rothko

Untitled (Green on Maroon)

ROOM 47

During the 1940s and 1950s the world capital of the avant-garde changed its location. Paris, which for a long time had been at the centre of the most radical and innovative transformations of artistic modernity, was eclipsed by the New York of the abstract expressionists. This surprising change came about as a result of the innovations of a unique generation of artists; a series of masters of different nationalities who came together in the great city and shattered established norms and conventions, spearheading a new and decisive stage in 20th century art. Mark Rothko, Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, Clyfford Still, Barnett Newman, Arshile Gorky, Hans Hofmann and Robert Motherwell were some of the artists who broke with the past through an art form that sank its roots in the European avantgarde. All of them lived through a key period in history, and embraced the legacy of the artists and intellectuals who had arrived from Europe in their flight from the Nazis. With their differing styles, which in some cases shared common ground, the members of what came to be known as the New York School of painting celebrated in their work the individuality and freedom of the artist.
Manhattan became the epicentre of the New York avant-garde. Meetings that went on until the wee hours of the morning were the norm at the Cedar Bar, on University Place, in Greenwich Village. It was at the Cedar, and the Artist’s Club –founded in 1949 – where the passionate masters of abstract expressionism drank, talked shop, organised shows and even came to blows, carried away by the very same impulsive nature that gave life to their art. Rothko was the star of postwar New York, although his temperament was slightly more subdued and he never felt too comfortable in rowdy places like the Cedar. In the world of art his painting was also somewhat removed from the spontaneous, gesturally dramatic work of his contemporaries. Rothko saw his pictures as drama; as the depiction of a timeless tragedy. His paintings, of great spiritual intensity, stir the viewer with a strong feeling of emotion, as if they were an invitation to contemplative meditation. Robert Rosenblum characterised Rothko’s painting as “the abstraction of the sublime”.
[...]
As important as the creation of the MoMA, in terms of advancing modernity in New York, and especially as regards the dissemination of American abstract impressionism, was the activity carried out by Peggy Guggenheim and Betty Parsons at their respective galleries. The Art of This Century Gallery, designed by Frederick Kiesler for the niece of Solomon Guggenheim and housed at number 30, 57th Street West, exhibited work by such masters as Rothko, Hofmann and Pollock. The artist, dealer and collector Betty Parsons also used her gallery, inaugurated in 1946, to promote emerging art and offer her enthusiastic protection to new artists.
Full text available at the downloadable guide in pdf.

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Richard Estes

ROOM J

Richard Estes

Nedick's

1970

Nedick's — View details of the work

Richard Estes

Nedick's

ROOM J

The geometry of the streets and brownstone buildings, the reflections in shop windows, the diners and telephone booths of Manhattan make their appearance on our journey through the work of Richard Estes. The master of photographic realism transforms the streets of New York into his favourite theme, and like a latterday vedutista invites the viewer to stroll through a city where time seems to have come to a halt.
Nedick’s, painted in 1970, focuses on the façade of one of the restaurants belonging to a chain of fast-food outlets created in the city of New York. The chain had branches in different American cities, and it became immensely popular among New Yorkers for its orange juice and its hot-dogs. The name of the brand was a fusion between the surnames of its creators, Robert Neely and Orville Dickinson, who opened the first Nedick’s restaurant on the ground floor of the Hotel Bartholdi, on 23^rd Street and Broadway. The chain’s mottoes – “Good food is never expensive at Nedick’s” and “Always a pleasure” – were known to all New Yorkers, and the restaurant’s characteristic white signboards with orange lettering on them were exhibited in the town’s most busy streets. Nedick’s soon became an institution in Manhattan, whose dwellers considered it as famous as Nathan’s, on Coney island. According to The Daily News, the establishment’s fame thrived on tales such as the story about a young Gregory Peck subsisting on the restaurant’s typical nine-cent breakfast during his lean years as a young, aspiring actor. Nedick’s sponsored the New York Knicks, and sports commentator Marty Glickman’s slogan on the radio, every time the team scored a point, became equally well-known in the city: “Good... like Nedick’s!”. When speaking of Nedick’s, another inevitable reference is of course Martin Scorsese’s film Taxi Driver, shot in Manhattan, in which the restaurant’s brightly-lit neon sign appears in different locations of the city.
Like Jimmy Herf, the character in Dos Passos’s Manhattan Transfer, Richard Estes traverses New York giving us the opportunity to rediscover the city through his works of art. To use the words of Sandro Parmiggiani, viewing his paintings causes “the resurgence inside of us of passage upon passage from the many pages written about New York”.

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Richard Estes

ROOM 51

Richard Estes

Telephone Booths

1967

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Richard Estes

Telephone Booths

ROOM 51

The geometry of the streets and brownstone buildings, the reflections in shop windows, the diners and telephone booths of Manhattan make their appearance on our journey through the work of Richard Estes. The master of photographic realism transforms the streets of New York into his favourite theme, and like a latterday vedutista invites the viewer to stroll through a city where time seems to have come to a halt.
The starting point for the composition of his painting Telephone Booths (1967) was a series of photographs that the artist took of a row of public phone booths on Broadway, Sixth Avenue and 34^thStreet. The effect of the light striking the surface of the picture creates a game of mirror images, refractions and reflections through which the artist seems to be challenging us to capture the infinite possibilities of contemplation. A close examination of the scene and the reflections it contains reveal typical New York details emerging from the painting: the famous Manhattan yellow cabs; the characteristic “Don’t Walk” sign at a pedestrian crossing; a fragment of the logo of Macy’s department-store, another iconic establishment of the city. Created by Rowland Hussey Macy, who opened the first Macy’s store on 28 October, 1858, the original emblem of the chain featured a rooster, but Macy subsequently decided to replace it with the famous star, inspired by the tattoo he had traced on his arm during his sailing days aboard whalers. The department-store’s success resulted from a number of innovative sales and advertising techniques that transformed the whole industry, attracting swarms of customers. Among other novelties, Macy’s introduced a single-price system that did away with haggling, and newspaper adverts announcing the exact price of goods. Macy’s was the first business to be granted a license to sell alcoholic drinks in the city of New York, and also pioneered the figure of an employee dressed up as Father Christmas to greet children during the festive season.
Like Jimmy Herf, the character in Dos Passos’s Manhattan Transfer, Richard Estes traverses New York giving us the opportunity to rediscover the city through his works of art. To use the words of Sandro Parmiggiani, viewing his paintings causes “the resurgence inside of us of passage upon passage from the many pages written about New York”.

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