(Please forgive any spelling or grammar errors - I will proof read this later when I have more time, thanks for reading!)
I don’t claim to be any sort of expert on art, but spending the last couple of days back in New York made me think a bit. For whatever reason, Art Deco has been on my mind quite a bit lately, and I decided while in New York that I wanted to revisit some of the city’s more famous Art Deco landmarks - Chrysler Building, Empire State, Met Life Building (the original one on Park Avenue, not the one above Grand Central), as well as the buildings of Rockefeller Center, and one of my all-time personal favorites, One Wall Street. I wanted to experience some of my favorite skyscrapers from the ground, the way they were intended to be experienced, and to circle them looking for new angles to capture them from, taking some shots but also planning more future shots.
One of the greatest Art Deco buildings ever, and another personal favorite, is Raymond Hood’s iconic American Radiator Building (pictured above in a Georgia O’Keefe painting). The American Radiator Building is on 40th St next to Bryant Park, occupying a prominent position near the public library, visible all around because of the park in front of it. After looking at the building, I remembered Georgia O’Keefe’s painting of it, and tried to picture it in person as she might have seen it. Her painting of the building is a homage to modernity. It was painted in 1927, and clearly shows how dazzling the new concept of an electrically lit city must have felt. Lights illuminate the middle floors, as well as the crown of the building, which is dramatically lit from below, and spotlights seems to search in the background from the ground. Another thing I get from this painting is the enthusiasm for verticality present in all Art Deco architecture. Raymond Hood was a master of verticality, and the American Radiator Building is one of the more impressive examples of the hopefulness of early skyscraper design, as the spires at the top point upwards into the sky, a theme that would become more and more prevalent, reaching its most exaggerated yet tasteful and handsome conclusion in the oddly under-rated Empire State and Chrysler Buildings (more on that later).
Anyway, the above painting and all of my Art Deco escapades over the weekend got me thinking about originality and inventiveness in American art, and I discovered a few other painters and photographers with interesting and uniquely American works today that I thought were worth sharing. The Precisionists were American painters who made urban images that depicted the unprecedented scale and odd, cinematic beauty of American cities. Charles DeMuth, Charles Sheeler, and Paul Strand were three of the new artists I discovered, along with some of O’Keefe’s other paintings, some of my favorites of all of these artists are posted below.
As anybody who follows this blog knows, I love cities and I love industrial architecture. The interesting thing to me about all of these paintings is the obsession they have with uniquely American scenery. Scenes like these have been a big influence on the way I have been shooting recently. Above all else, they remind me of a quote in a book review of Jean Baudrillard’s travelogue America“The crowded cities are ‘electrifying’ and ‘cinematic’“. That sentence stuck with me, as I think it is an interesting representation of American urbanism, at least as American cities differ from other world cities. American invented the idea of tall. The skyscraper was our idea, started in Chicago and perfected in New York, though our new skyscrapers do little to emphasize their height and American-ness, instead opting to look like relatively bland glass boxes with no geographic or regional importance (with a few notable exceptions).
The paintings above draw on the unique sense of bigness and modernity that American cities, especially the large eastern cities, carried with great confidence in the first half of the 20th century, when Art Deco was a prominent building style. Light, shadows, smoke, concrete, and occasionally people populate these pictures of an environment that was being pioneered and tested for the first time. In the great Northern cities (particularly New York, Chicago and some of the Rust Belt cities like Detroit, Pittsburgh, etc.), impressive and overwhelming structures became a part of everyday life. Outside of the tall, crowded, and chaotic granite walls of downtown laid the loud, noisy, traffic-clogged and smoke filled industrial streets, where immigrants flooded to work in super-structure factories that made ships, steel, textiles, automobiles, or consumer goods. The machine age was in full swing, and American architecture (and art) reflected this bold new era in its flamboyantly optimistic designs.
At the same time, these types of urban environments created a bizarre sense of loneliness, exaggerated by the constant flow of human beings, transit, consumerism, and general American excessive-ness that has always been our best and worst trademark. These types of feelings are captures by one of the greatest American painters, Edwards Hopper (below), whose works always included a sparse amount of people, often bathed in the glow of artificial light and sulking in their loneliness.
It says something about America today that Hopper’s urban paintings are by far better known than O’Keefe’s or any of the Precisionists. As the 20th century surged forward, urbanism became watered down. Cities were seen as dirty, grimy, and chaotic places that offered bad lives with polluted air. Anybody who could (and many could not), fled to the suburbs, and so we were left with one of the more absurd and racist movements of American history now known as “white flight”, which ruined our images of our own cities forever. Gone were art deco, flashy vertical skyscrapers, exuberant urban designs and the flutter of industrial innovation, and in came European Modernism and American consumerist design. It’s almost impressive how quickly Americans became disillusioned with what was by far their most impressive invention - the vertical city.
Even more bizarre is that we hardly even take Hopper seriously, and one of his paintings, Nighthawks, is one of the most parodied pieces of art in American history, as people have substituted the characters with all manner of characters from movies, or set the diner in an imaginary place, etc. In a very post modern move, we’re even disillusioned with our disillusionment.
I think part of what has made me think so much about this was my recent trip to Asia. I visited Hong Kong, as well as several cities in South Korea, for two weeks. I think the trip revealed two things - first, it reinforced my love for cities that have a certain amount of confusion to them (and there is not a more confusing, yet simultaneously exhilarating experience as being a white person in Asian cities, something which Lost in Translation does a pretty excellent job in capturing), and second, it showed me how much Americans are still admired in other parts of the world, despite my thoughts about our increasing irrelevancy and our currently ridiculous cultural and political circus that is on display for the world to see. In cities that have taken all of the best things about American cities in the early 20th century and perfected them, we were still met with awed looks when we talked casually about New York, or when people would ask us about the United States, and we would tell them about places in the US that we have traveled to, like Los Angeles, and Detroit, and Chicago. I realized that American cities do still have something of a prominent place on the world stage.
All of this has been informing the recent series that I have been slowly putting together from old photos and that I have been actively trying to take new photos for - Cities & Memory. The title is taken from Italo Calvino’s novel Invisible Cities(highly recommended), and comes from the feelings I got experiencing the cities of the Far East, which reminded me of my initial experiences of American cities. I felt, among other things, a sense of awe and confusion, in addition to being amazed by the architecture and especially the infrastructure, as we ate our way through certain types of food that I didn’t know were even possible.
That type of experience in a new city can be the worst thing or the most beautiful thing if you let it. I do sincerely wish we could build up our cities more than we do now, and that when we did so, we had something that made them look unique. I think architecture critics seem to think that American architecture is little more than a collection of variations of European architecture, but Art Deco is certainly a very American building style. I would love to see a return of Art Deco styles, like Pelli’s Wells Fargo Center in Minneapolis, which is perhaps one of the only buildings to be built in America in the last 50 years with so much as a nod to what makes American cities distinctly American (directly showing the influence of Raymond Hood, though with Pelli’s own mark). Instead of looking to the future so much in the bizarre experiments of our new skyscrapers, which are beyond Post-Modernism now (though I don’t know what to call them), which seem to be experiments in what we can do with glass for the sake of experimenting with glass, and look to our past visions. It would be interesting to see a new crop of neo-decoism flourish and redefine American architecture. We could use something that draws on our unique heritage, and inspires our imagination, reminding us that we were once, and could be again, great city builders.
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