Fralin Catalog (6-21-23) - Flipbook - Page 119
The city
Streets & Parks
W
ith endless spectacle of pedestrian crowds and
congested traffic, construction and development,
and continuous transformation and movement,
cities symbolize all that is modern. This dynamism
of motion is consummately enveloped within Theodore Butler’s
exuberant Flag Day, 1918, featuring a boisterous display of flags from
various allied forces during the First World War, fluttering along
New York’s Fifth Avenue. Butler’s slashing brushstrokes and colorful
composition suggest the impending victory celebrations, while also
announcing new advances in Abstraction and Expressionism that
would not fully take hold until the mid-20th century.
While the 19th and 20th centuries saw rapid industrialization and
metropolitan growth, it was also the era of great urban parks as
places of leisure, enjoyment, promenading, and sightseeing. The
crowded Park Scene by Maurice Prendergast, Windy Day on Battery
Park by Howard McLean with its view of the Statue of Liberty, Bridle
Path by John Sloan set in New York’s Central Park, and Boys with Sled,
Washington Square by William Glackens all capture a sense of social
interaction that enhance the city dweller’s daily life.
The once clamoring and boisterous waterfront of New York Harbor is
portrayed in the spatial dynamism and Cubist-derived forms within
John Marin’s New York City with Tugboat. Vigorous movement is also
prevalent in urban streetscapes at night, with the advent of electric
streetlights creating both a brilliant luminosity as well as shadowed
murkiness. Lower Fifth Avenue at Night by Guy Carleton Wiggins,
Charleston Night by Walter Biggs, and London Evening by Richard Hayley
Lever make us realize that the studied effects of light characteristic of
Impressionism were never limited exclusively to the brilliance of full
sunlight in the natural landscape.
Opposite: detail of Howard McLean, Windy Day on Battery Park, n.d., illustrated page 126-127
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