Collections: American Art

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Contemporary Take on Landscape Painting

Eugenie Tsai on October 21, 2008

Valerie Hegarty (American, born 1967). Fallen Bierstadt, 2007. Foamcore, paint, paper, glue, gel medium, canvas, wire, and wood. Gift of Campari, USA , 2008.9a–b. Photo courtesy Matt Verzola via Flickr. All Rights Reserved.

Hanging off kilter in 21: Selections of Contemporary Art from the Brooklyn Museum is Valerie Hegarty’s Fallen Bierstadt (2007). Looking like a charred painting that’s disintegrating, one corner of the ornate gold frame appears to lift off the wall while the lower half of the canvas and frame appear to have crumbled into pieces of debris that lie in small piles on the floor. What appears to be a painting is in reality a highly illusionistic facsimile crafted by Hegarty out of ordinary materials including paper, foam core, and wood.



Bridal Veil Falls, Yosemite, about 1871-73. Oil on canvas, 36 1/8 x 26 3/8 in. (91.7 x 67.0 cm.). Purchased with funds from the North Carolina Art Society (Robert F. Phifer Bequest) and various donors, by exchange, 87.9

Fallen Bierstadt refers to a painting entitled Bridal Veil Falls, Yosemite (in the collection of the North Carolina Museum of Art) by Albert Bierstadt, the renowned 19th century American landscape painter. I was gratified to learn that Hegarty, who lives across the street from the Museum, has frequently visited American Identities on the 5th floor where our own examples of Bierstadt’s paintings can be found. The title, Fallen Bierstadt, seems to refer both to the physical appearance of the piece and to the end of a heroic tradition of landscape painting. By mimicking the high degree of illusionism found in Bierstadt’s paintings, Hegarty’s fabricated object reveals her own skill as virtuoso.



While Patrick Amsellem and I were installing the exhibition, we invited Hegarty to place the debris on the floor as she wished and the placement was documented by our conservation department so that we can replicate it whenever the work is on view at the museum.

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Destination Paintings . . . as Featured on Sunday Arts

Terry Carbone on September 24, 2008

In planning our spots for Channel 13, we faced the challenge of choosing two particularly engaging paintings from among the many works on view objects in our American Art galleries. We often select groups of works for inclusion in the tours we give to students and adult visitors, but there is usually some sort of thread—historical, thematic, or artistic—that links them together. In choosing single works, we think more about which objects have come to represent the entire collection. And in the case of the Museum's pre-1945 American paintings, two works instantly come to mind. Each has come to represent the American art collection, even though one was acquired in 1846, and the other entered the collection more than one hundred years later . . . .

Francis Guy's "Winter Scene" was painted about 1819, and made its exhibition debut in Manhattan in 1820. Viewers were bowled over to see such a remarkably accurate "portrait" of a locale that was familiar to many of them. Guy had painted this townscape of Brooklyn's one-time center from the vantage point of his rented rooms on Front Street, and he included actual physical features of the place as well as the likenesses of many of the area's most prominent inhabitants. In shaping the scene, he probably intended to contrast the old-fashioned barnyard that occupies the center of the image, with more the stylish residences of the more affluent residents at the far left of the scene—the latter component sadly was lost when the painting was damaged in a fire in 1881, and the left-hand edge was cut away.

The Brooklyn Museum's predecessor, the Brooklyn Institute, held a series of important art exhibitions, featuring hundreds of works, in the 1840s, and Guy's "Winter Scene" was prominently exhibited in two of them. Among the visitors who marveled at the picture was the young Walt Whitman, then the vocal editor of the Brooklyn Daily Eagle and an active advocate for the arts in Brooklyn. In his review of the 1846 exhibition, Whitman called attention to the work's power to suggest to present and future viewers how rapidly and completely this once rural village had changed: ". . . few things will be able to bring before the next race the fact how rapidly Brooklyn has ‘went' in the progress of improvement, more fully than this well-delineated picture." Whitman's comments and a number of popular prints based on the painting guaranteed its public profile. Interestingly enough, when the new Brooklyn Museum building was opened to the public in 1897, "Winter Scene" once again occupied a prominent position, although not in the primary galleries of American and European paintings on the fifth floor; the early American portraits, and what were described as American "landscapes of great historical value," were installed near the entryway on the third floor. The segregation of what was considered at the time to be "antiquarian" material from "contemporary" turn-of-the-century art was typical of many young American art institutions. Even after Brooklyn dedicated separate American art galleries in 1907, the "historical" works were exhibited separately from the modern American paintings.

Today, a wide array of the Museum's American paintings is on view in the American galleries, grouped in a sequence of themes rather than by strict chronology. Guy's "Winter Scene" is the focal object in our introductory gallery, which is entirely Brooklyn-centric. In reorganizing these galleries in 2001, our goal was to use this space to introduce viewers to the art-life that has existed in Brooklyn for centuries. Every object in this space has something to do with Brooklyn—Brooklyn as a longtime center of manufacturing, of creative expression, and of collecting, and Brooklyn as subject. A broad spectrum of New Yorkers, and visitors from much farther afield, still marvel at Guy's townscape, as they consider how vastly different the Brooklyn environment is today.



Over the course of the 20^th century, American collectors and museums became increasingly more interested in collecting 18^th and 19^th-century American art. Brooklyn was among the leaders in this direction in the teens, when the Museum actively purchased and exhibited colonial and Federal era portraits. American landscape painting surprisingly lagged in the revival of interest in pre-Modern American art. It was not until the 1930s that a germ of interest began to develop—in part out of a renewed Nativism in the Depression era, and a concerted effort to establish the independence of American art from European influence. Interest in Hudson River School landscapes grew steadily during the mid-20^th century; most of the museum's best Hudson River pictures were purchased during this period, beginning in the 1950s. The collecting market was most dramatically boosted, however, by the build-up toward and the celebration of the American Bicentennial of 1976. It was in 1976 that the Brooklyn Museum purchased its monumental Bierstadt painting, "Storm in the Rocky Mountains, Mount Rosalie". Since entering the Museum's collection, this painting has captured the interest and imaginations of thousands of visitors to the museum, owing to the impact of its size, and the dramatic nature of the artist's portrayal of the American West. Bierstadt based it on his own expedition to the Colorado Rockies in 1863, and conceived the final canvas as a blockbuster that would introduce the remote western landscape that few individuals had experienced into the consciousness of largely urban audiences in America and Europe.That a painting as large and well-publicized as this one fell off the radar screen by the early 20^th century had to do in part with the fact that it was purchased immediately by the Englishman Thomas William Kennard, a civil engineer who had presided over the building of the Atlantic and Great Western Railway in the United States. At the outset of the revival of interest in 19^th -century American landscape art, preference was given to artists who were considered to have been less reliant on European landscape models. Since Bierstadt was associated so closely with the German Dusseldorf school, his work initially lagged in popularity. By the 1970s, however, when art historians began to revalue work by foreign-trained Americans, Bierstadt's reputation was gradually revived."Storm in the Rocky Mountains, Mount Rosalie" remained officially "unlocated" for almost ninety years—even reported by some sources to have been destroyed by fire. After Kennard's death in 1896, it entered the inventory of a London dealer and resurfaced only in 1974. Today, Bierstadt's grand canvas speaks to innumerable viewers who are captivated the artist's vision of the West despite their own broader familiarity with the region it recorded. Most people gravitate toward this painting even while understanding the hyperbole of Bierstadt's composition—a composite of various landscape elements in a super-sized view, animated by theatrical atmospheric and light effects. The painting still conveys the natural force and resources that were directly associated throughout the late-nineteenth century with the might and rising potential that the United States would bring to bear on the world stage. For contemporary viewers, it also presents a nostalgic vision of an unspoiled place, just as Guy's "Winter Scene" allows us to time travel nearly two hundred years into the past.

It is the power of both of these pictures to make us pause and look that has made them among the popular favorites on view in "American Identities: A New Look".

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Steeplechase, Luna Park, and Dreamland

Patrick Amsellem on January 16, 2008

The history of Coney Island from the 1890s and through the first decade of the 20th century is very much the history of three successful amusement parks: Steeplechase, Luna Park, and Dreamland. The Tilyou family had been influential in developing Coney Island ever since Peter Tilyou established one of the area’s first hotels and taverns in the 1860s, and the first of the three important parks was also a Tilyou creation. In 1897, Peter’s son George combined the family’s many sprawling concessions around the Bowery and opened Steeplechase Park on the beach between West Sixteenth and West Nineteenth streets. He was inspired by the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago in 1893 and by an earlier enclosed amusement park at Coney, Paul Boyton’s Sea Lion Park. Tilyou charged admission and provided affordable entertainment (a roller coaster, a scenic railroad, a Ferris wheel, a funhouse, a bathing pavilion, food, and dancing) for a mass audience inside an enclosure that was supposed to keep crime and violence outside. The main attraction was a mechanical horserace that gave the park its name and reflected the popularity of horseracing at Coney, at this time the country’s horse-racing capital. (Racetracks had been built at Brighton Beach, Sheepshead Bay, and Gravesend to serve the wealthy and fashionable clientele in the 1870s and 1880s.) Tilyou rebuilt Steeplechase after a fire in 1907, and many of the rides, from the Earthquake Stairway to the Human Pool Table, were moved indoors to the Pavilion of Fun, a large steel and glass building. The most long-lived and profitable of Coney’s three historical amusement parks, Steeplechase did not close its doors until 1964, and even today, Tilyou’s emblem, the funny face, is considered Coney Island’s mascot.

Frederic Thompson and Elmer Dundy, with experience of running concessions at the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition and other fairs, had brought their successful simulation of a spaceship ride, “A Trip to the Moon,” to Steeplechase in 1902. Because of the success, they decided, the following year, to open their own amusement venture, Luna Park, on the site of Boyton’s failing Sea Lion Park, on Surf Avenue between West Eighth and West Twelfth streets. Two hundred fifty thousand electric lights turned night into day, with an imaginary architecture of many exotic spires and domes in white, orange, and gold. A two-hundred-foot tower covered in thousands of electric lights which constantly changed colors was Luna Park’s centerpiece and was a fixture of nighttime Coney Island. Luna’s twenty-two acres were dedicated entirely to pleasure and play with concerts, fireworks, and carnivalesque performances, in addition to the many fanciful and creative rides that employed all the technical innovations of the day. The Helter Skelter was a hugely popular, adults-only giant slide. From a fifty-foot tower, people would tumble down the slide on little mats, skirts flying, to the amusement of the masses gathered on the ground. Luna Park also provided otherworldly experiences from far corners of the globe, from gondola rides on the canals of Venice to Eskimo villages, the Swiss Alps, and a Delhi marketplace. Variations of the Tunnels of Love were among the most popular of the early rides in the amusement parks at Coney. Like many other rides, they encouraged informal contact between men and women and provided new opportunities for interaction between young people. We have to remember that when these rides were introduced at the turn of the twentieth century, social etiquette often still made relaxed communication difficult. The Dragon’s Gorge was an enclosed roller coaster, a scenic railroad that brought the passenger on a fantastic trip from the bottom of the sea, through a waterfall, to the North Pole, Africa, the Grand Canyon, and even into Hades, the kingdom of Death, over the river Styx. Two dragons framed the entrance, their eyes glowing with light from globes of green electric light. The ride caught fire in 1944, ultimately leading to the closing of the park two years later.

William H. Reynolds’s Dreamland, constructed in 1904, was the third of the historical amusement parks at Coney Island. In an effort to attract a middle-class audience that otherwise might be deterred by the excesses of Coney, its all-white, more traditional design, in line with the White City of the 1893 Chicago Exposition, signaled purity rather than offering the orientalist exoticism of Luna Park’s imaginary architecture. With biblically inspired spectacles, it was meant to provide an alternative to the evils of dance halls and bars. “Creation,” a moving panorama under a giant blue dome, presented both the creation, according to the book of Genesis, and the end of the world. Its entrance on Surf Avenue was an arched portal supported by an enormous angel with her wings spread out. With taller towers, one million electric lights, and a capacity to accommodate one hundred thousand visitors, Dreamland sought to outshine its neighbors, but never reached the popularity of Luna Park or Steeplechese.

Beside the many different rides, disaster spectacles – both independently operated on Surf Avenue, and at Luna Park and Dreamland – were common at Coney Island. Reenactments of war battles, from Gettysburg to the more contemporary Boer wars, competed for attention with scenes of natural catastrophes such as the Galveston Flood of 1900. Luna Park’s “Fire and Flames” was a popular disaster spectacle in which firemen rescued several hundred actors from a burning six-story hotel, and Dreamland had its own fire-fighting display, “Fighting the Flames,” with even more firemen and actors. Not just spectacles, but real fires were common at Coney Island. Sometimes they engulfed large swaths of the mostly wooden structures in the area: a devastating fire took place on the Bowery in 1903; Steeplechase burned in 1907 (but was completely rebuilt eight months later); Dreamland burned in 1911, never to reopen. With Dreamland gone, many felt that the old Coney Island would soon disappear.

The west end of Coney Island attracted up to five hundred thousand people on weekends and holidays about 1900, and in 1909, perhaps the most successful year ever, about twenty million visitors arrived. Luna Park alone charged thirty-one million admissions between 1903 and 1908. The phenomenon of Coney Island was the epitome of mass culture. Dancing pavilions, concert halls, and restaurants like Stauch’s provided new opportunities for people to meet and contributed to changing the dynamics between the sexes at the turn of the twentieth century. The newly gained recreational time for the working classes was available to most people, and the new forms of mass entertainment and leisure activities created unprecedented possibilities for more informal mingling between the sexes. Public transportation was crucial for the success, and at this time – in addition to multiple ferry and railroad connections – a trolley service was running from Park Row on lower Manhattan across the Brooklyn Bridge, inaugurated in 1883. This provided another easy and relatively cheap trip for many working-class and immigrant visitors to Coney. The construction of the Williamsburg Bridge in 1903 and the Manhattan Bridge in 1909 made the trip even more effortless. The trolley would eventually be replaced by the subway, which was extended to Coney Island in 1920.

Slideshow created with Admarket's flickrSLiDR. Having trouble seeing the slideshow? Photos are also on Flickr.

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