Staff Picks: City views in the collection

This “Staff Picks” blog will spotlight some of the curators’ favorite city views in the Museum’s collection—some more obvious than others.  

Show Window

Melissa Wolfe is SLAM’s American art curator. She chose Reginald Marsh’s Show Window, which is on view in Gallery 333.

I love the exuberance of this department store window, bursting at its seams with dresses, bows, jackets, mannequins, flower bouquets, scarves, and a tumble of purses. (I love especially the mannequin in the lower center who seems to judge me for my enthusiasm.) I am so thrown for a loop trying to find a focus that still, every time I view this painting in the galleries, it takes me some searching to find the real women crowded into the lower right corner of the space!

The artist, Reginald Marsh, is one of the best-known painters of the bustling street life of 1930s New York City. Not interested one bit in the “tiresome” green of landscapes, or even of the city’s soaring skyline vistas, he kept his eyes to the ground, soaking up instead the warts-and-all, close-up view of the city’s peopled spaces—its subways, Coney Island beaches, Burlesque stages, Bowery streets, and window shoppers. His studio was located on 14th Street near Union Square, a working-class area known for its profusion of small offices, cheap restaurants and theaters, and bargain clothing stores such as Ohrbach’s, whose display window sets the scene in Show Window. While his shopper in green seems to be considering the limits of her pocketbook, her companion in red appears to embrace the temptations in front of her. Her fluid, rhythmic lines evidence Marsh’s love of Baroque masters like Peter Paul Rubens.

We are also positioned as shoppers, looking up at the commanding mannequin figures who draw us in and seemingly evaporate the glass that serves as the barrier between their fantasy space and ours of the “real” world.

To Encircle Base Plate Hexagram, Right Angles Inverted

Melissa Venator is the Museum’s Andrew W. Mellon Assistant Curator of Modern Art. She chose Richard Serra’s To Encircle Base Plate Hexagram, Right Angles Inverted, which is embedded in the pavement of Fine Arts Drive in front of the Main Building entrance.

We have so many great city views in our collection—Robert Delaunay’s Eiffel Tower, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner’s Basel with the Rhine, Oskar Kokoschka’s Marseille, Harbor II. These are stunning paintings of beautiful places, but my favorite city view takes a completely different approach.

Richard Serra made To Encircle because he wanted people to notice the overlooked spaces around them. He lived in Manhattan and was skeptical of the large sculptures he frequently saw next to skyscrapers, which he dismissed as “plaza art.” His answer was a 26-foot-wide steel circle set directly into the asphalt of a dead-end street in the Bronx, where people could walk or drive over it.

That is one reason I love this work. It doesn’t announce itself right away. You have to come close, look down, or see it from above before it registers. Then there is that wonderful pause: What is this? Why is it here?

Serra’s sculpture eventually came to St. Louis, where it was installed at Laumeier Sculpture Park before moving to the Museum’s campus in 2005. Today, it sits in Fine Arts Drive, between the Main Building entrance and the overlook with the statue of St. Louis. The location feels just right. You can notice it as you walk in, then see it again from the top of the steps as you leave.

It is not a city view in the usual sense. But for me, To Encircle does something even better. It asks us to look at the city under our feet.

Madison Square, New York City

Eric Lutz is an associate curator of prints, drawings, and photographs. He chose Victor Prevost’s Madison Square, New York City photograph. Photographs and other works on paper can be viewed by appointment in the Museum’s Print Study Room.

While photography was invented in Paris, the city that has captivated and held photographers’ attention most has been New York City. Its cycles of demolition and construction, and the nervy energy of its streets have proved endlessly fascinating. Most of us are familiar with work done in the 20th century as skyscrapers were rising, yet a recent gift to the Museum gives us insight into an earlier, less hectic period.

It is a view of the area around Madison Square Park, taken in the mid-1850s by Victor Prevost. The French transplant holds an important place in American photography as one of the first to depict New York City’s growing urban environment. This rare surviving print is from one of several negatives he made in the winter of 1853–54 from the rear window of his home on 28th Street. The nearly finished home of a prominent real estate developer, Adrian Iselin, is in the center, while the top of a hippodrome tent (a space for circus performances) on Madison Square is also visible, just above the structure.

Prevost’s picture draws us into the image through its rhythms of rectilinear elements that shift from foreground to back, from ground to sky. The buildings, windows, walls, and shadows of an entirely man-made environment are interlocked in a taut composition. It is a seemingly static view, yet—with the city’s relentless development—it is certain that none of the buildings we are looking at here survive today. The iconic wedge-shaped Flatiron building that now anchors Madison Square was erected a mere 50 years after this picture was taken. It’s strange that an image made to document the city’s growth is now one of the only records that these structures ever existed.