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UCD Clinton Institute for American Studies

Douglas Tallack 

(University of Nottingham)

“A sense, through the eyes, of embracing possession” (Henry James): Bird’s Eye Views of New York City, c. 1880s-1920s

Near the end of the nineteenth century and some twenty years before New York’s international career took off, bird’s eye and other distanced overviews (often of the skyline) were circulating quite widely and helping to define the city’s identity and even its iconic future in some cases. These overviews, whether suppositious or made from across the Bay or from the new tall buildings, pictured the city through discrete as well as mixed media. It is this emerging and complex “visuality” which will be analysed, beginning with the challenge to picture the city whole taken up by the map-like pictures in Moses King’s New York Views (1896 – 1915). The cross-overs between genres and media* are an important aspect of the visual discourse of New York City at a time when photography was becoming popular, the movies were getting started, and painting was surrounded by sketches, drawings and other variations upon painting, as well as by additions to it in the direction of collage, for example.

The re-visualising of New York under the auspices of the New York City Improvement Commission through to the1907 Plan, together with the associated work of the minor Impressionist, Jules Guerin, allows for a link in the middle section of the lecture with more obviously aesthetic distant images in the paintings of Childe Hassam and the photographs of Alfred Stieglitz, Alvin Langdon Coburn and Edward Steichen.

By focusing on John Marin, Max Weber and even the final twist which Piet Mondrian gives to the invitation to capture a now horizonless New York, the lecture concludes with abstract Modernism’s surprising amalgam of a formal self-consciousness about representation and an understanding of urban processes.

* With the option of showing a two-minute early panoramic film, a clip from Sheeler and Strand’s Manhatta, and a number of intriguing slides [packaged within Powerpoint], this topic would make an attractive full lecture which would appeal across the disciplines. If there are no such slots the talk could be cut to figure in a more specialised panel session. (I think that the need to show visual material necessitates a 30-minute slot.)