In 1946 a painter named Mary Mintz Koffler climbed some rubble skirting Castle Clinton, a protean site on the Battery that had served New York City as a military stronghold, opera house, immigration center, and aquarium over its 130-year existence. The structure, already partially demolished, had been doomed five years earlier when harbor pollution and lack of room to expand prompted aquarium administrators to look elsewhere for an improved facility (the aquarium was temporarily housed at the Bronx Zoo until the new facility was built on Coney Island). Their exit enabled the audacious Robert Moses to accelerate his plans for razing the old fort and the area adjoining it to accommodate the new Brooklyn-Battery Tunnel. Koffler, bracing her sketchpad from the construction blasts that had resumed after the interruptions of World War II and a prolonged unsuccessful legal campaign to have the landmark preserved, began to record the building's carcass from the nearby pile of debris. In The Aquarium in Destruction of 1947 (fig. 1), she memorialized the structure as an antique ruin against the backdrop of lower Manhattan's modern skyline.¹ Although straight-forward in style, the picture carries a subtext relating to the crossfire that surrounded the aquarium's threatened destruction. In their efforts to rescind the authorization to rid Battery Park of what remained of Fort Clinton, opponents of the Moses project, including members of the Citizens Union, the Fine Arts Federation of New York, and the American Scenic and Historic Preservation Society, had approached the city's Board of Estimate with a proposal to finance the fort's restoration with private funds in recognition of its historical value. When these efforts proved unsuccessful, they next appealed to the courts, a protracted process that bought some time (but not immunity from the start-up of site clearance) to press for legislation that would deed the property to the federal government as a national park.

A stay of execution materialized when an injunction was issued forbidding further demolition without approval by the New York City Art Commission. A few months later, however, New York's Appellate Court overturned that ruling, opining, "We hold that what now remains of the Aquarium structure or the walls of the old fort which preceded it does not constitute a 'monument' or a 'work of art' within the meaning of the City Charter."² Jurisdiction was returned to the Board of Estimate, which considered the structure to have outlived its practical usefulness. Demolition proceeded. Belatedly, Congress rewarded the preservationists with a compromised victory by declaring Castle Clinton a federal monument, but not before the wrecker's ball had dismantled all but the walls of the original fortress.

Threaded through the saga were all the recurrent debates pitting nostalgia against pragmatism, enshrining the past versus expediting the future, at the bedrock of New York City's history. Attuned to these tensions, Koffler used her brush to effect what bureaucratic taxonomy would not concede: she transformed into art a piece of real estate denied legal recognition as art, thereby "landmarking" the monument on canvas for posterity.

Koffler's elegy to the condemned aquarium is the sort of painting tailored to the Museum of the City of New York, with its interest in the city as a living organism. She eventually donated the work to the Museum, and it is now among the 1,750 "urban scenes" entrusted to the Paintings and Sculpture Collection, a curatorial department formally established by the Museum in 1987 to promote access to this important but little known and thus undervalued historical resource.

Paintings comparable to Koffler's, illustrating sites laden with narrative or sentimental association, were among the core materials gathered by the nascent Museum, which was incorporated in 1923, to help chronicle the aims and vagaries of New York's development via exhibitions lodged at its purpose-built headquarters on upper Fifth Avenue. In April 1929 Mayor Jimmy Walker laid the building's cornerstone; its interior time- and theme-driven displays made their public debut on January 11, 1932. Although the Museum had been housed successfully in several temporary locations during the robust years of the 1920s,³ upon taking occupancy of this new facility it was immediately hobbled by the financial fallout from Wall Street's crash. A chronic shortage of discretionary funds would test the institution's health and ingenuity thereafter, and gifts from artists--such as Koffler's Aquarium--became vital to the enlargement of its visual holdings.

Adhering to organizational models from abroad that had seeded this maiden American effort at a municipal history museum, the founding administration made no medium-based distinctions when assembling the instruments of urban iconography. Content mattered; the more direct in its delivery, the better. Just how such information was visually crafted, embroidered, concealed, jettisoned, or retrofitted, and what compelled artists to probe New York City's physicality, were issues considered less germane to the cause of educating citizens about their city's history. "Scene paintings" consequently spent almost sixty-five years tethered to the vast Print Collection, interspersed with maps, drawings, photographs, postcards, and a treasury of printed views.

Nonetheless, new acquisitions of oils, watercolors, and other brush-made landscapes arrived steadily, if randomly, through bequests and occasional pursuits of donations useful to specific exhibitions. Supplementary loans were secured as needed, and contemporary city-scene painters were honored with sporadic monographic surveys, solidifying the Museum's reputation as a venue receptive to this genre of picture.⁴ Along the way, however, the collection's custodial situation took an inevitable toll. Canvases housed as "prints" lost their materiality as artifacts. The origins of these unique artworks were largely forgotten. Only rarely did painterly techniques or makers' intentions surface in the discussion accompanying paintings on display.

Hindsight also exposes many missed opportunities to develop the collection proactively. A case in point: during the Museum's formative years, no courtship was paid to the "Ash Can School" painters, who were still in force locally, or to their patrons. Their bold forays into urban realism, though borrowed for occasional presentations, evidently were never recruited for the permanent collection, whether as gifts or purchases via specially solicited funds. Given the exalted prices commanded today for work by the "Eight," the likelihood of filling such a lacuna, at least in the form of a painting, seems improbable.⁵

The Museum's separation of paintings into a new division independent from prints, in 1987, was the lead step in bringing accountability to this sprawling collection and in rationalizing its future growth. By 1989 a comprehensive inventory and conservation assessment of these holdings had been completed, with dedicated research files compiled for the majority of works and artists represented. Contacts with artists or their estates also generated pertinent recollections for this evolving archive. Grant-supported cleaning proceeded on paintings prioritized for treatment, yielding many fresh revelations. Blendon Reed Campbell's Queensboro Bridge (plate 85), for example, was transformed from a leaden view of Manhattan, mood-toned to the Depression, into a pristine city of promise with the removal of a filmy grime that had obscured Campbell's high-keyed palette.

In the course of re-cataloguing, a profile emerged of a collection molded by idiosyncrasies innate to the museum's mission, operational circumstances, and service as a municipal memory bank, yet also characteristic of the immense proportions, variety, and constancy that have marked the enterprise of cityscape painting over the past two centuries. Consider, for instance, Franz Kline's 1940 Washington Square Arch (fig. 2), a rather pedestrian scene predating his celebrated breakthrough into nonobjective painting. What may seem marginal according to aesthetic canon can be lifeblood to an institution trafficking in imagery specific to place; hence the Museum's accommodation of this aberrant Kline as prime evidence of the pictorial gold the artist had spun from the hay of souvenir views when odd-jobbing around Greenwich Village in the late 1930s.⁶

Another goal of the documentation process was to recover contemporaneous meanings distanced from paintings during their long residency in the Print Collection -- contexts further obscured by the blanket of critical neglect that generally dropped on visual realism after the rise of Abstract Expressionism. Stansbury Norse's Old Blockhouse in Central Park, 1888 (fig. 3), received as a gift in 1952, epitomized the challenge, underscoring, too, that a scene's simplicity could prove deceptive. Date, author, donor, and nominal subject were the extent of facts volunteered on its spare registry record. A cataloguer had remarked that the painting depicted an artillery magazine built in 1814 as part of a defense erected against the possibility of British invasion of Manhattan from the north. The scene's creator proved to be a little-known painter who exited New York City in the 1890s to take the post of drawing instructor at the State Normal School in Potsdam, New York.⁷ A work of modest power, its virtue seemed limited to the topographical evidence Norse had supplied of Central Park's rocky northwestern summit, which had been enfolded into the Greensward Plan, blockhouse included, only after the park's northern boundary was extended from 106th Street to 110th Street. The view's meditative mood, however, encouraged deeper investigation. The boarded-up blockhouse, research disclosed, was one of just two structures surviving from the park's pre-development era.⁸ By the late nineteenth century, its eroding condition had provoked calls for removal and outcry over the rubbish accumulating in its interior. Discussions followed about whether, and then how, to reclaim old "blockhouse no. 1." In 1905 the Women's Auxiliary to the American Scenic and Historic Preservation Society placed a commemorative tablet on the freshly rehabilitated site. Uncertainty lingered, however, over whether to press for additional restoration or to risk leaving the structure to rusticate.

The military relic, while undistinguished architecturally, acquired symbolic appeal during these years as material proof of New York's continuum -- as a monument to historical memory all too rare in an urban landscape where amnesia, justified as progress, was the rule. "Overturn, overturn, overturn," nineteenth-century diarist Philip Hone had observed of the city's relentless forward momentum. Norse's painting, which details the picturesque overgrowth on the block house's masonry as well as its glacier-shaped site sloping toward a foreground of primordial boulders, assumes richer interest in the context of the larger ideas of preservation at stake in this remote corner of Central Park.

In a strong practical sense, the Museum of the City of New York itself was indebted to a series of local failures in New York's outdoor preservation movement, which paralleled the 1898 launch of Greater New York as a new, five-borough enterprise and then its aggressive re-sculpting into the world's touchstone mega-city.⁹ The prospects for the consolidated city were cause for excitement, but the breakneck pace of its modernization also prompted concern. How could a metropolis so large and provisional foster civic pride? How could urban memory be conveyed to newcomers spilling into this magnet for commerce when its place markers were so vulnerable? As construction accelerated after World War I, particularly in Manhattan, predictable landmarks used to reference city traditions were disappearing. The patriarchal homesteads of New York's old guard were being dismantled as their occupants regrouped in luxury apartments or decamped for the suburbs. Salvaging elements of the city's history in the safety of a professionally managed museum was a timely concept by 1923, the inception date of the Museum of the City of New York.

The Museum opened as a depository for the material evidence and residue of New York's three centuries of settled history, with the purpose of awakening "in the schoolboy and immigrant an understanding and pride in his citizenship," as noted in an early annual report. City-history crusader Henry Collins Brown, a preservationist, publisher, and prolific annalist of Old New York, helped to pilot the venture and briefly served as the museum's first director.¹⁰ Consultation was sought, too, from I. N. Phelps Stokes, an architect, philanthropist, and connoisseur of historical maps and prints who was then deep into his multi-volume illustrated study The Iconography of Manhattan Island (1915-1928), which drew largely on his own authoritative collection.¹¹

Creating an antiquarian shrine, however, was not the objective. Here, retrospection would be a device, not an end. With scholarship as a foundation, this city-history museum resolved to make learning a dynamic process, facilitated through collections, public programs, and didactic exhibitions. At the institution's Fifth Avenue home, the exhibitions included the progressive use of period alcoves installed as windows into the domestic culture of yesteryear, and a comprehensive scheme of miniaturized dioramas dramatizing, in twenty-five-year increments, episodes from local history. The first pair of dioramas readied, representing the reputed 1626 purchase of Manhattan Island and the Empire State Building then under construction, suggests the Museum's sweeping chronological interests. These are borne out in the topics of early special exhibitions, which ranged from views of old houses to watercolor studies of skyscrapers borrowed from contemporary artists. By straddling the past and present, the Museum's planners theorized, visitors would be afforded more informed perspectives about urbanization over time -- an appreciation of the gains ultimately achieved through sacrifices along the way. By looking back, one could also look forward with keener sight.

As instructional aids, paintings were instrumental in pointing New Yorkers toward models of civic character worthy of emulation. Not surprisingly, portraits of early community pillars, leading families, and other contributors to the city's commonwealth found immediate opportunities for exhibition. Although biography was the focus, a number of portraits acquired by the Museum offered incidental glimpses of New York City as background settings, to some extent forecasting the emergence of the cityscape as a "character" meriting indepen-dent documentation on canvas.

Several eighteenth-century portraits of local merchants in the collection contain what amount to generic New York Harbor views and other oblique allusions to public settings associated with the sitter. By the midpoint of the next century, however, convincing site details had entered the formula, sometimes competing for attention with the painting's announced subject. Thomas Hicks's "grand manner" portrait of banker and business leader George T. Trimble (1823 - 1890) (fig. 4), dated 1854, illustrates this tendency. To acknowledge the subject's dedication to educational philanthropy (Trimble championed the Public School Society in New York for thirty-five years and became a founding member of the Board of Education when it merged with the society in 1853), Hicks positioned Trimble in a school room with its door flung open. The view beyond reproduces, with considerable accuracy, the classical architecture and locale of Free School Number 2, on the corner of Tyron Row and Chatham Street, whose frolicking pupils have spilled into the street, providing scale to the scene.¹²

Transfer of this "municipal treasure" into the Museum's publicly accessible holdings made front-page news in several local papers. The Herald Tribune, in the opening of its article announcing the donation of Davies' $500,000 trove of "city relics" to the Museum, celebrated the scene as "the first oil painting ever made of Manhattan, showing small sailing vessels off the Battery and the little low-lying Dutch town with an occasional two-story-and-attic skyscraper jutting into the skyline."¹⁴ The artist, conjectured print historians, probably knew the engraved inset of Manhattan from the map published by Carolus Allard of Amsterdam around 1674, known as the Restitutio View, commemorating the fleeting triumph of the Dutch recapture of New Amsterdam on August 7, 1673. Maps featuring this view had appeared in several editions as late as 1760.

The primal cityscape, apparently modified from Allard's composition, fascinated Museum visitors. Depicted was a sputtering trading town of minimal scenic attractions, which nevertheless boasted long-vanished curiosities: Fort Amsterdam at the Battery, fortifications along the shoreline, a ship's signal tower, the indentation for the canal that once cut inland from the harbor, and gabled row houses reminiscent of Amsterdam. Borrowed from the Restitutio View is the line of soldiers marching along the quay. Absent here, however, are the cannon firing from the fort and the armed Dutch ships offshore seen in the earlier print. Other variances were accounted for by the speculation that the view had been purposely updated by the artist, or perhaps by another, some years after its original creation.

Great faith was placed in the picture's antiquity ("antedated by drawings only," affirmed the Herald Tribune's reporter) and in the facts about New York's topography that it supplied. These assumptions suggest the credence given, at least by the Museum's first curators, to such historical paintings as neutral documents that aspired to present an objective record of the cityscape, with outcomes dependent only on the artist's individual skill.

Years later, suspicions about the painting's authenticity emerged based on its provenance, condition, and peculiar rarity. Reportedly, the work had been discovered in the second decade of the twentieth century in the attic of an old house in New Dorp, Staten Island, which had been leased for the summer by an artist. Badly damaged by rain leaking through the roof, the abandoned canvas was brought by its finder to Paris for restoration, where the work was "badly done," as I. N. Phelps Stokes conceded in his notation about the view.¹⁵ With the passage of time, no other works by the same hand or school emerged to better situate the painting as the product of an artist active, however briefly, in colonial New York or perhaps Amsterdam. Moreover, corrective overpainting by the Paris "conservator" obscured any subtleties original to the picture that might have assisted attribution.

Today, the status of the work remains unsettled. Some experts accept the painting's oldness but assign its origins to the Netherlands, where it may have been developed from rough site sketches or other period sources; others speculate that it represents a falsified "find" planted sometime in the early twentieth century to capitalize on Colonial-Revival ardor for quaint Americana. Most, however, now date the painting from the nineteenth century, identifying it as probably the handiwork of an artist conversant with antiquarian iconography who was pleased to oblige curiosity about the old-fashioned Manhattan no longer discernible to present-day eyes.

That the painting may not be contemporaneous with the view it presents obviously calls its neutrality into question. Instead of diminishing its value as a document, however, the scene's retroactive creation shifts the picture into a category of reminiscent cityscapes now considered an important demonstration of "forgotten" New York's allure to generations that preceded Davies, Stokes, and the original sponsors of the Museum of the City of New York. By the middle of the nineteenth century, it is worth remembering, modernizing forces were furiously at work in the city. Manhattan's natural topography had undergone wholesale remodeling: it was "squashed, degreened, flattened, dried, and gridded with right-angle streets," as one writer summarized its transformation.¹⁶ Traces of New York's pre-1800 settlement had been largely eradicated by fires and developers; haphazard colonial charm had been supplanted by a cityscape systematized for speed, commerce, and land profits. While few lamented these changes as negative to society, they spurred the same sentimental glances back at a simpler city that reemerged at the beginning of the twentieth century, and recurrently during later periods of intense physical transition in New York.

View of New York remains a good example of the Museum's historical preference for literalism when it came to paintings of place, for depictions of tangible truths about the city's built environment. Seventy-five years later, these parameters have loosened. Today the collection reflects a far broader spectrum of motives that have driven painters of New York, encompassing conventional "portraits" of the urban envelope along with apocryphal views, memory studies, tourist souvenirs, autobiographical vignettes, and capriccios for which New York's streets have functioned as points of departure. In terms of large categorical sorts, a balance now exists between paintings concentrating on "scape" and those focusing on "scene," the latter visualizing the uses of, and interactions with, the city by urban humanity.

Lester Bridaham's Manhattan Island, 1931 (fig. 6), added to the Museum's holdings in 1989, is a measurement of the distance traveled from fact-based content as a requisite for acquisitions. Whereas the setting may be recognizable as the junction of 42nd Street and Sixth Avenue (the spire of the nearly completed Empire State Building thrusts skyward at the picture's left), its presentation is fantastical. Here, midtown Manhattan has been enlisted as a carnivalesque stage set, compressing into this famous intersection a swirling spectacle of Jazz Age commercialism and irreverence. The artist, who had trained at the Art Students League in the late 1920s before touring Europe in 1930 to study "the grotesque" in French Gothic sculpture, works the scene at both playful and profound levels. For instance, echoes may be found in Bridaham's complex composition and unsettling palette to Belgian painter James Ensor's Christ's Entry into Brussels in 1889 (1888), a sardonic tableau of monstrous-looking citizens jostling through an urban plaza aflutter with political banners and a lone placard imploring "Vive Jesus."¹⁷

This book offers a general profile of the urban paintings accumulated by the Museum of the City of New York since its inception. Using cityscapes from the collection as arguing points, essayists William R. Taylor and Michele H. Bogart introduce this survey by considering the larger cultural implications of "picturing" New York City as historical craft and art product. Their contributions shed light on the dynamics of symbiosis that have characterized the long-lived relationship of artists to New York City as a source for ideas, income, training, shelter, and professional community. The evolving formats and types of information associated with urban-scene art are distilled in the 128 works selected as catalogue entries.

The collection's terrain will be navigated more meaningfully if its general contours are understood. It seems obvious, yet bears repeating, that the Museum's holdings are, at essence, a compilation of visual insights. Although intentions, techniques, and individual skills vary, the painters represented in these holdings have shared the challenges of attempting to define the properties of a matchless place; of stilling New York's cinematic existence into revealing "frames" that invite scrutiny while offering optical delectation. Indeed, one group of paintings in the collection can be said to fall into the category of perceptual experiences. In them, content is submerged by the intense sensation of seeing and sifting meaning from the city's collage of lights, colors, shapes, movement, textures, and material stuffs.

Themes braided through these holdings more typically connect to high and low watermarks in the city's evolution. There are clusters of images, for instance, celebrating engineering achievements in New York's infrastructure. Others mark exceptional public events, dramatize catastrophes like fires, and expose the miseries of crime and blight. Historically, urban view makers have also commemorated activities and architecture so banal that they disconcert us, forcing reconnections to what is commonplace about the extraordinary universe of New York City. The quotidian, too, receives its due in the collection.

Still other cityscapes can be sorted into a category of geography-as-biography. These views, in their comparative density, graph the local movements of artists. Evidence of their explorations outward, for instance, are documented in landscape content drawn from such destinations as Coney Island (by the late nineteenth century) and Van Cortlandt Park in the Bronx (several decades later), made accessible via elevated trains, subways, and extending commuter rail networks. Paintings similarly witness their literally upward mobility: the continual search by artists for unobstructed and unprecedented views of the developing city. "El" platforms, bridge spans, high-rise windows, and skyscraper rooftops served as generating stations for a series of painted panoramas in the collection.

Subjects convey residential mobility, too. In their concentrated number, for example, scenes of early twentieth-century Greenwich Village speak to the painters then congregated in this picturesque enclave of cheap boarding houses and bohemian cafes. Slightly later, an increase is seen in the number of midtown panoramas and streetscapes, reflecting the realignment of artists around the professional resources of galleries, schools, and newer studio buildings centered around 57th Street.¹⁸ Frederick Detwiller's Temples of God and Gold (1923) (fig. 7), an aerial prospect of mid-Manhattan looking west from the eleventh floor of Carnegie Hall, is not only a striking view but also one enabled by Detwiller's workaday mooring in the building, which contained 150 artists' studios and a street-level gallery to display their work. Since 1990, the Museum's cityscape databank has registered an upswing in studies of neighborhoods formerly assigned to the geographic fringe, such as Red Hook and Williamsburg, Brooklyn, and the area known as Dumbo (Down Under the Manhattan Bridge Overpass). Prohibitive rents in the city's trendier art pockets have propelled painters to improvise studios in these industrial and working-class locales, from which a fresh crop of place-specific pictures is emanating.¹⁹

Exhibition initiatives tied to paintings also account for certain artificially seeded strengths within the collection. Exhibitions devoted to single artists have sometimes occasioned plural gifts of work. Theme-based projects have also generated activity. In 1973 the Museum's pathbreaking East Harlem, which looked at the history and art of its neighboring community, resulted in a windfall of contemporary work by resident painters. Entering the Museum were numerous date-specific views reflecting the harsh realities of a district gripped by drugs and poverty, yet taking note of El Barrio's transcendent sociability. In 1983 Painting New York, a vehicle to showcase recent paintings by twenty-five emerging artists, resulted in a flush of acquisitions representing urban-scapes of the early 1980s. The presentation in 1989 of Window on Wonder City as a companion piece to a major exhibition commemorating the fiftieth anniversary of the 1939 New York World's Fair also generated donations from former participants in locally based New Deal art programs between 1935 and 1941. This aging pool of painters, many of whom specialized in city-scene imagery during some portion of their careers, often recalled the Museum as a lifeline during the "hard times" of abstraction and other nonrepresentational "isms," and expressed satisfaction at now being able to give something back to an institution that had been dauntless in advocating the importance of art-of-the-city. The recent installations New York Now (1996) and New New York Views (1999) have also coaxed gifts from painters of disparate styles who are contributing to the current, reinvigorated stream of cityscape art coursing through the five boroughs of New York and beyond.

The Museum's collection is also a collection of sub-collections, assembled by individuals of far-ranging backgrounds and attitudes toward cityscape painting. J. Clarence Davies' bounty of New York iconography (which came with the services of his cataloguer, J. H. Jordan) was parceled out to the Museum in two gifts, the majority arriving in 1929, with the balance registered in 1934, following Davies' death. Enjoying status as the Museum's seminal "views" collection, its organizing purpose would set a tone for later acquisitions growing from and around it. When interviewed about his passion for collecting, Davies traced its inception to a print he chanced upon in a back issue of Valentine's Manual when he was an aspiring, fourth-generation realtor in the family firm, a leading promoter of Bronx properties.²⁰ Reportedly, the view showed an improbably pastoral intersection at Fifth Avenue and 42nd Street in Manhattan around 1840, before its metamorphosis into Manhattan land gold. Struck by the concrete demonstration that old pictures provided of the potential for, and inevitability of, urban growth, Davies bought it to "show to clients, in order to stir their imagination as to what was going to happen in the Bronx." Pragmatism, not nostalgia, attended the birth of Davies' collection. Views of the stripling city, he observed, wasting no words, "illustrate real estate arguments."²¹

The Museum has benefited from the generosity of others whose individual visions are now preserved in groups of paintings represented in the collection. Three short case histories illustrate the point. Natalie Knowlton Blair (1883 - 1951), a resident of Park Avenue and Tuxedo Park, New York, was a discriminating collector of Americana. Cushioned by financial resources and aided by prominent social ties as well as the advice of knowledgeable dealers, she assembled an extraordinary trove of antiques and period views in her lifetime. Much of this material was installed in museum-like room settings at her Tuxedo Park mansion. The significance of these holdings, however, far exceeded tasteful decoration. After Blair died in 1951, her collection was distributed among four New York City museums in memory of her in-laws, Mr. and Mrs. J. Insley Blair. Her bequest to the Museum of the City of New York included two oil paintings and sixteen watercolors, dating from 1731 to 1880, which still rank as some of the collection's most important, scrupulously observed New York cityscapes (see, for instance, plates 2, 3, 4, 9, 11, and 21).²²

Robert R. Preato (1941 - 1991), whose legacy survives in thirty-nine New York City scenes bequeathed to the Museum in 1991 (see plates 54, 59, 66, 71, 86, 88, 92, and 100), pursued collecting steered by two main reference points. An art professional who was a valued adviser to numerous private dealers, collectors, auction houses, and art publications, he had a seat on center court when it came to spotting investment opportunities, and as director of American Masters at the venerable Grand Central Galleries, he enjoyed access to some stunning work undervalued in the market. Preato was also a native New Yorker who relished the city's intensity and constant visual surprises. For his private nourish-ment and with relatively modest means, he began to buy oils, watercolors, and drawings that captured New York's theatrics of change -- older buildings sacrificed to the future and vistas forever erased by new construction, concentrating on the period of the city's physical journey into modernity between 1890 and 1940. This was the New York that Preato remembered from his youth, reflected a colleague about the personal sentiments these paintings embodied: "He was transported back to these days by living with his collection of New York cityscapes."²³

Martin Wong (1946 - 1999), a painter of Chinese-Mexican heritage, settled in the East Village in the early 1980s as a transplant from San Francisco, where he had been active in several Bay Area performance-art groups. A self-taught painter who favored cowboy attire, Wong imported to New York a mystical creativity but no solid assets beyond conviction to support his ambitions to make art and, in a matter of months, to collect it as well.²⁴

He succeeded at both. Wong's own career as an urban landscape painter took flight just as the phenomenon of urban graffiti was growing more brazen and adroit on the storefronts, tenement walls, and handball courts near his walk-up flat. Sensing something fascinating, if ephemeral, at work in the city landscape, he sought out the young writers behind the movement (most, like Wong, were outsiders to America's majority culture) and schooled himself in their renegade aesthetics. Briefly, he and an associate operated an American Graffiti Museum on Bond Street, which folded in the late 1980s. Through purchases, gifts, and barters, Wong amassed a singular collection of aerosol art by New York writers on the front line in shifting their expressive energies from underground to legitimate surfaces, thereby registering their "tags" and pictorial work in formats translatable to the art market. These holdings, consisting of hundreds of piece-books, spray-painted canvases, and decorated objects, eventually taxed Wong's storehousing abilities. His decision to return to California in 1993 prompted him to consider donating the collection to a museum where its cultural contexts would be well guarded. With its historical interests in the cityscape, the Museum of the City of New York seemed the logical repository. Howard the Duck (1989), by the Bronx "king" Lee George Quiñones, serves as standard-bearer for the Wong Collection in this catalogue (see plate 116).

Finally, the Museum's collection is a collection of artists: of works by individuals steered by the imperative to paint New York City. Many cityscapes gathered in public trust over the years were outright gifts from painters or their descendants. Although chefs d'oeuvre may have been reserved for higher-paying clients, views chosen for presentation to the Museum are nonetheless "signature," as they often represent subjects with personal resonance for their creators, relate to a larger body of work, or contain insights about an artist's style in formation.

As part of the Museum's recent efforts to explore previously uncharted dimensions of the collection, a number of new stories specific to paintings emerged for the record. To cite only one of multiple examples, Van Cortlandt Park (1944), by the Italian-born artist Vincent La Gambina (fig. 8), acquired a charm beyond its colorful rendering of a snow-glazed landscape outside the mid-eighteenth-century Van Cortlandt Mansion situated within this multi-acre Bronx preserve. An interview with the artist, then in his eighties, elicited an autobiographical overlay for the picture. Snow, the painter recalled, was an experience absent from his upbringing in Sicily. In 1944 he happened upon this scene of wintertime recreation by overriding his subway stop en route to visiting an army acquaintance. Wholly unaware of the history attached to the storied Georgian-era manse, he was captivated instead by his contact with an authentic American snowfall in his adopted city. The encounter with this wondrous attraction, there at Broadway and 242nd Street, is what La Gambina wished to memorialize.²⁵ This and other collected stories enrich appreciation of the real lives behind the cityscapes that constitute the Museum's collection.

In the history of American art, urban-scene painters have been a heterogeneous lot. Accordingly, the artists represented in the Museum's collection span a wide compass of backgrounds, from eminent professionals to devout dabblers. Their incentives for picturing the city have been as varied as their subjects and shadings of realist presentation. Certain painters preferred to work in the buffer of a studio. Some painted New York remotely, relying on printed imagery and written description. Still others took their curiosity to the streets, braving sunburn, wind chill, traffic, and sidewalk critics to catch impressions of their subject al fresco. Although Ash Can School art may be missing from the Museum's collection of twentieth-century cityscapes, the chronology contains other painter-reporters who, with portable easels, tracked their prey into the urban storm center. The confrontational oeuvre of the Street Painters (epitomized in Philip Sherrod's 1982 Pussycat Theatre [plate 110]) makes the point. A consortium of contemporary artists fluctuating in number but committed to live-action painting in the spirit of the Eight, they began their rounds painting in Manhattan's tenderloin and other high-pulsed sections of the city in the 1970s and are still at it today.

For artists choosing to make a specialty of cityscapes, the odds often have seemed stacked against success, with critical indifference frequently being the outcome of their commitment. Yet many continued the course. The social-realist painter Philip Reisman (1904 - 1992), honored with a one-man exhibition at the Museum in 1979, devoted much of his career to painting and sketching New York, as documented in a combination of accessioned prints, drawings, and canvases ranging from the late 1920s to 1985, the date of his lively oil Games (fig. 9). He persevered with the subject over six decades, despite claims from the art world that his brand of direct, acutely felt urban picture-making had disappeared in the 1940s, swallowed up by the modernist movement. A 1987 retrospective of the Ash Can Circle, which featured several Reisman streetscapes, prompted one young art critic to liken Reisman "to one of those Japanese soldiers hiding out on some remote island, who is still fighting World War II." How to explain Reisman's accomplishment, he wondered? Like the Japanese soldier, he may never have heard that his "side" lost the war. Or more likely, Reisman "ignored trends and fashion," never looking for a new style, "simply getting better at the one he started with."²⁶ The Museum's collection acknowledges the integrity and tenacity of hundreds of such artists who have painted New York.

It has been said that New York's cityscape is a palimpsest onto which consecutive generations have marked their historical comings and goings. This book was conceived to function in a similar way. By making accessible a portion of its large collection of urban-scene paintings, the Museum hopes that curiosity will encourage deeper inquiries into this richly layered resource. In turn, each look from scholars and other city-history enthusiasts will generate new interpretive possibilities to superimpose on the images awaiting, and inviting, study. See Notes