Painting the Town -- Museum of the City of New York

This essay examines several realist paintings in the museum's collection that feature women in New York's public spaces. The works range in time from 1890 to 1944, and in style from the genteel French-derived Impressionism of Childe Hassam to the tawdry old-master/popular-culture inspired pastiches of Reginald Marsh. "Realist" is used here in its broadest sense, with emphasis on subject over style, to designate the painting of modern life. The artists depicted women (and events in women's lives) as an integral part of the world they experienced and sought to chronicle as urban dwellers themselves. All would have agreed with the Ashcan School Realist Robert Henri that "[t]he American who is useful as an artist is one who studies his own life and records his experiences."1 Nevertheless, the "realism" practiced by artists and experienced by their viewers is filtered through the conventions of painting--color, spatial perspective and figure placement--just as all aspects of reported experience are filtered through the conventions of whatever spoken, written or visual medium the representer chooses for the expression of that experience. As we shall see, the artists' training and aesthetic beliefs, class and educational background, and their political sensibilities also contributed to the specifics of subject choice, pictorial means of representation, and to subsequent reception and interpretation. When read within this interplay of aesthetic and social mediations, this select group of works can be seen to embody some of the complex gender dynamics occurring in a historical period transformed by shifts in gender roles. These dynamics were part of wider social, political, and economic practices that reconfigured urban space and the lives of men and women living there.2 The paintings provide telling insights into these historical transactions.

Pictures (especially realist pictures) tell stories--they produce meanings. Viewers examine pictures, find these stories and make new ones in the process of interpreting and reinterpreting what they see. Over time, groups of viewers continually produce meanings for still other viewers. Some of these interpretations adhere closely to what the artist may have claimed about his/her art--assuming such evidence is available--while others attend solely to the work. Still others see the collective audience response to art as the best possible guide to meaning. In thinking about these New York scenes populated by female subjects, the essay focuses generally on the relationship between paintings and the society they picture, and on how audiences (both then and now) understand and interpret paintings.3

The questions of audience (viewers) and spectatorship (the process of viewing) are complicated in several ways, some thematic, some more general, some related to this essay's place in the larger project of Painting the Town, and some concerned with my own position as the interpreting viewer of the paintings I choose to discuss. Thematically, virtually all these paintings are about the spectatorship of women in public urban space. The actual act of looking at women is either overtly represented in the pictures or strongly implicit as a central phenomenon of urban life. As a more general principle, we view images as complex individuals, with attitudes toward the world conditioned by gender, class, age, race, nationality, and fashioned additionally by education and our experiences of daily life in different environments. No viewer will read a picture in exactly the same way. Moreover, viewers read paintings through time, and they read either with or against prevailing artistic and historical concerns. Art critics, to take the example of one kind of documentable reader, respond favorably or not, depending upon the aesthetic values they believe are important to art in a given moment. The preference for a particular style of painting or a specific kind of subject matter changes too according to social and political values. Painting the Town also raises the issue of what it means to talk about "paintings" as opposed to other kinds of pictures. Painting is, historically, more like sculpture in its institutional categorization with "fine art" than it is like magazine illustration, or cartoons, or advertising imagery. Its practitioners have been "artists", it has been exhibited in museums designed for the exhibition of art. These museums participate in the definition of what paintings will be designated as art, and we in turn accept--as good art--those paintings which have made it to the art museum. Moreover, art history and art criticism, the professions responsible for categorizing and evaluating painting, have established what is important to discuss when we look at paintings--stylistic periods, iconography, artistic intention, artistic biography, and aesthetic contexts along with those of patronage and social and institutional histories.4

By putting together a catalog of its most significant urban scene paintings, Painting the Town produces some very interesting and productive tensions that have to do with how we read and assess paintings. This collection of artifacts possesses as "works of art" special "aesthetic" qualities to which we, historically, assign a particular value. Paintings also convey meaning through specific conventions and institutional practices which make them different from other works of material culture--obviously the fire engines, or fashions, but also the popular prints (more closely aligned to painting as two-dimensional artifacts, but published primarily as "information" rather than as aesthetic objects). At the same time, however, these paintings are collected and subsequently viewed in the space of a museum about New York's history. Their significance for this project resides in the degree of interest in the New York subject of the work. Viewers coming to this museum might attend somewhat more to the subjects rather than the aesthetic attributes of the paintings. And, in fact, a number of the more important paintings from the standpoint of New York history would be deemed aesthetically unsuitable to an art museum, executed by artists who either fail to make innovative contributions to the historical development of American painting or do not fit into established stylistic categories. Within the context of this museum, however, some of the artists have produced urban scenes totally unprecedented in the iconography of American painting, which deserve another kind of attention.

To some extent I have set up a false dichotomy between aesthetic and iconographic concerns to highlight the different contexts and spaces of viewing these works. In fact, we read what is going on in a painting through its means of representation. How the painter manipulates the conventions of medium is crucial to what is said--though as I suggest above, different meanings surface because we look through different lenses, attend to different features in those paintings and come to paintings at different historical moments. This essay reads images at the intersections of art history, social and cultural history, and women's history informed by feminist theory. Although there are issues in painting that are quite specific to its history, paintings are related to other forms of visual and verbal representation in their particular historical moment. Together, these various forms of representation--literature, magazine illustration, films, social science and political tracts--to name just a few--help to craft a more nuanced historical account of social situations in a given period. They also help us to understand, as a context of comparative accounts and as evidence, the specific ways that painting works. In addition, I adopt the premise that all these forms of representation act simultaneously as historical documents (i.e. they reflect something about the period we study--they are evidence for it) and as active "agents" in the construction of a given social reality. This second assumption means that we learn and make choices about our social world as that world is shaped for us by all forms of verbal and visual representation--and art is one part of that understanding and formative process. 5

The brief case studies that follow continue the general argument that pictures can have significance for and shape audiences in different ways. Apart from their literal subjects (i.e. a painting of a woman on Fifth Avenue), there are also the ideological components of the work (the unstated meanings that may never have been spoken about by artist, or critic at the time, but are nonetheless "understood" by viewers). Pictures also have ideological meaning through their distortions and their absences--through what they omit from from their portrayal of a subject; such omissions may turn up in other kinds of representation from a period and these in turn cast light on paintings. By looking closely at a few works I will reconstruct several plausible narratives, keeping at the forefront the urban context of the works. In this way I will show how paintings participate in both the understanding and the construction of social reality at a given historical moment.

Two paintings set in New York's Union Square Park--Childe Hassam's Rainy Late Afternoon, Union Square of 1890 (plate 50) and John Sloan's Sunday Afternoon in Union Square of 1912 (Fig. 44)--concern themselves with the spectacle and spectatorship of women in public urban space. In so doing they play off one another to suggest the range of complex social meanings associated with women at different historical moments. Both artists show us the nearly identical site in Union Square and focus on female figures, observed predominantly by men, moving around the stepped and elevated circular flower bed. Both artists concern themselves with light and color, climate and mood. Hassam's somber palette describes a chill late autumn or early spring rainstorm; Sloan shifted his usually darker color scheme to "lavender light" to capture the spring sunshine of May, and the flowers in full bloom.6 But there similarities end for reasons that have to do first, with transformations in the social, commercial and political makeup of the Union Square neighborhood itself; second, with choices related to each artist's understanding and subsequent portrayal of different classes of urban women; and finally, the growing cultural preoccupation--central to the development of consumer capitalism at the turn of the century--with the commodification, display and visual consumption of goods and pleasures. Fashionable women, here for both artists, though in fundamentally different ways, were central to the spectacle of commodities on public display.7

In 1890 the Union Square/Fourteenth Street district was in transition, still holding its own as a fashionable music and theatrical center with adjacent residences, but slowly beginning to shift to the manufacturing and commercial center it would become by the next decade. The Steinway concert hall along with Tony Pastor's and Irving Place Theater on the north side of East Fourteenth Street faced the Academy of Music on the south side. On Union Square West, Brentano's and Tiffany's first stores drew an elite clientele; Macy's signage over a series of buildings at the corner of Sixth Avenue and Fifteenth Street proclaimed "World's Largest Store," and B. Altman's first department store was just two blocks away at Sixth Avenue and Eighteenth Street. Iron buildings like the Domestic Sewing Machine company, erected in 1873, and the Steinway piano company signaled the turn to manufacturing, while restaurants and music publishing and theatrical supply stores served the music and theatrical professions.8

With its late afternoon setting and its fashionably dressed crowd moving away from the Square, Hassam's painting undoubtedly shows people who have attended an afternoon concert or theatrical matinee at one of the neighborhood's establishments. Such a portrayal is also consistent with Hassam's other urban oeuvre from the period. Drawing on views from French Impressionism, Hassam typically depicted a generalized fashionable bourgeoisie in a naturalized urban setting--tree-lined rather than industrialized with an emphasis on climate and time of day. Parks and boulevards were his preferred subjects when it came to representing the urban, and two well-known paintings of Union Square are typical of a series on the park that he executed beginning in 1890. In Winter in Union Square of 1894 (Fig. 45), and Union Square in Spring of 1896 (Fig. 46), Hassam took distant and elevated views and looked south, perhaps nostalgically, toward older urban structures, rather than north, the direction of major residential migration and commercial change. The park itself remains the urban protagonist with weather setting the mood; snowy and gray with only the bright notes of blue and red trolleys breaking through the chill haze in the earlier work, and sun-dappled with the yellow green of new leaves as a screen against distant human activity in the later one. Rarely (with the museum's picture a striking exception), did Hassam impose the explicit narrative convention of portraying specific interactions between individuals.9

Such narrative reticence was not the case with Sloan, who depicts an amplified exchange of gestures and glances, that serve as commentary on the two young women in showy attire who parade through the center of Sunday Afternoon in Union Square. In 1912, however, Sloan's working-class constituency is drawn from and depends upon a different Union Square milieu. By about 1900 virtually all the once elegant residences had disappeared from Union Square, replaced by office and commercial structures. Upscale retail trade followed residential development north, and garment sweatshops moved into the district, drawing on the cheap pool of labor available in the nearby lower East side. By 1912 Union Square park was also a well-established center for radical political demonstrations. We know from Sloan's diary that this scene was made just after the artist, at that time a practicing Socialist, had watched part of a May Day rally in the Square.10 Finally, viewers familiar with Sloan's urban scenes would have recognized this painting as typical of both painted and graphic work more dependent on the reportorial mode of Ashcan School realism than turn-of-the-century Impressionism. In portraying the working and leisure pursuits of urban working class women, the artist frequently showed them as exuberant consumers of mass leisure and fashion. Examples include Sloan's 1907 South Beach Bathers on Staten Island (Fig. 47). Here women are now on display in bathing costume, savoring hot dogs and physically entwining themselves with male companions who puff on their cigarettes. Their openly sensual behavior contrasts with that of the properly-dressed woman adjacent to them who tends to her little girl. In Fun, One Cent, an image from the series of etchings "New York City Life," young girls share laughter as they attend to the penny arcade with its double entendre embedded in the enticing title of "Those Naughty Girls." (Fig. 48). In both public settings, Sloan puts a positive spin on the spontaneous behavior through which young working-class girls made themselves part of the urban spectacle.

Looking more closely at how the artists constructed the transactions between men and women in these two works, we discover that each work enacts a different moment in the emergence of women from, and the consequent breakdown of boundaries between the private and the public sphere. The doctrine of separate spheres, the dominant middle-class gender ideology of the 19th century, followed a form of biological determinism to prescribe gender roles. Women's physiological make up caused them to be spiritual, emotional and nurturing. It was their "natural" destiny to run the domestic sphere leaving the public realm of business to the stronger competitive drives and more rational intellects of men. As a social transformation, the ongoing breakdown of separate spheres in the decades around the turn of the century made itself visible in multiple ways: in working-class and lower middle-class women's growing presence in industrial factory work and in retail and clerical jobs; in middle-class women's increasing movement into institutions of higher education, and their subsequent professionalization, especially in the fields of social work, teaching, home economics, nursing, and the arts; in the suffrage campaign; in debates on sexuality and demands for birth control reform. This social movement was widely debated in virtually every public forum in the decades around the the turn of the century. Nowhere did it make itself more strongly felt than in urban centers, especially in New York, where prominent groups of progressive and radical thinkers placed women's roles and rights at the forefront of American cultural concerns.11 What happens in these two works must be read against this larger context of ideals and events.

By virtue of pose and placement, two figures immediately stand out from Hassam's anonymous Union Square crowd. At the center of the pictorial field, a solitary man faces forward, an anchoring form whose bright white face and hand and motionless stance contrast sharply with the dark mass of the moving crowd turning away from the square. His gaze is directed toward the largest figure in the work, a fashionably dressed young woman whose single status also contrasts with the discernible pairs in the crowd. Lowering her head, she hunches up her shoulders slightly and draws up her skirt with her left hand, protecting herself and her costume from the elements, or, just possibly, from the penetrating stare of the man who follows her progress around the rain-soaked pathway.

The spectacle and spectatorship of fashion and female beauty lie at the heart of this work. A viewer's eye is inevitably drawn to this central pair, rendered with an uncharacteristic specificity by Hassam--foils perhaps to the anonymity of the disappearing urban crowd. The man's gaze directs our own to the woman. But what, if anything, is happening in this carefully staged interaction, whose ambiguity resides in whether the woman consciously shrinks from, subtly elicits, or remains oblivious to the male gaze. Is it simply the weather she minds-unaware of the critical appraisal, the consuming desire of that glance? Was this a matinee couple, parting after a quarrel to go their separate ways? Is she on her own, a proper late nineteenth-century woman still unaccustomed to being unescorted in public, vulnerable to the anonymous public encounters from which the more familiar private space of home would protect her? Or, are we interrupting a flirtation? Having caught his eye, does the new modern woman coyly turn away and lift her skirt even as she wraps it protectively around her? An 1889 ad for Creole Cigarettes (Fig. 49) is a version of the latter interpretation, suggestive of the possibilities in the surrounding visual landscape and familiar to a middle class viewer of the painting. And, while this juxtaposition may seem to blur the subject areas and interpretive spaces between the images, it nonetheless points to the conventions reinforcing the discreetly held boundaries between high art painting and commercial illustration. The aesthetic codes of the painting of modern life militated against overt narrative while advertising demanded legibly suggestive stories to sell products. The ad encodes blatantly the common ground they share-the phenomenon of looking at women in public urban space.

Hassam's urban scenes rarely move from conveying atmosphere and mood to staging narrative. (Here and throughout the essay I use narrative to refer not to the illustration of a specific story, but to the possibility of reading several plausible scenarios from the depiction of an event.) Given the appearance of the participants and the neighborhood's history, the interpretations suggested above occur within a middle-class social space, around a concert or theatrical event (and hence, perhaps, the artist's more narrative staging), with fashionable patrons the main characters. Along with the narrative, the picture's composition and the viewer's position in relation to the narrative contain the codes of both private and public space at a moment when women's roles within these spaces were in tension and transition. While the park provides an open, public setting, everyone has turned away leaving a more private interaction between three participants. The viewer is placed slightly below the main event, seated perhaps on a park bench just outside the picture. Such a position is that of a fixed spectator--peering up at a theatrical event--rather than a moving passerby, casting a quick glance over the shoulder. The gaze moves between the man in the painting and the spectator, freezing the woman in the now intimate, more private viewing space between the two.

Painted twenty-two years later, Sloan's Union Square picture places the viewer slightly above the pictorial stage, in full command of a more complex and far more public narrative of spectatorship. In comparison to the genteel work of Hassam's American Impressionism, Sloan's images, in general, encompass a wider range of social spaces and activities of working class women. Exuberant women, portrayed in a variety of leisure pursuits often make visible the more controversial aspect of the new urban woman--her sexuality.12 Moreover, Sloan's narratives frequently play with the sometimes euphemistic responses of the Progressive era's middle-class social reformers to the morality of working class women engaged in commercialized leisure activities with men. The blurring between public and private spheres, especially in cities, was accompanied by a blurring of class distinctions. Middle-class reformers, fearful about the breakdown of institutions and practices, like procreative sexuality in marriage, struggled to maintain the private sphere of womanhood; many of these writers, and settlement house workers encouraged young immigrant women to spend their leisure furthering their cultural education or developing domestic skills--not picking up a date for a trip to the dance hall or Coney Island.

Hassam's painting portrayed several possible, though understated scenarios around the woman's response to the gaze--unconscious, reticent or coy. In Sloan's work the women are fully within the public eye. Knowingly engaged with one another, fashion and pose are self-consciously theatricalized; bright dresses, rouged cheeks and reddened lips, and pointed toes in chorus-girl tandem. One woman artificially cocks her elbow to display her parasol. The other trails her purse from the end of her finger. Sloan positions the purse so that it trails seductively down the leg of the man directly behind her. He in turn raises his hand to his mouth--a gesture of embarrassed speculation. Behind him another man turns to watch. To the left of the painting, two young women look and one whispers behind her hand. The man next to this pair leans toward them to catch their commentary.

Thus, in Sloan's work, women deliberately elicit the gaze, and narrative ambiguity resides elsewhere--in the question who, or what kind of women are they? With little knowledge of either New York neighborhoods or Sloan's oeuvre and interests, we might read this painting as a picture of park occupants momentarily entranced by the lively display of fashion and charm on the part of two urban women. For the solidly middle-class viewer of Sloan's day (perhaps a reform-minded or academically schooled patron) with a sketchy knowledge of New York in 1912--for whom women were either "good" (which is to say modest in behavior and dress) or "bad"--these might well be prostitutes engaged in a moment of flirtation. By the teens, Union Square, once the southern border of the notorious Tenderloin, was still not far from Madison Square, the southern end of New York's area of vice by 1912, and Union Square was still a site of solicitation. The picture also carries "codes" of prostitution--showy makeup, extravagant hats with large feathers, and a purse dangling from a long string. In this reading, the men are potential clients, the women to the left, and especially the woman in the shirtwaist to the far right, more proper foils to the central figures. We see the same codes at play in James Wilfred Kerr's later 1931 painting, In Chinatown New York City (Fig. 24), in which a woman with her back to the viewer poses seductively and dangles her purse for the man who walks up the cellar stairs towards her. According to Suzanne Kinser, inexpensive Chinese restaurants were also sites of solicitation, a social and commercial situation Sloan records in his Chinese Restaurant of 1909 (Fig. 50) which he later described euphemistically as a woman "feeding her boyfriend before taking him home." One of several paintings and prints Sloan made on this subject, like Sunday Afternoon in Union Square, it addresses the dynamics of looking and speculation engaged in by city dwellers in countless situations requiring visual interpretation.13

But the claim that solicitation is the subject of Sloan's Union Square painting must remain speculative. As Kathy Peiss has shown in her study on working class women and leisure at the turn of the century, many young women who wanted to participate in the public world of leisure, frequently adopted modes of dress from both the world of high fashion and the subculture of prostitution. In such "putting on style," they established their own claims to "ladyhood," a set of exaggerated fashion practices defined further by historian Nan Enstad. Such practices signaled aspirations to a higher social station as well as desires for greater independence from both Old World models of behavior and the restrictions of acceptable middle-class mores. These young women, most of whom were paid below subsistence wages, frequently used fashion and display as a means toward the practice of "treating," offering a boyfriend or date a range of sexual favors from kissing to intercourse in exchange for a trip to the dance hall or Coney Island. These women were called "charity girls" to distinguish them from regular or even occasional prostitutes, many of whom exchanged sex for pay to make ends meet. In any case, more conspicuous displays of behavior allowed for greater sexual expressiveness, outside a totally regulated working life, without being interpreted as prostitution. At the same time, as Enstad has pointed out, "ladyhood" allowed women to craft political identities as respectable workers entitled to unions, and improved wages and working conditions.14

Sloan thus plays ambiguously with different notions of the public female's desirability and respectability. Apart from the gaping male viewer or a reform-minded female, a working-class woman, sympathetic to women meeting men outside the home might have seen this as behavior to emulate. This viewer might identify with the two seated young women to the left, whose remarks, rather than condemning the central figures, actually admire their finery which is, after all, a more exaggerated version of their own. She might have taken to heart their greater autonomy in public leisure space. If public behavior is at issue here, certainly these women appear far more confident in their demeanor than the inward-turning woman in Hassam's picture--signalling again a later moment in women's movement into the public social environment of the city.

In the economic and power relationships implied in men viewing women, however, as with the economic status of women in the world of work, independence and confidence did not translate into political or financial equality. Beyond the depicted narratives, the central figures in both works are set up as objects for the pleasure of a primarily masculine spectator--the probable purchaser of the painting in turn-of-the-century economy. In diary entries, Sloan himself regularly took a benign reportorial delight as he consumed the spectacle of strikingly clad women; at the same time his images show working class women as active participants in modern life, seeking personal autonomy through urban work and leisure. Still, works like these imbued with specific narratives of spectatorship contributed to the visual commodification of women; they re-inscribe in visual form the unequal relationships of "sexual power and subordination"15 that were historically part of the day to day activities in the urban world Sloan and Hassam occupied and viewed.

In contrast to the numerically more frequent images featuring some aspect of female pleasure and urban leisure, few paintings showed women laboring in New York sweatshops or doing piecework in lower East side tenements. Such image making was left to early documentary photographers like Jacob Riis (see the Museum of the City of New York's Jacob Riis collection online under Past Exhibitions), and to the muckraking journalists and cartoonists who sought to expose and eventually ameliorate the hardships and inequities under which women labored. The costs of such labor were also central to the demands of 20,000 shirtwaist strikers seeking unions and improved working conditions in 1909. As the largest and longest strike of women factory workers, the collective walkout of shirtwaist strikers became front page news as a spectacle of women, not unlike the masses of suffrage paraders in this decade. Several strikers appear in a news photo, fashionably dressed on their way to meet with the mayor (Fig. 51). A sober group, their public determination stands as the flip side of the more lighthearted confidence of Sloan's workers, passing an admiring group of men in his 1915 etching Return from toil (Fig. 52). But nothing could stand in sharper contrast to either of these two images than the photographs of women's broken bodies (Fig. 53) lying on the pavement at the base of the Asch building, victims of the tragic fire of March 25, 1911 at the Triangle Shirtwaist Company. Located only eight blocks south of Union Square, just off Washington Square Park at the corner of Washington Place and Greene Streets, the top three floors of the 10-story building housed one of the largest sweatshop factories producing the tailored shirtwaists worn by virtually all classes of style-conscious women at the time (Fig. 54). No event brought the horror of working-class women's working conditions more sharply into focus than this spectacular blaze, which in a little over twenty-five minutes claimed one hundred forty-six lives; one hundred thirty-three women and thirteen men suffocated, burned, or jumped to their deaths.

Photographs provided pictorial evidence of carnage and rubble produced by a fire whose power, speed, and heat were fueled by oil for sewing machines and a week's worth of cotton shirtwaist scraps littering the floor. Survivors and eyewitnesses reported failing elevators, inadequate stairways, doors locked to prevent worker theft, and a blocked single fire escape which hurled women their deaths as it broke away from the building (Fig. 55). A year before the fire, the twenty-thousand shirtwaist makers who had demanded safer working conditions during the massive shirtwaist strike were blocked by the Triangle Company's management which thwarted unionization. Against all this evidence of terrible working conditions, Joseph J. Asch, the building's owner could make the astonishing claim:
My building is fireproof. . . . I have obeyed the law to the letter. There was not one detail of the construction of my building that was not submitted to the Building and Fire Departments. Every detail was approved and the fire marshall congratulated me.16

Sadly, Asch was right. While there were laws and investigations in process on a number of fronts--requiring fire escapes, sprinklers, and mandatory fire drills, as well as statutes concerning the proper number of staircases--the fluid discretionary powers of the building department and the fire inspection system gave the building a "good" rating for a loft factory.17 While investigations in the wake of the fire found neither the building owner nor the factory proprietors liable for damages, the National Women's Trade Union League helped to generate a petition which established the New York State Factory Investigating Commission, known commonly as the Triangle Fire Commission. After four years of public hearings, the commission proposed sixty bills, all of which became law, giving New York the strongest system of factory legislation in the country.18

The painting Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire, March 25, 1911, (plate 58), is a rich and remarkable historical document, painted approximately thirty years after the fire by Victor J. Gatto, an eyewitness to the tragedy. At the time of the fire, Gatto himself was a twenty-one year old son of Italian immigrants, working at odd jobs. He was an occasional prizefighter, migrated south after the first World War to work in an ammunition plant and eventually learned steamfitting, through the Public Works programs of the 1930s. Always a sketcher, it was only in 1937, after seeing an open-air show in Greenwich Village that he decided to become a "self-taught" artist; and he seems to have painted a number of scenes from youthful memories.19 While contemporary news photographs of the Triangle fire provided the all-too-graphic view of broken bodies, no photograph showed the actual fire, and no lens was wide enough to capture the scope and sweep of the event. Gatto's panoramic scene shows the Washington Place side of the building in the left foreground, parallel to the picture plane, with a line of spectators and policeman controlling the crowd all across the lower edge of the work. The Greene Street facade angles off to the right in an illogical spatial perspective that serves to expose the part of the Greene Street facade at the upper right corner of the building. The actual fire occupies a relatively small area of the painting. Orange-red flames and the brilliant spots of color signifying women's falling bodies are the only notes of color against the relentless gray monochrome of the building.

When compared to contemporary accounts, Gatto's memory image takes several minor liberties.20 The building is too low to show all ten stories, though on Greene Street he portrays what turned out to be one of the grimmest ironies of the entire event: the most up-to-date fire equipment available used ladders that failed to reach beyond the sixth story of an urban loft building, at a time when dozens of such structures housed fire-hazardous sweatshops. Here the ladders are well below flaming windows. Safety nets or blankets also proved useless, torn from the grasp of firefighters by the force of falling bodies, a detail Gatto excludes. In addition, the fire extended to both the Greene Street and Washington Place sides of the building and during the fire bodies fell to both sidewalks. Only after the fire was over were bodies tagged and moved across the street from the Asch building. In effect Gatto's depiction portrays not a single moment, but a continuous narrative moving from right to left. It contrasts the absolute chaos during the fire, with flames, horses, fire equipment, and firemen moving in all directions on Greene Street, to the chilling silent order of the bare Washington Place facade, with its identically shrouded, anonymous bodies arranged so carefully on the sidewalk.

Given the reportorial specificity of this painting, one can speculate that had Gatto become a "trained" artist in the first decade of the century, he would have been drawn to the kind of realist imagery produced by the Ashcan School artists. Like Sloan, Henri, Glackens, Shinn and Luks, all of whom worked as newspaper sketch reporters capturing urban events, and who, through that experience, expanded the range of urban subject matter in the "high art" of painting to include the lives of urban tenement dwellers, Gatto might have portrayed a subject like the Triangle Fire. However--and this is an important caveat--in their paintings, Ashcan artists still made certain accommodations to the more genteel expectations of high art at the turn of the century--even as they challenged that gentility. Sloan's lively working women appear at leisure in sun-filled settings--rarely at work. And, in Sunday Afternoon in Union Square, he chose the aftermath of a Socialist Rally, not the specter of labor strife at the rally itself. Everett Shinn's portrayals of tenement conflagration, as in Fire on Twenty Fourth Street, New York City, 1907 (Fig. 56), though on a much smaller scale, evoke the sublimity of romantic conflagration paintings like Turner's series on the Houses of Parliament, or the museum's The Burning of the Merchant's Exchange, December 16 and 17, 1835 by Nicolino Calyo (plate 11). Shinn's nighttime spectacles silhouetted a shining blaze against the dark sky; his fascination was with the spectacle rather than with loss and death for poor urban dwellers.21 When Gatto's canvas is set against this evocative tradition of fires, or Ashcan School painting in the first decade of the twentieth-century, there is a somewhat greater degree of narrative "realism" in the form of specific detail, primarily in the falling, flaming bodies, and the rank of shrouded corpses in the foreground.

John Sloan was one of the Ashcan realists who openly acknowledged his desire to keep politics out of his painting.22 When he turned to the subject of the Triangle fire, he chose the medium of the political cartoon, with its history of graphic protest. Working as an impassioned socialist, Sloan made a scathing condemnation of the fire in a drawing produced for the New York Call on April 8, 1911, titled "In Memorium, Here is the Real Triangle" (Fig. 57). In uncomfortable detail, Sloan depicted a partially charred and still smoking female corpse fallen across a triangle whose three sides carry the three words "rent," "profit," and "interest." The triangle is supported by a skeleton, the figure of death, and the rotund top-hatted figure of greedy capitalist entrepreneur. In the foreground, a knife labeled "courts" is driven through the employees liability bill, referring to a decision by the New York State court of appeals that workers cannot be protected from such disasters. In his graphic work as a political cartoonist, Sloan found the appropriate medium in which to take up this issue. Painting, as William Dean Howells had so aptly stated a generation before, was the place to depict the more "smiling aspects" of American life--for an implicitly more genteel audience for high art.23

In taking up urban realist painting in 1937, however, Gatto encountered a generation of New York viewers and a New York art world in which the kind of pictorial reenactment of the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire he stages here would have been both timely and acceptable, understood perhaps as the somewhat more moderate form of Social Realism advocated and practiced by artists on the Left in the later years of the Depression. As used here Social Realism refers generally to art in the 1930s which, in subject, style, and medium, takes an activist stance to propagandize for social and political change.24 For artists committed to the Left in the early part of the decade, political graphics calling for direct action (not unlike Sloan's depiction of the Triangle Shirtwaist tragedy) were the most acceptable form of art; painting was frequently condemned as a bourgeois capitalist medium. With the Spanish Civil war and the threat of Fascism, and with the emergence of the Popular Front in the second half of the decade, the more sectarian communist Left broadened its political constituency to include Socialists and even New Deal Democrats, and liberalized its aesthetic aims. Leftist critics and artists widened the range of subject and stylistic possibilities to include both representational and more abstract art, and recast principles of social and political art to include a variety of points of view.25 Artist Louis Lozowick, for example, argued that the "worker as victim," was an important area of investigation for the artist.26 Gatto's canvas clearly recalls the plight of the female worker as a victim of her working environment.

While we lack direct evidence of Gatto's own politics, and detailed accounts of the reception of his work, the artist shared with the Triangle workers and a number of other socially concerned artists in the 30s the working class experience and immigrant background that made him a sympathetic chronicler of and mediator for the working class. In this capacity, he found a straightforward "naive" visual language with which to interpret, even critique, an environment he shared as he took up art in his 40s. A viewer familiar with 1930s labor strife could see the subject of the Triangle Fire establishing continuity with an equally tumultuous past in the history of labor struggles. In such a reading, the tiny corpses as shrouded bodies or as fragile shards of flaming color are helpless victims against the powerful stone facade, a massive structure symbolizing the dominance of capital over labor. At the same time, however, Gatto's engagement with labor strife is more distant, both temporally and compositionally. Its small flat figures lack the material resonance and emotional impact of those in a work like Philip Evergood's archetypally social realist painting of labor conflict, American Tragedy of 1936 (Fig. 58). A viewer cannot escape the powerfully realized figures battling the police in the foreground. In Gatto's work, the horrors of a fire that destroyed so many lives are kept at a greater remove as experience is mediated through memory. Gatto's work does, however, return to public view the issue of female labor strife at the end of the Depression. Because of the prevailing ideology that continued to link men and masculinity with work and women with domesticity, labor strife and unemployment were largely understood as male problems despite statistical evidence that showed women suffering from unemployment as well. Moreover, in the iconography of work, produced as public art under the auspices of the federal government during the 1930s the "worker" was commonly a heroic, muscular male figure.27

Another urban work depicting an altogether different "spectacle of women" is Ben Shahn's WCTU (Women's Christian Temperance Union) Parade of 1934 (plate 76), one of eight preliminary sketches in gouache for a series of murals on the theme of Prohibition, destined for the Central Park Casino. The favorite haunt of Mayor Jimmy Walker, along with other fashionable New Yorkers, the Casino was destroyed before Shahn could complete the murals. The entire series looks with a certain humor at the impossibility of enforcing Prohibition, a stance Casino goers would undoubtedly have shared and enjoyed. But the WCTU Parade, coincidentally the only panel to feature women, uses stereotype and caricature to a more extreme degree, making women the butt of the Prohibition joke.

WCTU Parade is the only panel that actually favors Prohibition. Had it been completed and installed with the scenes showing the ongoing activities of making and distributing liquor or demonstrating for repeal, the men and their activities would have numerically overwhelmed the women. The parade imagery in the WCTU panel seems the logical pendant to the Parade for Repeal (plate 81) in which an elegantly beige-suited, flag-waving Jimmy Walker leads twenty-one actively striding men carrying large, boldly-lettered signs. Everything in the men's panel makes the ten properly clad older ladies, and their cause, look ineffectual. Instead of projecting signs, two ladies grasp the ends of a tiny banner, precariously supported on a thin central pole held by a third figure. The banner's message "Women's Christian Temperance Union For God, For Home, For Native Land," would have been lost in a moving parade. Where the men take strong steps and cast their gaze purposefully forward--or even beyond--the imaginary audience, only the woman on the right of the WCTU panel seems to move. Indeed the other women pause, smile, and in some cases clasp their hands or hold them awkwardly by their sides. Several are shown with their feet splayed outward. Most look generally pleasant or smile with a benign or cautious self-consciousness, ill-at-ease, perhaps, in the more exposed public space of the street. Unlike the men they seem uncomfortably aware of a viewer's gaze, as if caught in a split second of of composing themselves for a photographer who will freeze them while on public parade for the camera.28 Finally, Shahn takes the caricature of these passive older women even further by placing the sign for wine, liquors and cigars just above the "For God, For Home, For Native Land" of their sign.

A feminist viewer of the WCTU Parade might want to critique the images for making women participants in the spectacle of their own passivity and failure--for so blatantly reinstating power relations as usual with male paraders as active achievers, women as ill-equipped--out of their depth--and by virtue of age and fashion outdated in the modern public world. Against all the masculine activity of the other scenes they lack the wherewithal to compete. In 1934, Shahn's caricature of the older Temperance supporter would have engaged a closely related, though more broadly negative stereotype of womanhood--namely the fighting feminist survivor--what several journalists called the "flat-heeled" angry pre-franchise type lost in a post-franchise world. Many commentators in the 1920s and 1930s claimed that the vote made women equal and the feminist movement was at an end. Women who still clamored about women's rights were frequently caricatured as old, (because outdated), asexual and even masculine in contrast to the newly popular and sexually liberated stereotypes of the flapper and her 1930s successor, the voluptuous Jean Harlow movie siren (Fig. 59).29 These new stereotypes, though sometimes cast as sexually dangerous, even feisty, nonetheless offered sexual allure and a reclarification of sex roles. This became particularly compelling when the economic downturn of the Depression and the accompanying loss of jobs for men generated what many social scientists called an acute crisis in masculinity. The beautiful stereotype became a kind of popular antidote to the crisis. Shahn's temperance supporters, like their older feminist sisters, are also cast as masculine: Heavy clothes mask any hint of the female body. Many have the blocky faces, heavy jowls, and sharp features of their masculine counterparts in the Parade for Repeal. Having lost their "femininity" these women find themselves in a losing battle in a sphere not their own. Many so-called moderate feminists throughout the twenties and thirties supported feminist claims to equality but from the position that women needed to claim behaviors and expertise--and an appearance that could be deemed "feminine," in order to succeed in the world.

As historian Nancy Cott has shown, however, there was no monolithic feminism, especially after the franchise, when women adopted new positions and established the organizations that formed the basis of modern feminism. By the end of the 1920s, one of the widest fissures in a once stronger feminist consensus occurred between those who continued to support and those who abandoned the aims of Prohibition. While many in the latter group admired the spirit of temperance, they felt that Prohibition had actually stimulated alcohol production and consumption. One large group of wealthy New York women ultimately founded the Women's Organization for National Prohibition Reform, working with the larger men's organizations for the repeal of the Eighteenth Amendment.30 Viewed in these contexts, Shahn's women crusaders seem doubly alone, abandoned by women and men alike in what by 1934 would have been a lost cause. Overwhelmed by the counter evidence of parades for repeal and barrels of illegal liquor they seem not to know what to do. In the end, however, even as his stereotype participates in the construction of the period's antifeminist feminist, Shahn disarms some measure of mean-spiritedness by giving these women sweet benign expressions, not angry ones. They are grandmothers rather than battle-axes, posing for posterity, their well-meaning intentions in the face of the certain defeat signaled to any viewer of the series.

To find the newer feminist, a New York City dweller would turn to Greenwich Village. While many observers argued that a postwar world of consumption and tourism, combined with the new subway route had robbed the Village of its insider avant-garde spirit, and quiet village-like atmosphere, it retained its reputation as the bohemian enclave of New York and people flocked to cafes and cafeterias to experience the ambiance. The image of the New Woman, and the oddly mixed environment that surrounded her in mid-Depression are deliberately fashioned in Vincent La Gambina's The Life Cafeteria of 1936 (plate 83), where female spectatorship and the spectacle of women once again take center stage. The three women who dominate the picture are placed parallel to the picture plane, just behind a table covered with dirty dishes, a tray of condiments, and books. Through his careful composing of this central group, the artist has, unconsciously perhaps, stereotyped and homogenized these women, linking them into an inseparable little group. Like a modern parody of three Renaissance Graces the figures form a stable pyramidal composition with the woman at the center seated behind and slightly above the other two, her right arm circling the shoulder of the woman at the left. The two side figures wear identical costumes with white V-neck collars and cuffs, as if in uniform; their right arms are raised at the identical angles, mirroring the tilt of the central figure's head. The three women have similarly shaped mouths, noses, and eyebrows, with only slight variation in facial features and expressions, and all are looking. The central figure smiles as she peers over her friend's shoulder, watching approvingly (or catching a glimpse of herself) as this second woman scrutinizes her own application of make-up. The woman on the right turns her gaze sharply to the right, observing something outside the picture. At the center of the table, the round tray of condiments provides a witty interplay with the pyramidal pose of the three women, objectifying them, as they anthropomorphize the objects. From the other side of the table the viewer faces the women, watching their activities.

For a viewer knowledgeable about New York painting at the time, Village life and art infiltrate this image on several levels. In this early work, the young La Gambina's standardization of solidly painted female types, and his method of composing by rhyming and repeating shapes in a highly self-conscious fashion, reveals his admitted association in Village Cafe life with the figurative urban scene artists associated with Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney's Whitney Studio Club--specifically with artists like Kenneth Hayes Miller, who practiced and taught this method of composition like a religion to numerous students at the Art Students League.31 Miller's Sidewalk Merchant of 1940, for example, uses the same compositional devices; a triad of colors, a renaissance-style composition with the three Graces shopping for Fourteenth-street bargains, and standardized matronly types (Fig. 60). As if to cement this association further, La Gambina places a very different female type at the right edge of the picture. Though only partially realized, with her face partially hidden by the veil of her hat, her frizzy blond hair and full lips recall the blond bombshell types that populate Reginald Marsh's images. Marsh was another member of this group in the late 20s and 30s, and Miller's student and close friend. As La Gambina reminisced in 1989, "It's not bad to be with Reginald Marsh--I knew him and I saw him very often in the League. He was very friendly and anytime we met he always spoke to me at length about anything. . . "32 In taking on female subjects as modern types, La Gambina joined a coterie of Greenwich Village/Union Square artists and undertook a series of pictorial possibilities that would lead him through a lifetime of New York subjects.

Drawing on contemporary descriptions of Greenwich Village, the Life Cafeteria, and the perception of the Village as a social space defying conventional behavior, it is difficult to place the time of day or the clientele. With the exception of a man at a distant table and the man carrying his tray, the occupants of the cafeteria are women--on a lunchtime break, or unemployed and lingering during the Depression, or even students from local art schools. But it could be evening, given the yawning man, and the figure slumped over the bar. Moreover, in the evening, the scene changed, when "the more conventional occupy tables in one section of the room and watch the 'show' of eccentrics on the other side." This phrase, from the 1939 WPA Guide to New York City was, as George Chauncey has shown, a euphemistic description of nighttime activities at both the Life Cafeteria and Stewart's whose owners decided that "by allowing lesbians and gay men to gather there they would attract sight-seers out to gawk at a late-night 'fairy hangout.' "33 Given the well-known reputation of the cafeteria, where watching was the main event, then who is watching whom and what "side" are we on? On the upper left, the only other woman even moderately characterized appears with her dog, wearing a slightly exotic turban/scarf headdress; she looks to the right like the women at the front table. As "characters" these three are modern women, in dress, demeanor and self-presentation; one uses face powder, a thoroughly acceptable (though perhaps un-bohemian) post-meal pursuit; the woman who turns does so with strong forthright gestures, tightening her right fist, grasping her napkin with her left. Though moderately well-dressed, their presence at a table with books and dishes pushed to one side, suggests that they linger, perhaps over literary activities like poetry or fiction. The central woman may have joined the other two, indicating they are "regulars." And, finally, if on display, for which viewer? Does the central figure encircle her friend's shoulder in a gesture of greeting or admiration as she fashions herself for a male viewer? Or is this an embrace of same-sex intimacy, possibly one from which the third member of a menage a trois or a complicated lesbian love triangle turns sharply away. In 1933, one guidebook, Broadway Brevities, pointed out in disapproving language that in a restaurant on Sheridan square "Dykes, fags, pansies, lesbians, and others of that unfortunate ilk convene there nightly, parading their petty jealousies and affairs of the heart." Finally, are the occupants of the cafeteria women at all? In 1939, one gay man reported on the practice of looking through the Life Cafeteria's huge plate glass window at gay men in drag.
The Life Cafeteria was a big hangout. Faggots from all over the country would gather there. They'd just sit in the window, drinking coffee and smoking cigarettes and carrying on. . . . tourists would pass by to see them because they wore heavy makeup--blue eye shadow, rouge, mascara--and had long hair. It attracted young people coming out like me. . .34

Given the viewer's slightly elevated position and the distance across the table, it is possible to be on the outside looking in as a tourist or simply another participant in the scene. Of course we cannot claim any of these readings as either the key to the painting's meaning or as the artist's intention, any more than we could claim that the women in John Sloan's Sunday Afternoon in Union Square were definitively intended to be prostitutes. We are, however, looking through the eyes of several possible viewers in the fluid social spaces of Greenwich Village in the Depression, arguing that a viewer's own social position may dictate a different and historically plausible narrative for the mixed social codes on display here. For much of the first half of the 20th century, Times Square was at the "crossroads of commerce and culture," not just for New York, but, as recent commentators have argued, for the nation and the world. As the amusement center of New York, it was also a primary district for the spectacle, and spectatorship of women--as theatrical performers, dancers, screen stars, burlesque queens--and as audience. Housing all forms of popular culture, it was arguably a site--whether experienced first hand or through its representation--where the image and idea of womanhood was constructed, marketed and exchanged. How, and for whom these transactions occurred became the subject of two Times Square paintings of the 1940s; in very different ways, artists Reginald Marsh, in Harris Theater of 1940 (plate 91) and James Wilfrid Kerr, in Times Square Dim Out of 1944 (plate 93) examined women on what one songwriter described in 1933 as the "naughty, bawdy, gaudy, sporty, Forty-second street."35

Painted just four years apart, both paintings are quite true to their historical moments. Kerr's painting records a specific wartime event. Prompted by rumors that enemy planes were nearing the east coast, officials ordered either blackouts, brownouts or dimouts, when all lighting above street level was extinguished. Only the glow of storefront windows bathes the crowd and illuminates the otherwise dark marquis. In his watercolor, Marsh placed a newspaper in the hands of the gentleman on the left, bearing headlines and text that blare: "Germans Sweep to Channel," and "Nazis raid (?) North on Channel Coast." Both artists also make signage a major characterizing feature of their scenes and use it for punning comments on the events at hand. At the top of Kerr's image we read a veiled illusion to war in "Human Monsters clash in Combat...Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man." In Marsh's watercolor, as in so much of his work, the battle is between the sexes. There exists a sharp divide--a "channel"--to be breeched between the male half of the picture on the left, and the predominantly female right. Directly under the right hand sign picturing a handsome romantic couple with a text that states "She's pretty and will make a man of 60 feel the thrill of youth again," the sidewalk scene offers the potential, but finally thwarted, reenactment. One of Marsh's stereotypically voluptuous, "tarts" stands gazing up, as if to engage the mature, heavy-jowled man on the right who stands awkwardly with hands thrust into his crumpled suit pockets, unaware of, or ignoring her look.

Both artists, finally, show Forty-second Street well after its heyday in the teens and twenties, when theaters, vaudeville, lavish first-run movie houses and restaurants prospered. With the Depression, many theaters were forced to close or to change into radio stages, cheap movie houses, and burlesque theaters--transforming the neighborhood and marketing to a new clientele. The Harris Theater actually began as a film house, then became a theater for musical reviews--managed by the powerful Schubert theatrical business. They gave it up again to film in the 1930s, but by this time new entrepreneurs satisfying new tastes were redefining Forty-second Street amusement as something akin to the tawdry attractions of Coney Island. By the time Marsh portrayed the Harris Theater in 1940, it shared the block with Burlesque houses, Hubert's dime museum featuring freaks and a flea circus, and cheap restaurants. And the theater itself was one of a number of "grind" houses playing continuous double-features whose frankly sexual subjects addressed a predominantly male audience.36 The other two features under the Harris marquis in Marsh's picture are "Flirtation; the Well-known Comedy" in which "country gentlemen" are "lured by slick City Women;" and a film in which "Burlesque Dames Quarrel as to who will take over the next victim." If not the exact features, these would have been fairly accurate representations of the type of offering, since Marsh was known to make exact sketches of city life and signage as backdrops for his urban scenes, as in his other well known movie marquee painting, Twenty Cent Movie of 1936 (Fig. 61).

In spite of these topographical similarities, the two artists give us very different impressions of the street--impressions in which the overall staging, and role and appearance of the women play major parts. Thanks to the cut-off figure of a woman in the immediate foreground, Kerr's composition draws us down onto the sidewalk where he positions the viewer looking down rather than across the street. In spite of the crowds of people, we witness a stately promenade featuring acts of civility. In the middle ground, a beggar accepts a bill from a passing gentleman; Soldiers and sailors graciously guide their women companions through a crowd that takes entertainment united by a common purpose--carrying on in spite of wartime restrictions. All the women who feature prominently in this scene are individualized. Variation in fashion--the big hat and sweeping scarf on the woman in the right middle-ground; the slightly more low-cut fitted coat on the solitary blond woman to the left--adds to that individualization without breaking the bounds of tastefulness. High heels and tailored coats seem appropriate to an evening of entertainment. Of the three most prominent women, the blond to the left seems to be waiting to meet someone, given her directed gaze, and fixed pose. The other two women could be seen as waiting or simply moving through the neighborhood, sampling its offerings at the close of the workday. Given the obvious wartime theme, a setting in which other women appear with military men, and the comfortable propriety of these reflective single women we could easily interpret them as devoted wives or sweethearts of men at the front, working and waiting on their own at home. Whatever the exact moment, it is a relatively well-behaved crowd of average Americans interacting with a subdued Forty-second Street.

We are only viewers of Marsh's scene, staged as a hyperbolic fantasy of tawdry types on the sidewalk beneath the Harris Street marquis. Well known as both a "realist" painter and illustrator of New York, the upper-class, Yale-educated Marsh was familiar with all the major masters of high art and the amusements of cheap commercial culture. A onetime Daily News columnist who evaluated Jersey City vaudeville and striptease acts, the artist favored slumming in entertainment haunts that had slipped past the respectable to the seamy, whether the taxi dance halls of the Depression, Harlem jazz joints, Coney Island rides, Union Square/Fourteenth Street dives with illegal sidewalk hawkers, or the Bowery. On Forty-second Street he also portrayed Minsky's burlesque chorus (Fig. 62), and Texas Guinan's nightclub. And, unlike Kerr, it was the underside of life that he found in all his locales.

Marsh's New York, like the world on the Harris Theater sidewalk, was a world of recognizable, often jaded types--not individuals. It was also a social space in which looking and sex--principally men looking at, and lusting after, but never integrating with women--was the primary activity. So familiar did Marsh's general female type become that she came to be called the "Marsh Girl," a cross between high art, and the popular siren of thirties culture, but in lower-class guise, stepping off the pages of cheap sensationalist tabloids or film magazines. Modeled on a Rubens-type body from high art, by the late 1930s she displayed the exaggerated fullness of figure we see here, with swelling breasts, buttocks, thighs and powerful calves. Frequently blond with theatrical make-up and garish costume, she recalls Sloan's charity girls of an earlier time. Like them she is frequently an exuberant purposeful striding figure. In other guises she is reduced to a vacant vessel onto which predominantly men (or occasionally an admiring female viewer) might cast their desiring gaze.

It is no accident that Marsh saw his work as appealing primarily to men. Late twentieth-century feminist viewers might be put off by the exaggerated sexualizing and depersonalizing of women and the seeming impossibility of a happy truce between the sexes. Culturally, Marsh's visual language is a kind of vernacular, perhaps akin to Damon Runyon's fiction as developed in his Broadway stories. According to William Taylor, Runyon's women were "hostages" or prizes. Marsh's repetition of a common figure suggests his obsession with the female as an unattainable object of desire. The tawdriness of these women brings the slang of the period, and the district to mind--for a contemporary viewer they might have been "molls," or "dolls" or "gams" or "dames" or "dumb blonds"--today perhaps "bimbos."37 At the same time, these women are not represented as victims, no matter how extreme the voyeurism and objectification. Although the power relations set up in the dynamics of looking never are never redressed, Marsh's women are also represented as threatening to men. This is figured in their strong bodies, and in the stories played out in signs. The "victim" of the struggling burlesque dames is male; "she" lures the country gentlemen; and it is "woman" who has the power to make men feel young. In Marsh's image, women function as both "reality" and "fantasy" in a world of commercial desire. Men band together and either look or avoid from a separate place, frequently off to one side as in this image, or below, as audience beneath a stage. Women remain only spectacle.

Together artists, paintings, and audiences record and make history, itself an ongoing process of selection, interrogation, evaluation and interpretation. In the larger project of Painting the Town, which asks how artistic vision makes history, this essay has interpreted representations of changing social lives of New York women as they encountered a new world that was public, urban, and modern. Specific locales, like parks, cafes, and theater districts; dramatic events like Prohibition parades; or catastrophes like sweatshop fires became theaters for the spectatorship of these new women as they left the confines of home and took their places in city life to make anew its history. In these images, artists chronicled both the possibilities and problems, the gains and setbacks of women struggling to gain a foothold in a world that required a continued redefinition of social interaction and political structures. In engaging its viewers with this interpretive process, Painting the Town allows all of us to join our collective memories and current knowledges. As we read these paintings, in the space of this museum, new forms of understanding will help us make new histories--and perhaps better urban futures. See Notes