Gray Morning
1984
Marcia Clark
Oil on canvas, 42 X 30
Signed lower right: M. Clark
Gift of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, New York; Hassam, Speicher, Betts and Symons Funds 1995, 95.4.1

 

The construction of the World Trade Center's twin towers in the 1970s provided artists with a new vantage point for observing the city. From this perspective, Marcia Clark created the dramatic vista of Gray Morning, which provides an unusual view of some of downtown New York's most familiar structures: The Brooklyn Bridge, the Municipal Building, the Woolworth Building, and St. Paul's Chapel.

As early as about 1835, an anonymous artist had used an upper story of St. Paul's Chapel to depict City Hall Park. In the late nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth, the proliferation of New York's bridges provided artists with the opportunity to produce panoramas, accommodating the post -Civil War interest in prints of city views from an imaginary elevated vantage point.¹ Whereas the prints strove to present factual representations of both the built environment and the open spaces of American cities, Clark employs an elevated perspective as a metaphor for vision in its larger sense: in her words, a "symbolic way of pushing beyond personal frontiers, embracing the totality . . . and reaching beyond it."² The muted light of the gray day underscores this idea by softening and blending the elements of her quintessential Manhattan view, which includes historic landmarks, new structures, traffic corridors, and the East River.

Clark studied at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris before receiving degrees in fine arts from both Yale University and the State University of New York at New Paltz. She has exhibited widely and taught at various institutions, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Currently she is an instructor of drawing at the Parsons School of Design.

Notes:

  1  Sebastian Cruset's View from Queensboro Bridge after St. Patrick's Day Storm (plate 57), painted shortly after the bridge opened in 1910, is an example of such panoramas. For more on these "bird's-eye" prints, see John W. Reps, Views and Viewmakers of Urban America (Columbia, Mo.: University of Missouri Press, 1984), p. 3.

  2  Ibid.