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

Cecil Bell, having worked primarily in watercolor and gouache prior to 1934, turned to oils in the mid-1930s under the influence of John Sloan, his teacher at the Art Students League. Bell found that the shift in medium energized his ongoing efforts to capture New York's robust charm. "I want principally to get down life as I see it and if it turns out to be Art, so much the better," he told an interviewer in 1939, in the spirit of his Ash Can School mentor.¹ Bell's Depression-era vignettes were informed by a creative sensibility that acknowledged New York City as its life-giving force. Although a day job in commercial art was his financial backbone, Bell explored the city in his independent work for almost forty years.² His cityscape paintings, especially those dating to the later 1930s and 1940s, present a fundamentally benign place full of human incident: an urban theater of lush colors, energy, and endlessly diverting forms.

This rooftop scene records the pyrotechnics accompanying a thunderstorm passing over Manhattan on a sweltering summer night. The setting is the roof of a typical old multi-family dwelling found in Greenwich Village, probably near, if not on, the apartment building at 19 East Ninth Street where the artist then resided. (Bell often ascended to his roof with sketchpad and easel, relishing the breezes and vantage points.) The figures are several of the building's working-class tenants. Positioned in the foreground like theatergoers preparing to take seats in the front row, a couple gazes up at the erupting sky. The two have probably escaped to the roof from a poorly ventilated apartment below. Another suffering neighbor, emerging through the stairwell exit carrying a newspaper, will intrude on their privacy. Weather reports attest to the stifling heat that plagued New York during the summer of 1938, breaking half a century's worth of records and causing numerous sudden, severe thunderstorms.³

Although Bell's rooftop audience is preoccupied with the blazing lightning and ominous liver-brown clouds overhead, the composition also features two dramatic attractions of the Greenwich Village skyline. Protruding up toward the angry firmament is the conspicuous stepped-back pinnacle of 1 Fifth Avenue, a modern, twenty-seven-story brick apartment house that had been completed on Fifth Avenue and the southeast corner of 8th Street in 1929. In the distance, at the lower left, the distinctive campanile-style tower of the Judson Memorial Church at 55 Washington Square South is visible, crowned with its perennially illuminated cross. The painting's main attraction, however, remains the power of nature as it momentarily humbles Bell's indomitable city.

Following Bell's death in 1970, this canvas entered the art market under the title Storm Over Manhattan and was exhibited as such in the 1992 tribute installation mounted at the Museum of the City of New York in honor of the Robert R. Preato bequest.⁴ Loan records predating 1992, however, indicate that the Museum had borrowed this same work, then cited as Summer Electric Storm, from Bell's widow in 1973 for The Vanished City, a retrospective of the artist's New York scene paintings. The inscription "Summer Electric Storm" appears on its stretcher in what seems to be the artist's handwriting, prompting the reassignment of this earlier title to the painting.

Notes:

1 Harry Salpeter, "About Cecil Bell," Coronet Magazine (August 1939): 10 -14.

2 Bell's wife, when interviewed by a New Yorker writer three years after his death, spoke of his devotion to drawing and painting the city -art he considered altogether separate from his paying work. "Cecil made his living doing cartoons to be used by the salesmen of the Doughnut Corporation of America," she said; "he kept this completely separate." The interview's occasion was the opening of The Vanished City: Paintings of New York :1930 -1970, a posthumous survey of Bell's city scenes at the Museum of the City of New York presented in 1973. See "Vanish," Talk of the Town section, New Yorker (November 26, 1973): 37.

3 New York Times Index, Year 1938, pp. 2222 -2223, cites multiple articles reporting on the excessive heat, humidity, and storms besetting New York City over the summer months.

4 See The Robert R. Preato Collection of New York City Paintings and Drawings, exhibition catalogue (New York : Museum of the City of New York, 1994), p. 36. The catalogue was published two years after the newly acquired bequest was exhibited at the Museum of the City of New York.


Summer Electric Storm (also exhibited as Storm Over Manhattan), 1938 Cecil C. Bell (1906 -1970) Oil on canvas, 25 X 30 1/8 Signed lower right: Cecil C. Bell 38 The Robert R. Preato Collection, 91.76.21
Cecil Bell, having worked primarily in watercolor and gouache prior to 1934, turned to oils in the mid-1930s under the influence of John Sloan, his teacher at the Art Students League. Bell found that the shift in medium energized his ongoing efforts to capture New York's robust charm. "I want principally to get down life as I see it and if it turns out to be Art, so much the better," he told an interviewer in 1939, in the spirit of his Ash Can School mentor.¹ Bell's Depression-era vignettes were informed by a creative sensibility that acknowledged New York City as its life-giving force. Although a day job in commercial art was his financial backbone, Bell explored the city in his independent work for almost forty years.² His cityscape paintings, especially those dating to the later 1930s and 1940s, present a fundamentally benign place full of human incident: an urban theater of lush colors, energy, and endlessly diverting forms. This rooftop scene records the pyrotechnics accompanying a thunderstorm passing over Manhattan on a sweltering summer night. The setting is the roof of a typical old multi-family dwelling found in Greenwich Village, probably near, if not on, the apartment building at 19 East Ninth Street where the artist then resided. (Bell often ascended to his roof with sketchpad and easel, relishing the breezes and vantage points.) The figures are several of the building's working-class tenants. Positioned in the foreground like theatergoers preparing to take seats in the front row, a couple gazes up at the erupting sky. The two have probably escaped to the roof from a poorly ventilated apartment below. Another suffering neighbor, emerging through the stairwell exit carrying a newspaper, will intrude on their privacy. Weather reports attest to the stifling heat that plagued New York during the summer of 1938, breaking half a century's worth of records and causing numerous sudden, severe thunderstorms.³ Although Bell's rooftop audience is preoccupied with the blazing lightning and ominous liver-brown clouds overhead, the composition also features two dramatic attractions of the Greenwich Village skyline. Protruding up toward the angry firmament is the conspicuous stepped-back pinnacle of 1 Fifth Avenue, a modern, twenty-seven-story brick apartment house that had been completed on Fifth Avenue and the southeast corner of 8th Street in 1929. In the distance, at the lower left, the distinctive campanile-style tower of the Judson Memorial Church at 55 Washington Square South is visible, crowned with its perennially illuminated cross. The painting's main attraction, however, remains the power of nature as it momentarily humbles Bell's indomitable city. Following Bell's death in 1970, this canvas entered the art market under the title Storm Over Manhattan and was exhibited as such in the 1992 tribute installation mounted at the Museum of the City of New York in honor of the Robert R. Preato bequest.⁴ Loan records predating 1992, however, indicate that the Museum had borrowed this same work, then cited as Summer Electric Storm, from Bell's widow in 1973 for The Vanished City, a retrospective of the artist's New York scene paintings. The inscription "Summer Electric Storm" appears on its stretcher in what seems to be the artist's handwriting, prompting the reassignment of this earlier title to the painting. Notes: 1 Harry Salpeter, "About Cecil Bell," Coronet Magazine (August 1939): 10 -14. 2 Bell's wife, when interviewed by a New Yorker writer three years after his death, spoke of his devotion to drawing and painting the city -art he considered altogether separate from his paying work. "Cecil made his living doing cartoons to be used by the salesmen of the Doughnut Corporation of America," she said; "he kept this completely separate." The interview's occasion was the opening of The Vanished City: Paintings of New York :1930 -1970, a posthumous survey of Bell's city scenes at the Museum of the City of New York presented in 1973. See "Vanish," Talk of the Town section, New Yorker (November 26, 1973): 37. 3 New York Times Index, Year 1938, pp. 2222 -2223, cites multiple articles reporting on the excessive heat, humidity, and storms besetting New York City over the summer months. 4 See The Robert R. Preato Collection of New York City Paintings and Drawings, exhibition catalogue (New York : Museum of the City of New York, 1994), p. 36. The catalogue was published two years after the newly acquired bequest was exhibited at the Museum of the City of New York.