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

During World War II, when Mari-Louise Van Esselstyn was a student at the Yale University School of Fine Arts -one of the first women admitted there¹ -she frequently took buses home to Montclair, New Jersey, by way of New York City. This painting is believed to represent the escalator in one of the small city bus terminals that pre-date the 1950 Port Authority bus terminal at 40th Street and Eighth Avenue.

"A painting of an escalator must achieve a balance between ascending and descending motion," Van Esselstyn has written, adding, "To create the illusion of movement one vanishing pt [sic] was placed beyond the crest of the ascending escalator & a second below the base of the descending escalator." The distorted perspective, the artist explained, "demanded a semi-abstract treatment of repeated shapes."² She employed a Cubist idiom, wherein geometric shapes form an overlay pattern on the curvilinear forms of the commuters and the escalator handrails. The sense of the escalators' movement is accentuated by the crosscutting light shafts emanating from the windows along the right side of the view. The faceless

figures convey a sense of massed humanity moving rapidly through the automated setting. The subdued color palette, with occasional orange or red highlights, underscores the relationship of this work to the Cubist aesthetic. In 1946 The Escalator was chosen in a Pepsi-Cola competition as one of the paintings of the year and was included in an exhibition that traveled to such venues as the National Academy of Design in New York City, the Syracuse Museum of Fine Arts (now the Everson Museum), and the Walter Art Gallery in Baltimore.

Notes:

1 Van Esselstyn has modestly attributed her acceptance into Yale to the wartime scarcity of men to fill class places.

2 Artist's notes, Museum Archives.


The Escalator 1943 -1944 Mari-Louise Van Esselstyn (b. 1921) Egg tempera on masonite, 15 1/2 X 11 Signed lower right: van esselstyn Gift of the artist, 98.152.1
During World War II, when Mari-Louise Van Esselstyn was a student at the Yale University School of Fine Arts -one of the first women admitted there¹ -she frequently took buses home to Montclair, New Jersey, by way of New York City. This painting is believed to represent the escalator in one of the small city bus terminals that pre-date the 1950 Port Authority bus terminal at 40th Street and Eighth Avenue. "A painting of an escalator must achieve a balance between ascending and descending motion," Van Esselstyn has written, adding, "To create the illusion of movement one vanishing pt [sic] was placed beyond the crest of the ascending escalator & a second below the base of the descending escalator." The distorted perspective, the artist explained, "demanded a semi-abstract treatment of repeated shapes."² She employed a Cubist idiom, wherein geometric shapes form an overlay pattern on the curvilinear forms of the commuters and the escalator handrails. The sense of the escalators' movement is accentuated by the crosscutting light shafts emanating from the windows along the right side of the view. The faceless figures convey a sense of massed humanity moving rapidly through the automated setting. The subdued color palette, with occasional orange or red highlights, underscores the relationship of this work to the Cubist aesthetic. In 1946 The Escalator was chosen in a Pepsi-Cola competition as one of the paintings of the year and was included in an exhibition that traveled to such venues as the National Academy of Design in New York City, the Syracuse Museum of Fine Arts (now the Everson Museum), and the Walter Art Gallery in Baltimore. Notes: 1 Van Esselstyn has modestly attributed her acceptance into Yale to the wartime scarcity of men to fill class places. 2 Artist's notes, Museum Archives.