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

"Gender" is used here to describe the "social organization of the relationship between the sexes." It suggests that the definitions of "woman" and "man" must be understood in relation to one another, not as fixed or biologically determined, but as continually made and remade under changing historical circumstances. Representations--verbal and visual--are part of the process of this ongoing definition. See Joan W. Scott, "Gender: A Useful Category of Historical Analysis," American Historical Review 91 (Dec. 1986): 1053.

	Notes to Essays New York Stories: Narratives of Gender and Urban Space
1	Robert Henri, The Art Spirit: Notes, Articles, Fragments of Letters and Talks to Students, Bearing on the Concept and Technique of Picture Making, the Study of Art Generally, and on Appreciation. comp. Margery Ryerson (Philadelphia: 1923; reprint, New York, 1984): 116.
2	"Gender" is used here to describe the "social organization of the relationship between the sexes." It suggests that the definitions of "woman" and "man" must be understood in relation to one another, not as fixed or biologically determined, but as continually made and remade under changing historical circumstances. Representations--verbal and visual--are part of the process of this ongoing definition. See Joan W. Scott, "Gender: A Useful Category of Historical Analysis," American Historical Review 91 (Dec. 1986): 1053.
3	To frame these issues I rely very generally on what Richard Johnson, in speaking about mass culture rather than art, describes as the "circuit of production, circulation and consumption of cultural products." This circuit model claims that neither producers (artists) nor viewers are the sole originators or possessors of meanings of cultural artifacts (in this case paintings). Instead, meanings are generated and debated throughout the three-stage process with the cultural artifact as the site of multiple and contested meanings. See Richard Johnson, "What is Cultural Studies Anyway," Social Text 16 (1986): 38-80, and, for the application of Johnson, Elizabeth G. Traube, Dreaming Identities: Class, Gender, and Generation in 1980s Hollywood Movies (Boulder: Westview Press, 1992): 4-5. There are caveats to using this model for the paintings under consideration here. First, none of these paintings had either widespread circulation or critical response. And, though we have more general critical response for Hassam, Sloan, Marsh, and Shahn, and for the latter two, especially, clearer insight into stated intentions, social and political concerns, it is not always obvious how to extrapolate from such responses when the questions about the works are different ones. Hence, my discussion of possible readings by different kinds of spectators--both historical and contemporary--is speculative, but supported by comparative evidence from other social, institutional and aesthetic contexts.
4	This is obviously a schematic representation of a much more complex and contentious process. Museum goers are hardly passive and accepting recipients of art, any more than art historians and critics agree upon what art is important and how it should be presented.
5	For an excellent discussion of the problems of the relationship between the text (here painting or cultural artifact) and its historical context, see Michael Leja, Reframing Abstract Expresssionism: Subjectivity and Painting in the 1940s (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993): 11-13. Leja points out that that context is not a fixed historical set of facts (what I refer to as a "social reality") against which we interpret the fluid and multifaceted painting, but that both are constructed through interpretation. He also insists that context and text continuously shape and reframe one another in the process of interpretation.
6	At the time, Sloan was experimenting with the Maratta color system. His statement about the light in the work was made twenty-seven years after it was painted and suggests only his formal preoccupation. See The Gist of Art: Principles and Practise Expounded in the Classroom and Studio, recorded with the assistance of Helen Farr (New York: 1939): 233 . David W. Scott and Edgar John Bullard, III, John Sloan, 1871-1951, exhibition catalog (Washington, D. C.: National Gallery of Art, 1971): 124.
7	For a discussion of issues of spectacle and spectatorship see Deborah Fairman, "The Landscape of Display: The Ashcan School, Spectacle, and the Staging of Everyday Life," Prospects 18 (1993): 205-235.
8	The WPA Guide to New York City: The Federal Writers' Project Guide to 1930s New York, originally published as New York City Guide (New York: Random House, 1939; repring, New York: Pantheon Books, 1982): 200-201; 322; and Gerald R. Wolfe, New York: A Guide to the Metropolis (New York: New York University Press, 1975): 170-173. For a discussion of 1890s Union Square becoming more commercial see H. Barbara Weinberg, Doreen Bolger, and David Park Curry, American Impressionism and Realism: The Painting of Modern Life, 1885-1915 (New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, distributed by Harry N. Abrams, 1994): 185.
9	For a fuller account of Hassam's style, see, Donelson F. Hoopes, Childe Hassam (New York: Watson-Guptil Publications, 1979). For a lengthier discussion of the two Union Square paintings, see Weinberg, et al., American Impressionism and Realism, pp. 184-188.
10	According to Bruce St. John, ed., John Sloan's New York Scene from the Diaries, Notes and Correspondence, 1906-1913 (New York: 1965): 620, Sloan recorded that he "walked to Union Square and watched the thousands of Socialists come in from their parade."
11	Beginning with Barbara Welter, "The Cult of True Womanhood: 1820-1860," American Quarterly XVIII (Summer 1966), and Nancy Cott, The Bond's of Womanhood: "Woman's Sphere" in New England, 1780-1835 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1977), women's history is rich in sources describing the multiple ideological workings of and challenges to the doctrine of separate spheres. For discussions of feminist challenges to the established ideologies see Nancy Cott, The Grounding of Modern Feminism (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1987), and Rosalind Rosenberg, Beyond Separate Spheres: Intellectual Roots of Modern Feminism (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1982).
12	For a fuller account of this picture and its context in the discourse of new womanhood, see the author's (Ellen Wiley Todd) The "New Woman" Revised: Painting and Gender Politics on Fourteenth Street (Berkeley: The University of California Press, 1993): 17-24.
13	Suzanne L. Kinser, "Prostitutes in the Art of John Sloan," Prospects 9 (1984): passim and p. 243.
14	Nan Enstad, Ladies of Labor, Girls of Adventure: Working Women, Popular Culture, and Labor Politics at the Turn of the Twentieth Century (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999; Kathy Peiss, Cheap Amusements: Working Women and Leisure in Turn-of-the-Century New York (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1986): 27, 62-67; 108-113.
15	See Todd, The "New Woman" Revised, p. 324, n. 51. There is no one-to-one parallel relationship between paintings and social experience. What I describe here are unequal power relations in viewing and in the economic situation at the turn of the century that are worked out in both painting and day-to-day urban life. Rosemary Betterton "How Do Women Look? The Female Nude in the Work of Suzanne Valadon," in Looking On: Images of Femininity in the visual Arts and Media, ed. Rosemary Betterton (London and New York: Pandora Press, 1987): 218.
16	Asch is quoted in Leon Stein, The Triangle Fire (New York: J. B. Lippincott Company, 1962): 22, 29.
17	Stein, p. 28
18	John D. Buenker, "Triangle Fire" in Angela Howard Zophy, ed. Handbook of American Women's History (New York: Garland Reference Library of the Humanities, vol. 696, 1990): 610.
19	Information on Gatto in "The Island and the Bay," an exhibition at the Staten (?) Island Museum, January 13 to March 12, 1957, catalog entry number 43, p. 20. His childhood and art career are documented in Harry Salpeter, "Gatto: Little Primitive," Esquire (May 1946): 98, 207.
20	My source for these details is Stein, pp. 14-18, and photo caption following p. 67.
21	For a discussion of Shinn's scenes of fires in New York, see Sylvia L. Yount, "Consuming Drama: Everett Shinn and the Spectacular City," American Art 6 (Fall 1992): 87-109.
22	For a discussion of Sloan's politics and painting, see Patricia Hills, "John Sloan's Images of Working-Class Women: A Case Study of the Roles and Interrelationships of Politics, Personality, and Patrons in the Development of Sloan's Art, 1905-1916." Prospects 5 (1980): 157-196.
23	For a discussion of the graphic medium and social and political protest, see Rebecca Zurier, Art for the Masses: A Radical Magazine and Its Graphics, 1911-1917 (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1988): 129-132.
24	See Matthew Baigell, The American Scene: American Painting of the 1930s (New York: Praeger, 1974; and Todd, The "New Woman" Revised, pp. 70-83. Social Realism was the politicized branch of American Scene Realism--a type of painting that depicted the ordinary lives of average Americans without taking an overt social or political stance.
25	Cecile Whiting, Antifascism in American Art (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989): 38-39, 165.
26	Louis Lozowick, "Towards a Revolutionary Art," Art Front 2 (July-August, 1936): 12-13, as quoted in Patricia Hills, Social Concern and Urban Realism: American Painting of the 1930s, (Boston: Boston University Art Gallery, 1983): 17.
27	For an excellent discussion of the problems of representing gender in New Deal art, see Barbara Melosh, Engendering Culture: Manhood and Womanhood in New Deal Art and Theater (Washington, D. C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1991). Gatto's vision might have been inspired by the major mural cycle by Ernest Fiene, commissioned by the manufacturers and unions of the needle trades industries for the High School of Needle Trades at 24th Street and Eighth Avenue, and unveiled to major acclaim in 1940. One of two 65-feet murals "Victory of Light Over Darkness" showed the early history of the needle trades, culminating in a representation of the burning Asch building which brought attention to labor exploitation. Though we lack specific evidence that Gatto saw the mural, the disposition of the building, with fire spewing from the Green Street facade, is not unlike Gatto's subsequent image. See Lynda Hyman, Ernest Fiene: Art of the City, 1925-1955 (New York: ACA Galleries, May 2-23, 1981): figs. 11 and 12.
28	For an excellent discussion of the relation between Shahn's painting and photography see Laura Katzman, "The Politics of Media: Painting and Photography in the Art of Ben Shahn, American Art 7 (Winter 1993): 61-87, especially figures 19-20, revised and reprinted in Deborah Martin Kao, Laura Katzman, and Jenna Webster, Ben Shahn's New York: The Photography of Modern Times (Cambridge: Harvard University Museums and New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000): 97-117.
29	See, for example, Dorothy Dunbar Bromley, "Feminist--New Style," Harper's Monthly Magazine 15 (October 1927): 552-560; and Lillian Symes, "Still a Man's Game: Reflections of a Slightly Tired Feminist," Harper's Monthly Magazine 158 (May 1929): 678-686.
30	Nancy Cott, The Grounding of Modern Feminism (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1987): 263-264.
31	For a discussion of Miller and his methods see Todd, The "New Woman" Revised, pp. 76-80.
32	Vincent La Gambina in a letter to Jan Ramirez dated 9/11/89, on the occasion of the Museum of the City of New York's exhibition Within Bohemia's Borders.
33	George Chauncey, Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture, and the Making of the Gay Male World, 1890-1940 (New York: BasicBooks, a division of HarperCollins, 1994): 167. Lewis Erenberg points out that as Greenwich Village became a tourist center in the 1920s, Village entrepreneurs, themselves onetime bohemians, capitalized on a new social climate emphasizing personal impulses, and commercialized both the free love and homosexual aura that surrounded the Village to uptown entertainment seekers. Like Harlem, though for different reasons, it became a place to seek out the exotic "other." Lewis Erenberg, "Impresarios of Broadway Nightlife," in Inventing Times Square: Commerce and Culture at the Crossroads of the World, ed. William R. Taylor (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 1992): 168.
34	Interview with Dick Addison, in Chauncey, Gay New York, p. 168.
35	Brooks McNamara in "The Entertainment District at the End of the 1930s," in Inventing Times Square: Commerce and Culture at the Crossroads of the World, ed. William R. Taylor (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 1992): 179.
36	Margaret Knapp, "Introductory Essay," to section on Commerce and Entertainment, in Inventing Times Square, p. 130; and McNamara, "The Entertainment District at the End of the 1930s, p. 186.
37	William R. Taylor, "Broadway: The Place that Words Built," in Reinventing Times Square, p. 228.