Night View, St. Patrick's Cathedral

(also exhibited as St. Patrick's Cathedral), 1956
Ernest Fiene (1894 -1965)
Oil on canvas, 35 7/8 X 24 1/8
Signed lower right: E. Fiene. 56.
The Robert R. Preato Collection, 91.76.4

 

Critics have grouped the late urban scenes of painter Ernest Fiene with a larger tide of haunting, hard-edged portraits of New York City that rose briefly to public notice after World War II. This body of work has been variously interpreted as pictorializing the inhumanity lurking behind Western civilization's facade, which the impersonal, steel-cage qualities of modern American cities seemed to epitomize, or as expressing the collective loss sensed by figurative artists like Fiene as they contemplated the dark shadow that Abstract Expressionism was casting on their timeless, representational vision. When interviewed in 1956 about the impact of such upstart styles on his own meticulous craftsmanship, Fiene, whose forty-four-year career had remained anchored to realism, surprised many by crediting non-objective art for its "cleansing effect" on painting: "It has made us more aware of color," he reflected. "It has cleared a certain mugginess out of art."¹

Dating from that same year, Night View, St. Patrick's Cathedral reflects Fiene's willingness to return to a familiar subject -the built forms of midtown Manhattan -with eyes adjusted to modernist influences, which he grafted onto his own system of depicting New York.² Fiene borrowed from painters like Charles Sheeler the Precisionist's cool, distilled aesthetic as applied to the cityscape. His intense palette and his preference for opaque cerulean shades probably reflect his combined studies of New York's younger abstract artists, the early twentieth-century Fauves, and Italian primitive painters, whose frescoes he had researched during a trip to Florence as a Guggenheim fellow.

The view, one of a series of New York nocturnes by the artist, synthesizes the architectural medley of Fifth Avenue near East 54th Street into a deceptively simple composition. On one level, the scene celebrates New York's postwar prosperity, when a profusion of department stores, commercial high-rises, social clubs, and churches jostled for space in the congested blocks of fashionable "Midmanhattan," the ascending hub of metropolitan culture, consumerism, and executive clout.³ Between 1946 and 1957, a building boom had manufactured 36 million square feet of new office space with another 5 million on the planning boards, much of it concentrated from Third to Sixth Avenues between 34th and 59th Streets.

Having maintained a studio on East 55th Street in the 1940s, Fiene was well acquainted with the area's striking skyline. The austere rectangle visible at left, with stepped-back upper stories, is Best and Company, the venerable women's and girls' clothing retailer that had moved its flagship store to Fifth Avenue and 51st Street in 1947. At center, rising like a ghost, is the painting's namesake cathedral. Its Gothic spires and richly carved exterior appear dwarfed by the anonymous glass monolith towering behind the church, reflecting a night sky of deep indigo. The truncated silhouette of the nine-story DePinna Company (at far right), a retail operation styled like a Venetian palazzo, faces it across Fifth Avenue at the southwest corner of 52nd Street. Bordering the sidewalk, a long blue construction wall evokes New York City's ceaseless "creative destruction" -the cyclical outbursts of demolition and new construction sanctioned in the name of Progress. A modern office building known as 666 Fifth Avenue, designed by Caron and Lundin, would rise at the site in 1957.

Fiene, born in Germany, became a naturalized citizen of the United States in 1927, having spent the previous fifteen years studying art at various New York institutions and building his reputation as a painter of American scenes. A fixture on the faculty of the Art Students League, he was also a prolific artist with an oeuvre spanning many media, from etchings to frescoes. "He had an acute eye for the telling details of landscape and an equal perception of the pointless details that should be eliminated," one critic reflected in Fiene's obituary. "He shifted the ordinary world into a harmonious pattern, creating a world that was not so much idealized as purified."⁴

Notes:

  1  Ernest Fiene, quoted in "A Painter Questions Emphasis on Novelty in Modern Art," Kansas City (Mo.) Star, May 18, 1956.

  2  This painting was one of nineteen works by Fiene, most representing recent Manhattan night scenes, that were featured in a one-man exhibition at Midtown Galleries on East 57th Street, January 27 -February 21, 1959.

  3  The term 'Midmanhattan' enjoyed a passing vogue in the 1950s. For a survey of the construction centered in the area during the building-boom years concurrent with Fiene's painting, see Midmanhattan, Portrait 1957 (New York: Bank of New York, 1957).

  4  Quoted in "Ernest Fiene, 70, Realist Painter," New York Times, August 11, 1965. For an overview of Fiene's career before his production of this painting, see Lynda Hyman, Ernest Fiene, Art of the City, 1925 -1955, exhibition catalogue (New York: ACA Galleries, 1981). The Museum Archives contain extensive clippings of press notices, short biographies prepared for Who's Who in American Art and for various gallery shows, obituary notices, and information about Fiene's larger New York City oeuvre.