Coney Island Streetscape
1992
Roger Bultot (b. 1952)
Oil on linen, 18 X 24
Signed on verso, centered: Roger Bultot "3/22/92 (Coney Island)" 1992 oil/linen © 1992
Gift of Harvey Schulman, 94.100

 

At the twentieth century's outset, the neighborhood surrounding Coney Island began its residential growth spurt. In the years before World War I, affluent New Yorkers built large mansions along Ocean Parkway, close to the still-unspoiled beachfront. After the completion of the Brooklyn-Manhattan Transit Company's extension to Coney Island, a surge of apartment-house construction attracted immigrants, particularly Italians and Jews, in search of low rents, job opportunities, and proximity to the fresh ocean air. In the 1920s and 1930s modest, low-cost, single-family summer bungalows proliferated. New York's housing shortage after World War II spurred the conversion of many such dwellings to year-round residences. Later, during the 1960s, some of the bungalows at the western end of Coney Island were demolished to make way for publicly financed high-rise housing projects.¹ This view of the corner of Brighton Street and Oceanview Avenue features some of the residences that survived the 1960s razing. Roger Bultot's observations, based on extensive location photography, note keeping, and frequent return trips to interesting sites, have been translated into a sharply delineated, Photorealist painting.

A native of Woonsocket, Rhode Island, Roger Bultot earned his undergraduate degree in art education from Rhode Island College and a Master of Arts in studio art from New York University. In the 1970s Bultot began to search out subject matter in the blue-collar residential neighborhoods peppered throughout Brooklyn, Queens, and the Bronx. Bultot has described his working method as a self-conscious attempt "to select buildings and places that are not immediately recognizable but are 'New York' in feeling and emotive of each unique area."² Like many other emerging urban-scene painters, he chooses to bypass the typical tourist-saturated Manhattan sites in favor of subjects drawn from the city's perimeters.

Notes:

  1  Ellen M. Snyder-Grenier, Brooklyn! An Illustrated History (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1996), p. 197.

  2  Artist's letter, dated May 6, 1995, Museum Archives.