Bryant Park
1914
Theresa Bernstein (b. 1895)
Oil on canvas, 21 X 17 1/8
Signed lower left: T. Bernstein, 14
The Robert R. Preato Collection, 91.76.1

 

Although a product of the artist's early career, Bryant Park exhibits the rapid, fluid brushwork, innovative color play, and fresh sensations of direct optical encounter that earned Theresa Bernstein praise in 1919 as "a woman painter who paints like a man."¹ Ill-considered as that tribute seems today, the comparison acknowledged her solid footing as a member of the Ash Can School of urban realists whose work was garnering critical esteem in the second decade of the century and from whom Bernstein crafted her own variant of a "virile" sensibility to chronicle contemporary New York on canvas. Never a formal student of Robert Henri, she nonetheless embraced his philosophy of depicting the city's everyday drama "with guts," heeding his advice as well to preserve the "vivacity of your first impression."²

Bernstein brought the sum of her academic training and visual knowledge of art to the cityscapes she began to generate in the aftermath of the 1913 Armory Show, which seemed again to disorient modern painting only five years after the "Eight" had made their initial splash in New York's art world. Born in Philadelphia to cultured, middle-class immigrant parents, Bernstein studied at the Philadelphia School of Design for Women, from which she graduated in 1911 with an award for general achievement. From Daniel Garber, her most memorable teacher, she carried forward a delight in plein-air landscape painting and flirtations with startling color contrasts and bright accents of light. After a brief enrollment at the Art Students League in New York, where she took life and portraiture classes with William Merritt Chase, she traveled for a second time to Europe with her mother, her first trip abroad having been made in 1905. Exposed during both tours to the latest adventures in modernism being investigated in these foreign art capitals, Bernstein was strongly impressed on this 1912 visit by the work of Franz Marc, Edvard Munch, and Wassily Kandinsky, admiring their anti-naturalistic palette and novel departures from other eye-pleasing painting conventions. She returned to New York emboldened in her ambition to record the larger, expressive power of the city, rather than to dilute that visual confrontation into finely tuned details.³ Bernstein gravitated to subjects where urban spaces fostered the intersection of citizens from all strata of New York society: scenes commonplace to the waterfront, streets, trolleys, and centers of public recreation ranging from theater lobbies to Coney Island. Bryant Park, a verdant six-acre enclave stretching west behind the newly completed main branch of the New York Public Library at Fifth Avenue between 40th and 42nd Streets, offered Bernstein the double virtues of a distinctive setting in which to test her accumulating ideas about painting and a guaranteed cross section of New Yorkers seeking air, light, and company.

In 1914 the park, named in honor of poet, newspaper editor, and parks advocate William Cullen Bryant, was enjoying a relatively recent makeover prompted by the library's opening in 1911, with landscaping that featured crisscrossing paths in the English style. It occupied the site of the former Croton distributing reservoir, drained in the 1890s, and had once accommodated the Crystal Palace, the mid-century exposition hall ruined in a flash fire in 1858. With efficient brushstrokes that resist individual detailing, Bernstein suggests the varied populace who animate the park: groups of men locked in conversation, some sailors on shore leave relaxing on benches, and a friendly twosome wearing the latest in ladies' millinery shown chatting in the picture's lower foreground. The amiable mood seems to confirm the popular allusion to Bryant Park as midtown's green "living room."

Bisecting the mid-horizon is the armature of the Sixth Avenue El. Behind it loom the geometric silhouettes of the multi-story buildings framing the park view. Bernstein, revealing the adventurous color sense she often brought to her cityscape studies, startles the eye with splashes of chartreuse-toned lawn and foliage and a vivid salmon sky portending twilight's onset. Showing her independence from customary landscape formulas, she intrudes the dark trunk and sinuous branches of a plane tree into the middle of the scene, causing viewers to oscillate their attention between its assertive and curious forked shape, and the balance of compositional elements that together establish its narrative context.

Bryant Park -one of several paintings by the artist in the Museum's collection -belongs to a group of city vignettes dating from 1912 to 1919 that attracted notice to Bernstein as a vigorous new talent on the rise in New York.⁴ She has lived in the city, working from a studio on the Upper West Side, for eight decades since. While retaining an interest in urban genre scenes, she expanded her subject repertoire in later years to include musical personalities and events (many informed by the rhythms of jazz) and the seacoast area around Gloucester, Massachusetts, where she summered with her husband, the artist William Meyerowitz (1887 -1981). As of 2000, well past her centennial, she was still dividing her time between the city and Gloucester and granting occasional interviews about her career as a painter.

Notes:

  1  W. H. de B. Nelson, "Theresa F. Bernstein," International Studio (February 1919): xcviii. That same year, Bernstein held her first solo exhibition at the Milch Galleries in New York, causing another critic to remark on her masculine sensibility as a painter: "It is with a man's vision that this artist looks at her subjects. . . . Then having found what she wants, it is with a man's vigor that she gets it down to stay." See Frederick James Gregg, "Theresa Bernstein: A Realist in the Old Sense of the Word," New York Herald, November 2, 1919.

  2  "American Art Notes," Gallery (Spring 1985): 2; and Charles Movalli, "A Conversation with William Meyerowitz and Theresa Bernstein," American Artist (January 1980): 4.

  3  The influences that converged to shape Bernstein's approach to painting, and the maturation of her style in her later career, are discussed in catalogue essays by Michele Cohen in Echoes of New York: The Paintings of Theresa Bernstein (New York: Museum of the City of New York, 1990); Cynthia H. Sanford in Theresa Bernstein; A Seventy-Year Retrospective (New York: Joan Whalen Fine Art, 1998), and Cassandra Langer in The Robert R. Preato Collection of New York City Paintings and Drawings (New York: Museum of the City of New York, 1994).

  4  In 1914 Bernstein's Open Air Show -inspired by the novel experience of attending a moving picture presented out of doors -was selected for exhibition at the prestigious Chicago Art Institute and purchased by the British art collector John Lane, publisher of International Studio. In 1919 it was this influential journal that ran a feature article commending Bernstein's "assurance and virility" as a painter, terming her a "true product of American precepts and ideals" (Nelson, "Theresa F. Bernstein").