Red Cross Parade, Fifth Avenue, at 41st Street

1918
Grace Ravlin (1873 -1956)
Oil on canvas, 251/4 X 30
Signed lower left: G. Ravlin 18
Gift of the Women's Association of the Brick Presbyterian Church, 56.90

 

Following the United States' entry into World War I in April 1917, parade activity along Manhattan's Fifth Avenue accelerated, demonstrating support for the American war effort overseas and the home-front activities being mobilized on its behalf. The avenue's status as one of the country's most impressive and important urban boulevards made it the ideal stage for such expressions of patriotic solidarity. Indeed, before President Woodrow Wilson's formal announcement of war, Fifth Avenue had been enlisted for a massive "preparedness" march held in May 1916. As host of four later "liberty loan spectacles" conceived to stimulate sales of government war bonds, the thoroughfare earned the honorific "Avenue of the Allies."

As local parades supporting the U.S. campaign increased in number and complexity, special committees, often headed by artists, orchestrated the programs of decorative bunting for Fifth Avenue and its side streets.¹ Painters on the New York City home front -including a disproportionate number of women, who were exempt from conscription -also produced colorful impressions of the show of patriotism exemplified by these civilian processions. Many, including Childe Hassam in his exuberant "flag" series, documented the American Red Cross parade held on Fifth Avenue in May 1918, the magnificent capstone event for a larger War Fund Week to solicit monies and volunteers for the nation's mounting military needs.

Led by President Wilson, the Red Cross parade attracted seventy-five thousand participants who filed down Fifth Avenue to urge replenishment of those accounts earmarked for the humanitarian relief organization lauded as "our second line of defense," whose stricken clientele now included American soldiers.² For the event, Fifth Avenue was dressed in Red Cross flags. Adding color were the distinctive American stars and stripes flying from buildings edging the avenue, joined by the smaller flags of the allied countries to symbolize the organization's international reach. Spectators crowded sidewalks, balconies, and bandstands, cheering most vigorously for the heroic fifteen thousand women marching the two-mile course -veterans of foreign field service, nurses awaiting assignment to the front, and auxiliary members and affiliate groups who performed invaluable clerical and morale-boosting duties stateside.

Illinois native Grace Ravlin, an artist based in Paris who stationed herself in the United States during the peak period of hostilities, spent part of 1918 working in New York City, where she observed the varied proceedings of War Fund Week and the emotional pageantry of the Red Cross parade. From an elevated prospect opposite the New York Public Library -the institution's flag pole and the flank of its marble facade are discernible in the upper right -looking toward the intersection of Fifth Avenue at West 40th Street, Ravlin depicts the ranks of white-uniformed volunteers being heralded by a unit of 150 women wearing scarlet scarves over their heads, who flowed south in a human red-cross formation.³ The gathered onlookers, more soberly attired, create a diagonal border offsetting the dramatic configuration of the moving red cross and white columns of marchers trailing it. The dominance of the vivid flags within Ravlin's composition accentuates their festive impact on the war-era cityscape; the bright lime-green foliage specifies the season as spring. Anchoring the corner immediately south of the library is the multi-story commercial building then occupied by the Knox Hat Company.

Ravlin, who had studied at the Art Institute in Chicago and with William Merritt Chase at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, traveled abroad for the first time in 1906 and, before the outbreak of World War I, made frequent trips through France, Belgium, Spain, Tunis, and Morocco. She remained devoted to the European continent and North Africa as landscape subjects throughout her subsequent career. In Paris, her preferred residence, Ravlin had sought out painter Simon-Menard Cour for individual training, exhibited with the Peintres Orientalists Français, and became an associate of the Société Nationale des Beaux-Arts. She also achieved gratifying recognition of her abilities from the French art press, which was impressed by her inclusion in select salon exhibitions and by the French government's purchase of five of her sunlit and decorative plein-air canvases, one acquired for the Luxembourg Museum in Paris. In the United States, soon after painting Red Cross Parade, Ravlin became personally engaged in New York City's Red Cross Corps. She signed on for nurse's-aide training and was issued orders in December 1918 to proceed to Paris for dispatch to a Red Cross canteen assisting troops returning home after the armistice.⁴ Her life after the war remained international in orientation, although she devoted greater lengths of time to painting in the United States, particularly in the southwest and near Cape Ann, Massachusetts. In 1921 Ravlin returned to Manhattan, intermittently painting New York City scenes until she left for Mexico City in 1925. Critics often compared the results to modern French Post-Impressionist landscapes, praising her "sprightly eye," fresh use of color, and expressive, fluid brushwork. "Were it not for certain familiar landmarks, we might think some of her New York street scenes French parks or boulevards," observed the Brooklyn Daily Eagle, which also remarked on the artist's "absorption" of the "dry, staccato touch which is frequently used in France."⁵ In January 1924 a selection of these cityscapes were featured at the MacBeth Galleries together with recent paintings by the inimitable urban realist Robert Henri. This incongruous aesthetic pairing worked to Ravlin's disadvantage, but a consensus prevailed that her compositions had a notable tempo, and that her manipulation of viewpoint and liberties of palette were pleasing, if not entirely innovative. One painting dated 1922, representing a military parade at the junction of 42nd Street and Fifth Avenue but probably conceived in a serial relationship to the earlier Red Cross Parade, drew favorable comments about Ravlin's "flair for processions" and her ability to re-create their sense of stirring movement and color.⁶

Notes:

  1  A summary of the involvement of artists in New York City's World War I parades, as members of special decorating committees and as visual recorders of these events, is offered by Ilene Susan Fort in "The Flag Paintings of Childe Hassam," Magazine Antiques 133, no. 4 (April 1988): 876 -887.

  2  Henry P. Davison, a leading officer in New York's Red Cross organization, whetted interest in the parade and fund drive by reminding the public, "Contributors to the Red Cross War Fund cannot give too much consideration to the fact that the Red Cross at the front is . . . holding the second line of defense by keeping up the morale and hopes of the people of France and Italy . . . As an emergency force the Red Cross is resolutely holding the second line, and will continue to stand fast until the war is over." As quoted in "The Red Cross, the Second Line of Defense," New York Times, May 20, 1918.

  3  "A human red cross, composed of 150 women, dressed in white and wearing red scarves over their heads, struck the keynote of the demonstration and evoked uniform cheers all the way down the line." As reported in "President Leads Red Cross Parade," New York Times, May 19, 1918.

  4  The nurses' drive mobilized by the New York chapter of the Red Cross was especially effective, with a measurable increase in volunteer enrollments beginning in June 1918. Materials related to Ravlin's tour of service in the Red Cross reserve -including dated family correspondence, a copy of her "ordre de mission" from American Expeditionary Forces Headquarters dated December 28, 1918, and a photograph of Ravlin dressed in her nurse's-aide uniform -are owned by Ravlin's grand-niece Alta Ann Morris, who has done extensive research on Grace Ravlin's career (copies in Museum Archives are courtesy of Ms. Morris). In a letter to her sister Alta written from her apartment at 31 West 47th Street and dated October 26, 1918, Ravlin describes the routine and rigors of her training in a local children's hospital and mentions her expectation of shipping out to the European front.

  5  Brooklyn Daily Eagle, January 13, 1924.

  6  Excerpts of six locally published reviews of Ravlin's exhibit with Robert Henri at the Macbeth Galleries in January, 1924, are contained in the Museum Archives. About her pairing with Henri, a critic for the New York World wrote on January 6, 1924: "They are so incongruous that the combination is disconcerting. They have nothing in common in aims and they are violently antagonistic in color."