High Bridge
1920
Samuel Halpert (1884-1930)
Oil on canvas, 33 X 39
Signed lower right: S. Halpert -20
Anonymous gift, 48.221

 

Samuel Halpert painted this view of High Bridge from the Bronx side of the Harlem River, thirty years after the bridge had ceased to serve as a conduit for New York's water supply. The conditions of the area around the Harlem River and the bridge, as Halpert recorded them in 1920, contrast sharply with those evidenced in an earlier, more bucolic view of High Bridge (see plate 20). A locomotive rushes west along the riverbank; a supporting tower for electric lines beside the railroad tracks echoes the older water tower at the far end of the bridge; and a tugboat scurries southeast toward Hell Gate.

Even greater changes befell the bridge after Halpert's 1920 painting. With the outbreak of World War I, the U.S. War Department and the Army Corps of Engineers had pressed for removal of the bridge because its narrow arches prevented the passage of large cargo ships and military vessels. The American Institute of Consulting Engineers, the New York Chapter of the American Institute of Architects, the American Society of Civil Engineers, the American Institute of Fine Arts, and preservation-minded citizens who opposed the destruction of such an icon jointly confronted the government agencies and managed to elicit a compromise. In 1927 two of the graceful arches were replaced with a steel arch, altering the structure's original symmetry but saving the bridge.¹

In the first decades of the twentieth century, the Bronx side of the Harlem River succumbed to railroad blight. The Manhattan cliff and High Bridge Park prevented similar urban decay on the Bridge's south side. In the painting, the figures traversing the viaduct, whose graceful design was taken from Roman aqueducts, signify the continued popularity of High Bridge's scenic walkway.

Samuel Halpert was born in Russia and brought to the United States as a young child. His early artistic talent was recognized and encouraged by teachers Jacob Epstein and Henry McBride at the Educational Alliance in New York City. After three years of traditional study at the National Academy of Design, he traveled to Paris to work with Leon Bonnat (1883 -1922) at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts. While in France, Halpert was strongly influenced by his exposure to the works of the French modernists, especially Paul Cézanne (1839 -1906) and Henri Matisse (1869 -1954), and by his colleagues Fernand Léger (1881 -1955) and Jean Metzinger (1883 -1957).² From 1905, which coincided with the first favorable review of the Fauvists' daring use of color, until 1911, Halpert participated in the annual Salon d'Automne in Paris, one of few Americans to be so recognized.³ His signature use of solid, thickly outlined block-like forms, as evidenced in this composition, reflects his Paris experiences.⁴

Notes:

  1  Sharon Reier, The Bridges of New York (New York: Quadrant Press, 1977), p. 73.

  2  In Samuel Halpert: A Conservative Modernist (Washington, D.C.: Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System, 1991), Diane Tepfer writes that Halpert, during his student years in Paris in the first decade of the twentieth century, fraternized with artists of both his own generation and the previous one. According to Tepfer, these included Patrick Henry, Robert and Sonia Delaunay, Man Ray, Max Weber, Albert Marquet, Henri Matisse, and Henri Rousseau, as well as Léger and Metzinger.

  3  Mary Anne Coley, "Introduction," in ibid., p. 2.

  4  Diane Tepfer, in ibid., pp. 5 -16.