Suburbia #5 (Flushing, Queens)
c. 1945
Maurice Sievan (1898 -1981)
Oil on canvas, 22 X 28
Signed lower right and on verso: Sievan
Gift of Carolyn and Howard A. Sievan, 92.84

 

In 1940 painter Maurice Sievan and his wife, Lee Culik Sievan (1907 -1990), an emerging photographer, moved from a Manhattan apartment into a new single-family home located in Flushing, Queens. The transition introduced Sievan to a pictorial theme that would preoccupy him for more than a decade: the uncelebrated landscapes of this outlying residential borough of New York City, typified by tree-lined streets, low-rise housing, nondescript shopping areas, and ubiquitous automobile traffic. These moody and curiously depopulated pictures were the outcome of sketches and occasional photographs recorded by the couple from a battered Chevrolet that Sievan had improvised as a mobile studio. Suburbia #5, an unspecified Flushing streetscape dating from the mid-1940s, bears out the reputation -albeit unsought -that Sievan would acquire as the "poet laureate of suburbia."¹

  Sievan's Expressionist landscapes represented only one chapter in a long career marked by diverse stylistic adventures.² Arriving in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, from the Ukraine in 1906, Sievan became a U.S. citizen in 1913, the same year he left school for an apprentice job with a local lithographer. He subsequently took courses at the National Academy of Design, studying under the realist painter Leon Kroll. Following a brief tour with the merchant marines during World War I, he resumed evening studies at the Art Students League and the National Academy of Design while working by day as a commercial illustrator.

During his tenure as a "self-supervised" easel painter with the WPA's Federal Art Project, Sievan began to produce deft painterly sketches of downtown Manhattan and other vistas familiar from his successive apartment rentals in Greenwich Village and Brooklyn. During the war years Sievan began teaching in order to supplement his earnings from painting. Although the Greater New York area continued as the wellspring of his quietly inventive cityscapes, Sievan also captured views of Provincetown, the Massachusetts artists' colony he frequented during the summer. By 1956 he had shifted to wholly imaginary landscapes inspired by his first observations of earth from an airplane. Paralleling this output was a series of darker allegorical paintings, interpreted by some as Sievan's existentialist meditations about the horror of the Holocaust and the onset of the Atomic Age. Semi-abstract figural studies, effusing a rough and haunting vitality, preoccupied his later years.

Notes:

  1  See Emily Genauer, "This Week in Art: Sievan Exhibit," New York World Telegram, March 17, 1945.

  2  Ibid. For a fuller treatment of Sievan's artistic development and exhibition history, see Francis V. O'Connor, "Maurice Sievan (1898 -1981), an Artist of the New York School," in Creative Lives: New York Paintings and Photographs by Maurice and Lee Sievan (New York: Museum of the City of New York, distributed by the University Press of New England, 1997), pp. 33 -81