GRIT AND GRIDS

An appetite for the real, the pragmatic and the scientifically verifiable had long been resident in 19th century America. But it was brought to a peak in the wake of the Civil War. The journalistic eye was equal, as a transmitter of (sometimes unbearable) reality, to that of the novelist or poet; the camera replaced the draftsman in reportage. This was new. American public culture was now driven by technique–the skills that built bridges and docks and railroads, the scientific laws that underwrote Americans’ conquest of their environment. There was no ghost in the machine, only the machine itself.

As the index of social reality shifted from the farm and the village to the impacted, simmering cities, a distinct visual aesthetic was bound to rise from American utilitarianism. It showed itself earliest–and most dramatically–in the art where science, material and common social needs intersected: architecture. Its great expression was the iron grid, which begat the skyscraper. The technology of cast-iron joists and columns as the skeleton of a multistory building had come from Europe, but it mutated and ramified in the U.S., especially in New York City. There early architects like Daniel Badger (1806-84) popularized it and crossed it with mass production.

The master image of America’s industrial potential, however, was the Brooklyn Bridge, completed in 1883. Designed by John Roebling and his son Washington Roebling, built by thousands of workers laboring under perilous and sacrificial conditions on the high cables or underwater in the caissons, it was the greatest engineering feat of 19th century America and, with a central span of 1,595 ft., by far the longest suspension bridge in the world. Its soaring Gothic-arched towers also predicted the vertical city, whose chief element–the high, steel-framed palazzo block–had been adumbrated by Badger but reached its first maturity outside New York in the 1890s, in the buildings of Louis Sullivan and others.

Sullivan (1856-1924) was America’s first great modern architect. It’s a curious twist of fate that, having written hundreds of thousands of words about architecture, he should be known to most people today by one phrase: “Form follows function.” It became the motto of all functionalist designers, but it doesn’t represent Sullivan’s own ideas at all. He wasn’t antidecoration. He was, rather, one of the greatest designers of decorative detail, in an age that excelled in it. But he insisted on the primacy of the main masses. Both this and the love of inventive detail would form the youthful imagination of his protege, the cranky, overbearing genius who remains the outstanding American architect of the 20th century, Frank Lloyd Wright.

The art of painting does not go in tandem with those of architecture and engineering. Yet when painting aspires to a “scientific” analysis of things in sight, when the ego of the artist recedes behind the task of examination, one can at least speak of parallels. The American Realist generation of the turn of the century would not have disagreed. One of them was Thomas Anshutz (1851-1912), best known for his small factory scene, The Ironworkers’ Noontime, 1880. It’s a piercing image of American youth and strength, feeling its new muscle (literally) in the post-Civil War industrial surge.

This emphasis on the masculine reacted to what many Americans from the 1880s on saw as a crisis in their culture. America’s business environment was abundant, booming and young. But to Realist artists and writers, its art and literature looked pious, neurasthenic and “feminized.” Younger artists such as Robert Henri, John Sloan and George Luks sought vitality in what had once been called the “lower depths” of New York City. They were nicknamed the Ashcan School, and the most bravura performer among them, for a time, was George Bellows (1882-1925). Bellows’ most memorable images were his fiercely macho boxing scenes, which for brutal energy outstripped anything else in American art in the 1900s.

Edward Hopper (1882-1967) was the quintessential Realist painter of 20th century America, and although not all his work was based on the city–some of the most beautiful Hoppers are of rural and coastal scenes–he “got” a particular city mood as no other painter has. He liked painting seediness and abandonment. He saw it as a peculiarly American condition, the downside of excessive hope. More abstract than the Ashcan painters, he made his apartments, lobbies and cafes into space frames: abstraction was a sign for not belonging. Probably the most dystopian American images of modernity, though, were painted by a man who meant no criticism of it: Charles Sheeler (1883-1965), with his “Precisionist” industrial scenes. Culture, for Sheeler, had colonized all the space in the imagination that nature once claimed. The world of Thomas Cole was finally concreted over.

Apart from Hopper, the outstanding American painter of urban experience in the 1930s and ’40s was a journalist’s son and (like Hopper) a pupil of Robert Henri’s: Stuart Davis (1894-1964). He defined the role of the artist as “a cool Spectator-Reporter at an Arena of Hot Events.” Davis found visual equivalents to that greatest of American musical forms–which was also the greatest of African-American cultural achievements–jazz. Another artist who achieved such a synthesis was Romare Bearden (1912-88), who did it from within and delineated a kind of city-within-a-city, Harlem. Bearden tried to “establish a world through art in which the validity of my Negro experience could live and make its own logic.” He was no cultural separatist–African masks and Matisse odalisques were of equal value to him–and his collages have the same direct beauty and inventive toughness as the writings of Ralph Ellison, in their common task of figuring and narrating the black experience of the American city.