Daily post 13 Sep 2006 07:29 am
Brooklyn bridges
– At first I noticed the number of images of the Brooklyn Bridge that appeared in the work of some artists that I respected enormously:
Georgia O’Keefe, Joseph Stella, John Marin, and Albert Gleizes among others.
It tooktime for me to realize that this was part of a competition held to honor the bridge, and the images that were created as a result were extraordinary.
Nocturne 1913 – a photo by the extraordinary Karl Struss)
I have always been fascinated with the futurist artists, and, as a result, was attracted to Joseph Stella‘s work. He, among other artists, is most closely associated with the Brooklyn Bridge. There are quite a few paintings and drawings and preparatory sketches he’d created of the bridge. They dominate the one book on his work & life that I own.
In fact there is one interesting bit of writing he’d done to describe the experience of painting right on the bridge. The piece is, itself, almost futurist:
To realize this towering imperative vision in all its integral possibilities [he wrote] I lived days of anxiety, torture, and delight alike, trembling all over with emotion as those railing[s] in the midst of the bridge vibrating at the continuous passage of the trains. I appealed for help to the soaring verse of Walt Whitman and to the fiery Poe’s plasticity. Upon the swarming darkness of the night, I rung all the bells of alarm with the blaze of electricity scattered in lightnings down the oblique cables, the dynamic pillars of my composition, and to render more pungent the mystery of the metallic apparition, through the green and red glare of the signals I excavated here and there caves as subterranean passages to infernal recesses.
A bit emotional, perhaps, but he tries desperately to describe his emotions which are articulated so well in the paintings.
(Click on any image to enlarge.)
