UNDERGROUND
ART, 1925-1950:
A Centennial Celebration of
the New York City Subway
Friday, Oct. 1 through Thursday, Nov. 4, 2004
In celebration of the city-wide centennial of the New York subway in October 2004, the Sidney Mishkin Gallery will showcase Underground Art, 1925-1950: A Centennial Celebration of the New York City Subway. More than a mode of transportation, the subway dramatically changed the pace and quality of life in New York City. It altered perceptions of time and space in the urban environment and shifted the boundaries between people of varying ethnicities, races and classes.
Underground Art, 1925-1950 will include 35
paintings, prints and photographs by artists ranging from
John Sloan to Mark Rothko to Jacob Lawrence. The exhibition
will be on view at the Mishkin Gallery from Oct. 1 through
Nov. 4, 2004. Opening reception on Thursday, Sept. 30, 6 to
8 pm.
Anticipated with excitement and anxiety, the subway teased
the imagination and shifted public perception of what constituted
functional urban space. Was the underground the right solution
to the city’s transit woes? Would one really be able
to travel “from City Hall to Harlem in Fifteen Minutes,”
as one slogan proclaimed? Might one be electrocuted or asphyxiated
along the way? Once in use, rumbling and careening beneath
the city, it was prized and admired, feared and despised.
By the mid-1920s, the subway was more crowded than ever before,
dubbed “the most awful ride in the world” by Laurence
Bell in the American Mercury in 1938. At the same
time, the subway emerged as a popular subject among artists.
A key theme was the integrating effect of the subway on the
city. Subway expansion, completed between the mid-1920s and
1940s, created New York’s “subway suburbs.”
Connecting these racial, religious and ethnic communities,
the subway was one of the most densely and diversely populated
spaces in the world. The subway was the melting pot.
This exhibition features a broad range of artists and images.
Among the earliest subway scenes, John Sloan’s etching
Subway Stairs of 1926 features a compositional component
favored by many artists, the staircase. Slightly mischievous
in intent, Sloan wrote: “In modern times incoming trains
cause updrafts in the subway entrances. Getting on an omnibus
in the hoopskirt was exciting in grandmother’s day.”
Mark Rothko produced several images of the subway between
1935 and 1941, prior to his conversion to abstract expressionism.
Included in this exhibition is one of his earliest, Subway
(1935). This painting has not been seen since it was shown
in the first exhibition of “The Ten” at the Montross
Gallery in 1935. In his modernist interpretation of the subject,
Subway, (1938), Jacob Lawrence uses an unusual asymmetrical
composition, flattening and framing three African-American
figures within a vibrant, brightly colored subway car.
Depictions of the subway between 1925 and 1950 reveal dualities
between public and private space, freedom and restraint, and
the machine and the body. These contrasts, and the tensions
they display, are timeless, as relevant today as they were
a century ago.
This exhibition was curated by Tracy Schpero Fitzpatrick.
The catalogue was supported in part by the Graham Foundation
for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts. Additional funding
was provided by the Baruch College Fund.
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The Sidney Mishkin Gallery regularly presents small, museum-quality
exhibitions that highlight innovative scholarship, significant
artists and multicultural perspectives. Gallery hours are
Monday-Friday, Noon to 5 pm; Thursday, Noon to 7 pm. All shows
at the Mishkin Gallery are free and open to the public.
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