Sunday, July 23, 2017

19th and 20th Century Prints and Paintings of East River Bridges: Brooklyn Bridge

There are thousands of highly abstract, moodily expressionistic, and crisply realistic paintings of the Brooklyn Bridge. I selected a few paintings that appealed to me, because of their umber hues and contemplative mood, for this week's blog on the Brooklyn Bridge. The watercolor from 1955 (shown above) is recognizable as the Brooklyn Bridge because of the tall Gothic arches. Its recognizable as a work by Lyonel Feininger because the image is representational although simplified to a few geometric shapes.
The Brooklyn Bridge is less recognizable in the 1915 painting (shown above) by the Cubist artist Albert Gliezes. He seems to be riffing on the openings in the bridge towers, the diagonals of the cables, and on the many tall buildings that surround the bridge.
An evocative painting by the contemporary artist Ed Little seems to be spiritual in nature with the dark colors of the earth ascending to the church-like spires of the bridge, and the bright, ethereal colors of the sky.
Another contemporary artist, Lazarus Nazario juxtaposed a gardenia blossom next to the Brooklyn Bridge. Perhaps she wants us to contemplate the similarities and differences between two beautiful objects. Maybe she's showing us that the bridge is important because it carries us to the people we love, symbolized by the flower.
The last painting (by Wyoming native Tom Loepp) is of the Brooklyn and Manhattan Bridges from the tragic vantage point of the World Trade Center.

No comments: