Exhibiting the Nonexistent

An exhibition about the Subject of the Artist School seems like it would be a rather straightforward task: display some advertisements or invitations that were used to promote the evening lectures, include some edited lecture notes compiled by the founding members and guest speakers, and choose some photographs that show the attendees. However, after combing through the archives of New York City’s art museums that own works by the schools founders — David Hare, William Baziotes, Robert Motherwell, Mark Rothko and Barnett Newman — and after looking through the papers compiled by these artist’s estates, there is a possibility no physical materials were ever produced during the year of 1948-1949 when the school was in operation. Or, if physical materials were produced, they no longer exist. Very few materials documenting Studio 35 (what the Subject of the Artist School was renamed when New York University acquired the 35 West 8^th Street space in 1949) remain. An invitation to one of Studio 35’s lectures is housed in the Louise Bourgeois Archive, while the Dedalus Foundation has a few photographs taken by Aaron Siskind and Max Yavno, photographers who happened to capture the discussions of the school while trying to document the downtown arts scene more generally. A discussion between Julia Link Haifley and artist Grace Hartigan  in 2008, which was later transcribed for the Archives of American Art, at least reveals a few details about the otherwise mysterious Studio 35, including the fact members had to be voted in to the school in order to enjoy the conversations and cheap steak dinners hosted on Friday nights. This likely means no advertisements were ever produced for Studio 35 since members and attendees likely heard about the lectures through word of mouth, when they attended a gallery show or frequented a local hangout like Cedar Bar Tavern. Furthermore, the school was discussion-based. They were not a studio school that produced work nor an exhibition space that would have had a greater chance of being documented.

The transition of the Subject of the Artist School to Studio 35 is one worthy of scholarly research not only due to the well-known names attached to the venture, but also because the school was founded at a pivotal moment in history when the art capital shifted from Paris to New York after World War II.  The founders were among a collective of artists who learned from the stylistic traditions of the expatriates who relocated to New York after the war but were determined to push the medium of painting forward into new territory. The art produced by these artists transitioned from work rooted in Surrealism to new work that would later become recognized as Abstract expressionism. Although the doors of the Subject of the Artist School and Studio 35 did not remain open for long, the conversations that occurred likely influenced the signature styles of the founders and the rise of one of the most important American art movements.

Barnett Newman’s Concord, 1948, which displays the artist’s signature vertical “zips.” Courtesy of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

The challenge becomes how to document the school’s part in this crucial moment in American history when there are few resources to work with. Even when art historians organize exhibitions about performance art, conceptual art, land art or art work that has deteriorated due to the unconventional materials from which it was originally constructed, these professionals often have documentation to display. In the case of my project, I have a few poor photographs and some oral histories, footnotes, invitations and wrinkled letters that mention the mere existence of the school. In order to produce an online exhibition that is both visually interesting and engaging for a general audience, I have had to rely on short gallery advertisements, excepts from experimental magazines like The Tiger’s Eye and VVV magazine, as well as images of artwork produced by the founders during this time period. For my exhibition I will also build my own visual tools, both maps and timelines, to make the context more manageable, especially since there are multiple founders showing at different galleries, producing different works and contributing to different publications simultaneously. As I continue my research in hope of filling a whole in the Greenwich Village Blog still lacking in entries from the 1940s and hope to fill a hole within the art historical literature, I am very much open to suggestions on how to find additional resources and how to go about the final display of my materials.

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From Henry James to the Triangle Fire: A Century at 27 Washington Place

Washington Place has a distinctly nostalgic feel.  The block between Washington Square East and Greene Street is probably the closest New York University comes to resembling a suburban college campus, with violet and white flags flying on both sides of the street, and the greenery of Washington Square Park as a backdrop.  Many passersby are doubtless reminded of their own college days.  But the block also hints at something older.  The cobblestones that still pave Greene Street, and the architectural details of buildings saved by the Greenwich Village historic preservation movement, transport visitors back to the nineteenth century.  Conveniently, this is when the story of 27 Washington Place begins.

In 1842, Henry James, Sr. purchased a townhouse at 27 Washington Place.*  The birth of his first child, William, on January 11th of that year may have inspired him to find a more permanent home for his family.  However, James had rented in the neighborhood for several years.  He occupied a bachelor’s apartment in the University Building on Washington Square East in 1838, and then—with his new wife, Mary Robertson Walsh—moved to 2 Washington Place.  He knew firsthand that it was a good place for a well-to-do family to settle in New York City.  The former potter’s field at Washington Square had been transformed into Washington Parade Ground, a military parade ground that also served as a public park, in 1828.  Local residents strolled and children played there.  “The Row” of Greek Revival-style homes recently built along Washington Square North was one of the most fashionable addresses in the city.  Its wealthy residents included Mary’s family, in whose home Henry and Mary were wed in 1840. The closeness of 27 Washington Place to the studious atmosphere of the University Building may have also attracted Henry.  (The two buildings were only separated by one house, 29 Washington Place.)  He was a theologian who took his work quite seriously.  Perhaps he had enjoyed the university’s community of scholars and intellectuals as a resident, and hoped to continue to participate in it as a neighbor.

Detail from an engraving of the University Building by Robert Hinshelwood, with 27 Washington Place visible behind it.

Henry’s second child, Henry James, Jr., was born at 27 Washington Place on April 15, 1843.  Like many of his siblings, he followed his father’s intellectual bent.  Henry James, Jr. would become one of the most important Realist writers of the nineteenth century.  He spent most of his adult life in Europe, but looked fondly upon his childhood home from a distance.  His memories of his grandmother’s house on the Row inspired his short novel Washington Square, published in 1880.  Finally, in 1904, Henry James, Jr. returned to Washington Square.  He was not pleased with the changes that he found.  He shared his resentment in The American Scene: 

“The gray and more or less hallowed University Building—wasn’t it somehow with a desperate bravery, both castellated and gabled—has vanished from the earth and vanished with it the two or three adjacent houses, of which the birthplace was one. This was the snub for the complacency of the retrospect, that, whereas the inner sense had positively erected there for its private contemplation a commemorative mural tablet, the very wall that should have borne this inscription had been smashed as for demonstration that tablets, in New York, are unthinkable…but that we have only to reflect an instant to see any such form of civic piety inevitably and for ever absent.”

During Henry James’ decades in Europe, New York City expanded northward, and the neighborhood around Washington Square lost its suburban character.  The wealthy and fashionable residents of the Row began to move away.  Meanwhile, many of the immigrants who had fled famine, political and economic strife, and religious persecution in Europe constructed their own communities in neighboring areas of Greenwich Village.  Residential buildings around Washington Square were demolished or transformed into commercial buildings in which workers toiled for long hours at low wages.  Other buildings were subdivided into cramped tenement housing.  Even the houses on the Row became multi-family dwellings in the 1880s.

27 Washington Place was not immune from this change.  By 1894 Joseph J. Asch had acquired it, along with 23, 25, and 29 Washington Place.  Asch demolished the houses in 1900, four years before Henry James’ return from Europe, to make way for a ten-story commercial building.  When the Asch Building was complete, a pair of business partners named Max Blanck and Isaac Harris moved their factory to its eighth floor.  As Henry James glared up at the building that had usurped his birthplace, hundreds of immigrant laborers sweated at the sewing machines of the Triangle Shirtwaist Company.

The story of the fire at the Triangle factory has been told elsewhere.  It deserves more attention than I can give it here, but in short, these are the facts.  146 people died in half an hour.  They were mostly women, mostly Italian and Jewish immigrants, some as young as fourteen.  146 people who were trapped in a burning building by locked doors, a small elevator, a broken fire escape, and fire department ladders too short to reach the eighth floor.  Some victims fell from the windows.  Some jumped, rather than burn alive.

It is incredible, almost insulting, that the Asch Building survived the fire when so many people did not.  Yet it did.  The upper floors were rebuilt, and the building was renamed the Greenwich Building.  Frederick Brown acquired it shortly afterward.  New York University began to rent classroom space in the building in 1916, and in 1929, the Brown family gave the building to the university as a gift.  It is now called the Brown Building.  New York University students attend classes there daily, in a world that shares little with those of either Henry James or the Triangle Shirtwaist Company employees, except its location.

In The American Scene, Henry James bemoaned the lack of a physical historical marker at his birthplace to match the one imprinted in his memory.  There is still no historical marker for Henry James on the Brown Building today.  He is commemorated elsewhere.  However, there are three historical markers on the Brown Building at the corner of Washington Place and Greene Street, remembering the victims of the Triangle factory fire.  It is a small oversight, perhaps, but Henry James was one man who lived a full life of privilege and fame.  They were 146, poor and otherwise unknown.  How many times in history has the reverse occurred?

The historical markers on the Brown Building. Photo by Harmony Barker.

The history of 27 Washington Place serves as a case study in the changing character of Washington Square throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.  More than that, it serves as a reminder that, especially in places where space is limited and populations are dense, history marches on.  Henry James might have wished for the Washington Square in his memory to remain unchanged forever, a monument to the great writer and his great works.  Likewise, a witness to the fire at the Triangle Shirtwaist Company might have wondered how the site of such horror could ever become anything else.  But the story of Washington Square, both joyful and tragic, continues to grow and change.

*The house was actually numbered 21 Washington Place when Henry James, Sr. purchased it in 1842, but the street was renumbered two years later.  For the sake of clarity, I have referred to the James house as 27 Washington Place throughout this post.

Sources:

Thomas J. Frusciano and Marilyn Pettit, New York University and the City:  An Illustrated History, 1831-1996.  New Brunswick, NJ:  Rutgers University Press, 1997.

Luther S. Harris, Around Washington Square:  An Illustrated History of Greenwich Village.  Baltimore, MD:  Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003.

Habegger, Alfred.  “James, Henry.” American National Biography Online.  February 2000.  Accessed September 22, 2015.  Available online at http://www.anb.org/articles/16/16-00842.html.

Henry James, The American Scene.  London:  Chapman and Hall, Ltd, 1907.  Accessed November 9,  2015.  Available online at https://archive.org/details/americanscene00jameuoft.

“Henry James, Birthplace, Location of.”  Biographical Files; New York University Archives, New York University Libraries.

Administrative Papers of the Chancellor Henry Mitchell MacCracken 1884-1910; RG 3.0.3; Box 16; New York University Archives, New York University Libraries.

Records of the Office of the Treasurer, 1910-1963; RG 10.9, Box 47; New York University Archives, New York University Libraries.

Cornell University ILR School, “Remembering the 1911 Triangle Factory Fire.”  2011.  Accessed November 9, 2015.  Available online at http://trianglefire.ilr.cornell.edu/index.html.

Triangle Shirtwaist Factory National Register of Historic Places Registration Form.  Revised August 1986.  Accessed November 9, 2015.  Available online at http://focus.nps.gov/pdfhost/docs/NHLS/Text/91002050.pdf.

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66 Perry Street, New York, New York

There is no escaping it.

If you are going to do an exhibit on costume designer and Greenwich Village retailer Patricia Field, you are going to have to talk about Carrie Bradshaw, the character brought to life by Sarah Jessica Parker in HBO’s Sex and the City. No matter what level of research you may conduct on Ms. Field, from a light Google search to a deep dive into the archives of The New York Times, SATC and Carrie Bradshaw are never far behind, and understandably so. One of the most important reasons Carrie, and her friends, were so inspirational to viewers of the show was due in part to their unique style of dress—envisioned and realized by lead stylist Patricia Field from 2000 (the series’ third season) to the end of the show in 2004. While my exhibit will share in-depth thoughts on the “Carrie Effect” and the influence of Field’s lens on early twenty-first century fashion, this blog entry is about another important (and slightly more interesting) character on Sex and the City —New York City itself.

Dubbed by the city’s landmarks Preservation Commission as “delightful and interesting,” Perry Street, in New York’s West Village, is a tree-lined preserve for many historical buildings. All are residential, each more beautiful than the next. One of the most iconic homes on the block between Bleecker Street and West Fourth is No. 66.

Built in 1866 by architect Robert Mook, this Italianate style townhouse is not famous for being the home of poet Edna St. Vincent Millay, first lady Eleanor Roosevelt or some other gilded name in Village history. Instead, it is known as the fictional home of Carrie Bradshaw. In the mid-2000’s, it was also home to busloads of tourists who crowded the stoop trying to relive their favorite SATC moments, cosmopolitans and all. While Carrie was supposed to live in a rent-controlled apartment on the Upper East Side (245 East 73^rd Street to be exact), the 4000 square foot brownstone was the actual façade and location used in the show. Originally, the show was shot in front of 64 Perry Street, but the grander stoop of neighbor 66 won out as the favorite spot after three seasons. The setting for many memorable scenes in the show’s eight year run, the house is now listed as the 92^nd place to visit in New York City on the blog 1000 Things To See In NYC. It beats out Magnolia Bakery (100 on the list), another Village location immortalized by a visit from Carrie and her friends.

In 2008, community residents won a campaign to stop Sex and the City tour buses from looping the neighborhood. If you Google the address, the house is actually blurred out on the map, rumored to be part of the $9.85 million sale by an anonymous buyer in 2012. The house was sold again in 2013 for $13.5 million and current estimates list it at $35 million.

The buses may have stopped years ago and the throngs of fans have dwindled, but the house still sits quietly behind a “no trespassing” sign hung over the front steps —a reminder of its famous past. Occasionally, especially on the weekends, you will still see a group of outrageously dressed, selfie-loving tourists stop to relive a Carrie moment. They come from all over the world, some wearing heels and tutus, to pay homage to their anti-hero, and unbeknownst to most, the influences of Patricia Field.

Sources:

Shanahan, Gerry. The New York Times, September 9, 2007.

1000 Things To Do In NYC Blog

Curbed Blog

Zillow.Com

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“A Handsome Institution of This Kind for Themselves”: Women in the University Building

The University Building in 1891. Courtesy of the New York University Archives.

A researcher first digging into the history of the University Building might wonder if women could only enter as servants or in masculine disguise, like the titular character of Cecil Dreeme, the 1861 gothic novel set in the University Building.  The University of the City of New York did not admit women students for most of the time it was headquartered there.  The building’s most famous residents—Samuel F. B. Morse, Samuel Colt, Winslow Homer—were all men.  Did nineteenth century ideas about men’s and women’s separate spheres truly mean that all women were excluded from the University Building’s intellectual activities?  While that may have been the intent, the reality was more complicated.

Dorothy Catherine Draper is the first woman most accounts of the University Building mention by name.  In 1839, she posed for one of the first clear daguerreotypes taken of a human face.  Tradition holds that this took place on on the roof of the University Building.  Professor John William Draper, Dorothy’s brother, took the portrait.  Despite being an educated woman herself, Dorothy was admitted to the University Building because her brother escorted her there.  No other record of her visiting the building exists after the day her earnest face was immortalized among the earliest examples of American photography.

More women gained access to the University Building in 1860, when the Woman’s Library opened on the third floor.  The New York Times reported, “On Saturday the Woman’s Library was crowded with ladies, and the pleasure and satisfaction they seemed to feel in having a handsome institution of this kind for themselves, were not only plainly apparent, but eagerly expressed.”  This was the first time women were admitted to the University Building to pursue their own studies:  the University of the City of New York would not accept them for another thirteen years.

The Woman’s Library was developed as a philanthropic project to let working class women access books that would improve their minds, further their educations, and help them find employment that paid more than “starving wages.”  It was a subscription library, but membership fees were relatively low.  Members paid $1.50 per year, though women unable to afford that fee could join for free.  The Woman’s Library also had some notable advantages over other libraries in the area.  The Astor Library was free, but its books did not circulate, and it closed half an hour before sunset.  The Mercantile Library opened to women beginning in 1854, but membership cost between two and five dollars per year, and the Apprentices’ Library was not open to women until 1862.

Critics pointed out that the Woman’s Library was not much use to the truly destitute.  As Elbert S. Porter, editor of the Christian Intelligencer, put it, “It is difficult to see how [the Woman’s Library] will materially help the ‘poor sewing girl’ who must work all day and late in the night to get twelve cents for the making of a dozen capes or fifteen cents for the making of a pair of pantaloons.”  Perhaps in response to this argument, the Woman’s Library subscribed to a dozen expensive Parisian fashion magazines.  Members were allowed to cut patterns from them.    Whether these magazines helped “poor sewing girls” to command higher prices for their work, or simply allowed middle class women to improve their own wardrobes, is not clear.  The Woman’s Library moved out of the University Building in 1865, and was taken over by the Working Women’s Protective Union in 1866.

Subscribers to the Woman’s Library provided the University Building’s population with some variety in gender.  However, there is no documentation that they mixed with the college students and lodgers who also occupied the building.  The Woman’s Library could thus exist in the University Building without significantly disrupting the separate spheres.  This is not to suggest, however, that the spheres remained undisrupted.

An artist by the name of Mary L. Stone rented a studio on the third floor of the University Building in 1863.  At first glance, her placement on the third floor might be interpreted as an effort to contain women in one area of the building, but it is more likely that she chose the studio because it was next door to that of her teacher, Edwin White.  In doing so, she followed the footsteps of artists like Daniel Huntington, student and University Building neighbor of Samuel F. B. Morse, who twice served as president of the National Academy of Design.

“Village Children,” by Mary L. Stone. Courtesy of the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts.

Stone also became quite successful in her day.  The Ladies’ Repository, a Universalist publication, praised her work in 1868, the year she left her studio in the University Building: “Miss Stone has a great deal of fancy, an excellent eye for grouping and composition, and is rarely at fault in drawing the human figure.”  Her illustrations of Reconstruction-era North Carolina were published in Harper’s Weekly in 1873.  Five years later, the writer and artist Horace J. Rollin named Mary L. Stone alongside Mary Cassatt in a list of women artists “who are worthy of especial mention” in his Studio, Field, and Gallery: A Manual of Painting for the Student and Amateur (1878).  Stone moved to the artists’ colony at Ecouen, France, shortly thereafter.  A New York Times reporter visited the colony in 1881 and wrote that “A large number of Miss Stone’s paintings have found their way to America, and have done much both there and abroad toward upholding the reputation of that country for producing artists of ability.”

Stone’s identity as an artist helped her straddle the line between traditional feminine accomplishment and middle class masculine professionalism.  Art was among the more acceptable educational pursuits for middle- and upper-class women in the mid-nineteenth century.  In fact, when women were first admitted to the University of the City of New York in 1873, it was the only subject they were permitted to study.  The other artists in the building may have raised an eyebrow at Stone renting a studio, but women artists were not a new concept to them.  Her association with Edwin White also granted her legitimacy. 

Yet Mary L. Stone was a woman who directed her own career, and her decision to work in the University Building alongside other serious artists was ultimately her own.  It was a brave choice, and one which seems to have paid off, at least in her lifetime.  For the past century, though, her name has been omitted from the lists of artists’ names who lived in the University Building.  It is time for that to change.  In the twenty-first century, it is time to replace Mary L. Stone among her historical contemporaries.

Like the rain and snow which frequently found its way through the University Building’s poorly-constructed tin roof, women found their way into the building’s history despite considerable barriers.  The stories told in this post are, admittedly, footnotes.  But they are footnotes because they were not considered important enough to be recorded and preserved at the time these women lived.  Taken as a group, they shed light on the ways women in nineteenth century Greenwich Village negotiated social norms and their own educational desires—and that is an excellent topic to study.

Sources:

Draper, John William—history of photography.  Archives H subject files; New York University Archives, New York University Libraries.

Sandra Roff, “A Room of Her Own:  The Woman’s Library, a Footnote to New York City Library History.” Information & Culture: A Journal of History, Volume 49, Number 4 (2014), pp. 450-468.  http://dx.doi.org/10.1353/lac.2014.0017.

“Libraries.”  Trow’s New York City Directory.  Vol. LXXVIII. New York:  John F. Trow, 1865.  p. 26.  https://books.google.com/books?id=hY4tAAAAYAAJ.

The New York Times, various issues, 1858-1861, 1881. 

University Building—original correspondence from tenants, 1920s and 1930s; Buildings Collection; RG 1; Box 17, Folder 3; New York University Archives, New York University Libraries.

“Literary and Artistic.”  The Ladies’ Repository.  Vol. 39.  Boston:  The Universalist Publishing House, 1868.  pp. 398-399.  https://books.google.com/books?id=H4gUAAAAYAAJ.

Horace J. Rollins.  “American Artists.”  Studio, Field, and Gallery: A Manual of Painting for the Student and Amateur.  New York:  D. Appleton and Company, 1878.  pp. 191-195.  https://books.google.com/books?id=Wdc4AQAAMAAJ.

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