The Women of Atelier 17: Modernist Printmaking in Midcentury New York

Review by Jennifer Farrell

While there is certainly no dearth of scholarship on midcentury art in the United States, especially work made in New York City, this informative and important new book proves that there are still many areas in this period which demand further study. In The Women of Atelier 17, the independent historian Christina Weyl closely examines a world largely ignored in both art history and cultural studies—modernist printmaking and work done by female artists at the celebrated print studio when it operated in Gotham. Using archival sources, interviews, skillful visual analysis, as well as literature from a variety of fields (including art history, women’s studies, cultural studies, history, sociology, and other subjects), she considers both their work and influence, in this particular field and beyond it.

Arts & Culture, ReviewsGuest UserApril 30, 2020Comment

The Unstoppable Irish: Songs and Integration of the New York Irish, 1783-1883

Interview by Elizabeth Stack

Today on the blog, Gotham editor Elizabeth Stack speaks with Dan Milner about his recent book, The Unstoppable Irish: Songs and Integration of the New York Irish, 1783-1883 and the importance of music to the Irish people both in Ireland and New York.

The Unstoppable Irish follows the changing fortunes of New York's Irish Catholics, commencing with the evacuation of British military forces in late 1783 and concluding one hundred years later with the completion of the initial term of the city's first Catholic mayor. During that century, Hibernians first coalesced and then rose in uneven progression from being a variously dismissed, despised, and feared foreign group to ultimately receiving de facto acceptance as constituent members of the city's population. Dan Milner presents evidence that the Catholic Irish of New York gradually integrated (came into common and equal membership) into the city populace rather than assimilated (adopted the culture of a larger host group). Assimilation had always been an option for Catholics, even in Ireland. In order to fit in, they needed only to adopt mainstream Anglo-Protestant identity. But the same virile strain within the Hibernian psyche that had overwhelmingly rejected the abandonment of Gaelic Catholic being in Ireland continued to hold forth in Manhattan and the community remained largely intact. A novel aspect of Milner's treatment is his use of song texts in combination with period news reports and existing scholarship to develop a fuller picture of the Catholic Irish struggle. Products of a highly verbal and passionately musical people, Irish folk and popular songs provide special insight into the popularly held attitudes and beliefs of the integration epoch.

Arts & Culture, Immigration, InterviewsGuest UserApril 16, 2020Comment

The Unexpected Logic of Art Economics: Arts and Inequality in 1980s New York

By Sarah Miller-Davenport

When Richard Serra’s Tilted Arc was installed in Federal Plaza in Lower Manhattan’s Foley Square in 1981, it was meant to be a pioneering work of public art that would expose New York’s masses to post-minimalist sculpture. Tilted Arc would indeed become one of the most legendary sculptures in 20th century history—but not for its artistic merit.

Arts & Culture, Contemporary Era, Urban Decline & Fiscal CrisisGuest UserMarch 5, 2020Comment

How The Volstead Act Ruined New York’s French Pleasure Palaces

By Alice Sparberg Alexiou

At the beginning of the twentieth century, when New York was rolling in dough but had a dearth of rarified places in which to spend it, enterprising immigrants who knew how to run restaurants began coming to New York. They knew because they’d grown up in France or Switzerland, in bistro-owning families. In New York, after working their asses off at one of the few already-existing luxury restaurants--Delmonico’s was the most famous—the newcomers then combined what they’d just learned about how to run a New York restaurant with their Gallic sensibilities around food, ambiance, and, most of all, drink—what French chef, after all, creates cuisine without the addition of alcohol, be it wine or brandy, and enlarged them to fit New York’s eye-popping scale. They opened big restaurants, then the trend in New York—“lobster palaces.” But these were different, because they were French, where New Yorkers were introduced to the joys of pate de foie gras and frogs legs, were taught them what wines to drink with these exotic dishes. And so was created a unique and scintillating French dining scene in New York , a product of a specific time in New York history, that is now largely forgotten.

Manhattan, Arts & CultureGuest UserFebruary 24, 2020 Comment

Henry Chalfant: Art vs. Transit, 1977-1987

Reviewed by Katie Uva

On October 30, 1975, The New York Daily News thudded onto curbs, newsstands, stoops, and doorsteps around the city trumpeting the (paraphrased, but nevertheless evocative) attitude of President Gerald Ford toward New York: “Drop Dead.” There was no question that New York was in trouble: rising crime, declining quality of life, mounting public debt, and arson all plagued the five boroughs.

Arts & Culture, Bronx, Urban Decline & Fiscal Crisis, ReviewsGuest UserFebruary 13, 2020Comment

Iconoclasm in New York: Revolution to Reenactment

Reviewed by Benjamin L. Carp

New York is a city of destruction. What doesn’t burn by accident, somebody tears down on purpose. When Chip asks Hildy to take him to the Hippodrome in Leonard Bernstein’s On the Town, she replies, “It ain’t there anymore,” which might as well be the city’s motto. Nothing is too sacred to shatter. Nothing is too exalted to escape the city’s brutal contests over money and power.

Reviews, American Revolution, Arts & CultureGuest UserJanuary 9, 2020Comment

The Piano in the Sukkah: Early Twentieth Century Immigrant Jewish Piano Culture in New York

By Sarah Litvin

In 1905, the Yiddish language New York newspaper Yiddishes Tageblatt reported on a new trend in the city’s Lower East Side, “The Greenhorn of Plenty: The Piano in the Sukkah.” Jewish families were hauling parlor pianos to rooftops to incorporate them into the fall harvest festival Sukkoth, the article explained. At the time, New York City was exploding as the center of the country’s bustling piano trade and its largest immigrant city. The peak year of immigration was in 1907 when 1.7 newcomers arrived, and the peak year of piano production was in 1909, when 364,545 pianos were sold. By 1910, more American homes had a piano than a bathtub.

Religion, Arts & Culture, Gender & SexualityPeter-Christian AignerOctober 15, 2019Comment

Rough Paradise: Sex, Art, and Economic Crisis on the New York City Waterfront

By Jeffrey Patrick Colgan and Jeffrey Escoffier

New York City was for many years one of the world’s leading ports. In the early 1950s, the docks in New York City, by far the country’s busiest, directly and indirectly supplied, according to the City’s Department of Marine and Aviation, livelihood for almost 10% of the city’s population. Nevertheless, even then there were signs of the port’s impending doom. Plagued with racketeering, traffic congestion, and outmoded facilities, the invention of container shipping was the final straw. Without adequate rail and road access and the space to operate cranes and stack containers, most of the port’s Manhattan-based business moved to New Jersey where new container facilities were being built.

Arts & Culture, Gender & Sexuality, Reviews, Waterfront & Islands, Urban Decline & Fiscal CrisisGuest UserAugust 15, 2019Comment

Inclusive Archiving, Public Art, and Representation at the Hall of Fame for Great Americans

By Cynthia Tobar

The Hall of Fame for Great Americans, created in 1900, was the first monument of its kind that sought the active involvement of Americans in nominating their favorite "Great Americans.” The Hall was conceived of by Dr. Henry Mitchell MacCracken, Chancellor of New York University (NYU), who envisioned a democratic election process for selecting these greats modeled after presidential elections. Nominations came to the election center and after a person received a certain number of votes, an NYU Senate of 100 voters made the final choice. The Senate was composed of American leaders: past American presidents, presidents of colleges, senators, and men of renown in various fields. Problems soon arose, however, when this initial process yielded 29 nominees, all male. The lack of women created a scandal and in the next election eight women were elected (currently, there are 11 women in the Hall). However, the contentious nomination of Robert E. Lee remained.

Pinstripe Nation: The New York Yankees and American Culture

Reviewed by Tony Calandrillo

In Pinstripe Nation: The New York Yankees and American Culture, Baker University professor Will Bishop explores how the success, failure, and attendant drama of the New York Yankees fits into the larger narrative of American culture, and how both the Yankees and that culture constantly mirror each other in the 20th century. In the introduction, Bishop makes this point clearly when he states that “what plays out in our little cocoons of sport is so often a close parallel of what is going on outside of them, only dramatized in a way that frequently makes it clearer.” According to the author, “the narratives that play out in the world of sport often are somehow able to help us better see and understand who we are as a society, what we value, and how we are changing.” For the particular case of the New York Yankees, this mirror narrative sees that the Yankees’ story of success parallels and is interwoven with the narrative of American success in the twentieth century. For his book, Bishop uses the work of Roland Barthes in relation to unspoken communication through symbols to illustrate how the Yankees have been used as an American cultural icon from their rise to national prominence in the 1920s through the end of the twentieth century.