Visit to Brooklyn Museum of Art – Brooklyn, New York
Installations Outdoors
“Atlantes Figures,” circa 1899, are from the town house built for Hugh J. Chisolm at 813 Fifth Avenue. Chisholm was a wealthy paper manufacturer. One pair flanked the doorway and the two other figures supported the upper stories. The term atlante alludes to the mythical Atlas, who supported the sky on his shoulders. In this application it refers to a figure of a man used as a column to support a building. The house these atlantes originated in between 62nd and 63rd Streets was demolished in 1961.
Nine keystones, circa 1924, were taken from the Park Lane Hotel, formerly at 299 Park Ave in Manhattan. The keystones are male heads wearing garlands of grapevines. They represent satyrs, part human and part animal, or more specifically Bacchus, the god of wine in classical mythology. The fourteen-story building they were on was demolished in 1966.
At the base of the installation is Night, from circa 1910 by Adolph A. Weinman. This was at the Pennsylvania Railroad Station located on 31st to 33rd Streets between 7th and 8th Avenues. Charles Follen McKim was the designer. He modelled the building after the Roman Baths of Caracalla. Each of the four pedestrian entryways to the terminal were surmounted by a clock, flanked by two allegorical figures representing time. Day held a sunflower, and the hooded Night bears a drooping poppy. The terminal building was demolished in 1963. This sculpture was retrieved from a landfill in the New Jersey Meadowlands.
Jan Martense Schenck House
This whole house installation is the oldest architecture in the Museum’s period room collection. IT is also the most complex of the period rooms by virtue of its reconstruction and interpretation. The house originally stood in the Flatlands, one of six rural towns that became the borough of Brooklyn. Established by the Dutch, it became the English colony of New York in 1664. Flatlands was first called New Amersfoort, after a similarly named place in the Netherlands. The Canarsie Indians originally inhabited the area.
The house itself is a simple two-room structure witha central chimney. The framework is composed of a dozen heavy H-bents, visible on the interior of the house. These resemble goal posts with diagonal praces. This ancient northern European method of construction contrasts with the boxlike house frames that evolved in England. The house had a high-pitched roof that created a large loft for storage. The roof was covered with shingles, and the exterior walls were clad with horizontal wood clapboard siding. Brick nogging was used inside of the wall for insulation. The interior walls were stuccoed between the upright supports of the H-bents.
A kitchen was added at a right angle to the house probably in the late 1790s. In the early nineteenth century a porch with four columns was also added. Finally, sometime around 1900, dormer windows were installed above the porch. The interior of the house was also changed. The large central chimney was removed, probably about the same time the kitchen wing was added, and new chimneys and fireplaces were built on the outer walls.
When adding it to the Brooklyn Museum of ARts collection, curators wanted to add an early Dutch colonial house to the series of existing colonial rooms, thereby pushing back chronologically the survey of American interiors. This required stripping away later additions and changes, such as the kitchen wing and porch, to rediscover the original two-room structure. When the house was moved to its present location in 2006, it was decided that if the house had a bed box it would logically be on an interior wall next to the hearth as you now see it.
For many years the house was painted gray. Recent analysis of the exterior paint layers on the original clapboard surviving in the corner at the short end of the building revealed that the house was originally white and then red. Since the interior of the house is interpreted to the first decades of the eighteenth century, it was decided that the exterior of the house should be red, a color it displayed at that time.
According to Schenck family tradition, Jan Martense Schenck, the man who built this house, arrived in New Netherland in 1650. He is first documented in Flatlands in 1660. On December 29, 1675, he purchased the land on which he built the house, along with a half interested in a nearby gristmill. The house was probably in place by 1675. The Schenck family owned the house for three generations, finally selling it in 1784. As real-estate development increased beginning in the 1920s, a number of preservation plans that might have maintained the house on its original location were put forward but none were ever realized. Finally, in 1952, the Brooklyn Museum made a commitment to save the house, dismantle it, and store it for about ten years until plans to install it in the Museum were finalized. The house was opened to the public in 1964.
Inventing Brooklyn Exhibition
When we visited the Inventing Brooklyn exhibition was available to view. The exhibition started with the question, “What comes to mind when you hear the word, ‘Brooklyn?'” The exhibition then traces the evolution from a small village to the diverse polyglot place it is today.
This view of Prospect Park from the reservoir where land had been set aside from development. Designed by Frederick Law Olmstead and Calvert Vaux, the construction of Prospect Park was a turning point in the development of Brooklyn as an urban center. Open spaces in rural Brooklyn (and Flatbush) were no longer used for agriculture, but instead for leisure space to accommodate the needs of urban Brooklynites. The growing city of Brooklyn is visible in the distance in this scene from 1860. By the turn of the twentieth century, the city of Brooklyn had enveloped all of the land surrounding Prospect Park and annexed its neighboring towns, taking a form similar to the park and urban neighborhoods that appear today.
The exhibit went on to explore the architecture of Brooklyn’s Dutch past through three buildings: the de Hart-Bergen House, the Nicholas Schenck House (also in the Brooklyn Museum collection), and an unidentified fieldstone house. The de Hart-Bergen House stood around what is now 3rd Avenue near 36th and 37th Streets. The house itself dated to around 1660, and under Simeon Aertsen de Hart served as a trading post.Jasper Danckaerts wrote of visiting de Hart at this house during his 1678 voyage. Simon Bergen owned the house in the early nineteenth century, and was successfully persuaded against tearing it down. The house was torn down on July 20, 1880.
The Nicholas Schenck House fared better. Originally built before 1758, the Dutch farmhouse was occupied by British soldiers during the American Revolution. In 1897, the house and land were bought by the city during a public auction, for use as a city park. The house fell into a state of disrepair and was dismantled, though a part of it was reassembled at the Brooklyn Museum of Art in 1929, where it remains on display.
Finally, an unidentified stone house was shown as it appeared in July of 1850, from drawings of illustrator Charles Parsons. Though dilapidated, the structure had a sense of dignity through the watercolor technique utilized.
The Colonial Dutch heritage was also reflected in the Old Homestead Hotel and Cafe that stood at 365 Arlington Ave in Brooklyn near the Queens border. Lining the walls of the cafe’s sitting room were painted scenes of the area’s Dutch past. The Old Hometead appealed to patrons by suggesting they continued the tradition of hospitality and warmth for which Brook;lyn’s Colonial Dutch culture was known.
In another panel the story was told of Walter O’Malley struggling to keep the Dodgers in Brooklyn. Around 1950 when he bought out the team they were regular pennant contenders and profitable off the field, though their ballpark was small and deteriorating. Their cross-town rival, the Yankees, had a stadium with almost twice the size of Ebbets Field. Finding a site with ample parking began in 1946 and continued for the next decade. A site was found at the intersection of Flatbush and Atlantic Avenues – home to the Fort Greene Meat Market. The cost of land acquisition doomed the effort. New York City Parks Commissioner Robert Moses who controlled most large-scale projects in New York City was not a fan of the project. He suggested Flushing Meadows in Queens as an alternative, but O’Malley had no interest in moving the Dodgers to Queens. Los Angeles made an offer to O’Malley to move the team after the 1957 season.
A final exhibit reflected on “New Architecture in Historic Districts 1967 to Present.” It went on to reflect how in the four decades since the 1965 passage of the NEw York Landmarks LAw – the legislative milestone inspriing those remarks – New York has become one of the most influential forces for historic preservation in the United States. The Landmarks LAw established the New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission as the agency responsible for identifying and preserving the city’s architecture, historical, and cultural resources.
Historic districts acqknowledge neighborhoods where a particular architectural character and history establish a sense of place. Brooklyn Heights, the Upper East Side, South Street Seaport and SoHo illustrate the different building types and landscapes that can define districts as historic and compel us to consider how they should or should not change.
The legal mandate to determine the “appropriateness of new architecture in historic districts is one of the Commission’s most challenging tasks. How can new buildings best relate to their historic contexts? By replicating their older neighbors, or through a deliberate contrast of contemporary material and style? Can a new building be taller – or shorter – or shaped differently than others in the district and still be sensitive to its landmark setting?
The Williamsburg Murals
These murals were returned to public view in 1990 after a long hiatus in which they were thought to be lost or destroyed. The paintings were placed on long-term loan to the Brooklyn Museum by the New York City Housing Authority of these “works that document the overlapping histories of abstract and public art in the United States.” The murals were executed by the American abstractionists Ilya Bolotowsky (1907-1981), Balcomb Greene (1904-1990), Paul Kelpe (1902-1985), and Albert Swinden (1899 or 1901-1961). The paintings were part of a group of works commissioned by the New York Mural Division of the Works Progress Administration/Federal Art Project in 1936 for installation in the public areas of Brooklyn’s Williamsburg Housing Project, a public housing development designed by William Lescaze.
The commission was awarded to largely unknown painters working in avant-garde styles at a time when most commissions were focused on narrative scenese of American life. The murals were intended for spaces devoted to leisure activities so a realistic subject matter extoling work and productivity would not be a source of enjoyment. This commission gave significant impetus to the acceptance of abstraction as a valid mode of imagery in public art and to the creation of these particular paintings, believed to be the first nonobjective public murals in the U.S.
Over the decades following their original installation, the murals fell victim to passive neglect. As rooms once designated as recreation areas were converted into offices or storage spaces, the murals were no longer available to the residents for whom they were originally intended. Caught in the bureaucracy that had once nurtured them, the murals remained ignored, in some cases hidden under layers of paint and known to a few historians by reputation only.
The restoration of the murals received generous support from the J.M Kaplan Fund, Republic National Bank of New York, and the Williamsburgh Savings Bank. Additional funding was made possible through the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development in addition to other sources.
Other Items from the Permanent Collection
In the African Innovation section, we were moved by the Akan proverb Se wo were fi na wosankofa a yenkyi. (One must turn to the past to move forward.)
The Appian Way, a painting by John Linton Chapman from 1869, were among the paintings made by artists who flocked to Rome in the nineteenth century. Souvenirs were painted like these for wealthy foreighners making the Grand Tour of Europe. This was one of the artist’s most popular compositions, featuring the Appian Way that served as Rome’s oldest highway linking the capital (looming in the distance) to the Adriatic Sea.
The Madonna and Child by Zanobi Strozzi was completed circa 1450. The pose for the Christ Child is somewhat aggressive, inspired in part by the low-relief sculpture of Donatello. Strozzi’s Christ twists away from his mother, thus breaking the psychological bond that defines so many Renaissance altarpieces. The panel’s tabernacle frame – an architectural model designed to enshrine and elevate the image – is original and possibly the oldest surviving example in a New York collection.
Another section of the museum had large quotations from notable people to provide context for the art that was on display there.
Looking at the paintings and carvings of goddesses, of wildflowers, or powerful and playful animals, flocks of brids like those still migrating over the Nile – all the scenes of the sanctity of everyday – left a feeling of peace and empowerment that caught me unaware. – Gloria Stieinem
“It is no small thing to see the land of Joseph and his brethren and from which Moses led the children of Abraham out of the house of bondage.” – Frederick Douglas
This window Hospitalitas from ca. 1906 was by John La Farge. Opalescent or iradescent glass was an innovation of both La Farge and Louis Comfort Tiffany. This window for the Brooklyn house of HErbert Pratt at 213 Clinton Avenue is thought to be the first to have this glass in the window of the stairwell landing in the entrance hall. Hospitalitas is dressed in classical garb and flanked by columns, showing the effort of La Farge to reconcile his art with the neoclassicism of the Beaux Arts style popular at the time.
Amor Caritas from Augustus Saint-Gaudens from 1898 is a bronze sculpture. There are similar cast bronze pieces like this at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and elsewhere.
This painting by Arthur Fitzwilliam Tait is labelled The Reprimand. Ah! You Naughty Fawn, You Have Been Eating the Flowers Again. This piece is representative of naturalism, a design movement in the nineteenth century. Nature became a cult and one can almost consider it a style by the mid-19th century. Virtuosic depictions of nature became the hallmark of high art. One goal of inventors of the time was to devise machines that could make realistic natural decoration to rival the work of master carvers.
While not on display we were able to find a silver cann made by Thomas Underhill, ca. 1780. This bore special significance for us as we have Underhill family members.