1913 Page 20
Everywhere these multi-coloured lights, which sparkle and change, forming and re-forming letters, rushing cascades down the fronts of buildings, or crossing the tracks like taut banners. But it’s up into the air that you have to look – in spite of the din of subway trains which instinctively makes you cast your eyes to the ground. It’s in the air that one sees the most extravagant constructions of light, above the rooftops. There, there are the advertising hoardings, offering a dancing vision of new products to consume … An umbrella salesman has put up a lady gesticulating with her open umbrella. A haberdasher shows off a huge cat, all lit up in fiery yellow, unpicking a red ball of string and getting caught up in its threads … Quickly, quickly, the apparitions are drawn in lights, change, disappear and return, quickly, so quickly that one can hardly follow them with one’s eyes. And then sometimes, on top of an unlit skyscraper, the peak of which is invisible amongst the fog and the smoke, a huge display lights up, as if suspended from the heavens, and hammers a name in electric red letters into your soul, only to dissolve as rapidly as it appeared. All this, to the mind of an Oriental [European] is bewildering and even a little diabolical. But it’s so amusing, and so ingenious that I enjoy and almost admire it.12
Viewing New York from the twenty-fifth floor of the New York Times Building, Loti declared the city the ‘capital of modernism’, announcing himself both fascinated and frightened by what he saw. ‘Seen from here’, he wrote in his diary, ‘the city looks infinitely large: as far as the eye can reach, electricity traces zig zags, palpitates, winks, dazzles, and finally, towards the horizon, merges in a diffused glow as of the aurora borealis’.13
Loti missed a still more spectacular illumination a few months later. On 24 April 1913, at half-past seven in the evening precisely, President Wilson hit a button in the White House. Two hundred miles north-east the Woolworth Building, the tallest building in the world, was bathed in electric light flashing into the cold night air.14
In 1910, when the construction of the Woolworth Building had first been proposed, its cost had been estimated at $5 million and its height at 625 feet.15 Both had escalated by the time the building opened in 1913. When Cass Gilbert, the building’s architect, asked Frank Winfield Woolworth, its commissioner, how tall the tower should ultimately be, Woolworth was said to have responded: ‘Fifty feet higher than the Metropolitan tower’, the then-tallest building in New York, finished a couple of years previously.16 And so it was, with Gilbert’s design edging up to 750 feet, and then to 792 feet.
Woolworth, the founder of a chain of cheap stores across the United States, intended the building to be a permanent advertisement for his shops (he himself appeared as a grotesque with a nickel in the foyer).17 The advertising alone justified his investment. But he also intended the building to be a profitable venture in itself, with the highest office rental rates in the world. It boasted an enviable location, within easy reach of Wall Street and the Brooklyn Bridge. Looking up Broadway at St Paul’s Chapel, with the Woolworth Building dead ahead and City Hall off to the right, it was said that in this one place you could see the most splendid examples of three centuries of New York architecture. But it was Cass Gilbert who best expressed why the skyscraper really took off in New York City. A skyscraper, Gilbert explained, was a ‘machine that makes the land pay’.
Not everyone approved. In 1913 the Heights of Building Commission was set up to investigate. It was noted that on the shortest day of the year, 21 December, both the Woolworth Building and the Singer Building cast shadows of well over 1,000 feet at midday. While the Woolworth building promised ‘permanent light and air’ to the ‘lawyers, financial institutions and high-class businesses’ it intended to attract, it denied these conditions to nearby offices. There were considerations of public safety to be borne in mind. Two years previously a fire in the Triangle Shirtwaist garment factory, on the top floors of a ten-storey building in Greenwich Village, had claimed well over one hundred lives. Since then, the city’s workshops had been plastered with no smoking signs, in English, Italian and Yiddish. But many considered it a matter of time before something went wrong in a tall building, with little that the fire service, on the ground, could do to help. A month before the inauguration of the Woolworth Building, George McAneny, the Manhattan Borough President, told the members of the New York City Club that the ‘day of the skyscraper is passing’. He predicted a time, in the not-too-distant future, ‘when there were no more skyscrapers built in this city, and when that type of architecture would be regarded as a curiosity’.18
The tallest inhabited building in the world, the Woolworth Building, opened in New York in 1913, symbol of a city on the make.
Over time, of course, the skyscraper would be viewed as the quintessentially American building, marking a radical divide between the urban landscape of the Old and New Worlds. No buildings in Europe could compare to the audacity of New York’s tallest skyscrapers – even if the Eiffel Tower, pride of European modernists, overtopped them all in sheer vertiginous height. Nonetheless, American skyscrapers rendered themselves less brutal by appealing to the aesthetics of older civilisations. The ceiling of the lobby of the Woolworth Building evoked Byzantine mosaics, while its marble floor was hewn from a quarry on the Greek island of Skyros. The tower was made out in the Gothic Flamboyant style with a tourelle on each corner. The building accordingly became known as the ‘cathedral of commerce’, though Gilbert himself preferred to think of an analogy with the great town halls of northern Europe, while Woolworth had advised his architect to take the neo-Gothic Victoria Tower of the Houses of Parliament in London as his model. The next tallest building in New York, the Metropolitan Life Tower, owed its form to the campanile of San Marco in Venice. (The president of Metropolitan Life, John R. Hegeman, was said to have admired the campanile – which had collapsed in 1902, but been rebuilt in 1908.19)
What went for the skyscrapers went for everything else. The recently built Penn Station was modelled on the Roman Baths of Caracalla. The New York Public Library was designed by men who studied at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris, and who contributed to the flowering of its elegant, recognisably Parisian, style with pillars, pediments and pilasters on public buildings, office buildings and theatres all across America. The Central Post Office building, which opened its doors in 1913, was one of the best examples in New York. The new Grand Central Station, completed the same year, combined American efficiency and scale with European grace.
In many respects, the New World defined itself against the Old. Yet when educated New Yorkers came to think about culture – and particularly high culture – their minds journeyed fondly back across the Atlantic to Europe, the birthplace of modern civilisation.
John Pierpont Morgan might be considered the titan of American high finance at the turn of the twentieth century, but when the Swiss and German-educated Morgan came to art he looked to Renaissance Italy. When Puccini played back an image of Gold Rush America to an appreciative New York audience in the 1910 première of La Fanciulla del West, the opera was, of course, sung in Italian. William Frick, the steel magnate on whose Fifth Avenue home construction began in 1913, as a rule did not collect art by American artists. (The house itself was built in the Beaux-Arts style, using the same Paris-educated architects as for the New York Public Library.) Only in later years did Frick purchase works by his compatriots: a portrait of George Washington by Gilbert Stuart, chosen more for the subject than for the artist, purchased in 1918, and, from 1914, a substantial body of work by James McNeill Whistler, who spent much of his career in Europe painting European subjects. Europe was where art was produced. America’s role was to acquire.
But only if an artwork was bought in Europe by an American, shipped back to the United States and given to a public gallery such as the New York’s Metropolitan Museum (which was provided with the foundation of its collection this way) would it be seen by Americans other than the minority who could afford regular travel abroad for leisure. New York was rich, and a number
of its leading citizens highly cultured. Educated Americans took seriously the role of the arts in rounding off the country’s rough edges – John H. Girdner prescribed it as the only cure for ‘Newyorkitis’. But the elite got their cultural education the old-fashioned way: they went to Europe, a few months spent in the museums of Italy to familiarise themselves with great art, and a few more in Parisian cafés turning their earnest American appreciation into urbane European sophistication. Returning American artists and a few brave Europeans aside, New York was barely touched by Europe’s main currents in contemporary art.
In February 1913, that changed. The International Exhibition of Modern Art gathered over a thousand modern art works – many of them European – at the Armory on Lexington Avenue. The previous autumn, travelling to Cologne, Munich, Berlin and Paris in order to identify suitable European art works and secure them for the exhibition, the young American organiser Walt Kuhn had worked hard to persuade European galleries of the spectacular nature of the planned New York show. ‘Gang und gar ausgeschlossen!’ – roughly translated ‘never in a million years’ – exclaimed Berlin art dealer Cassirer when Kuhn enquired about the possibility of taking a couple of Cézannes and Van Goghs over to New York.20 But Kuhn hoovered up anything he could find. Meanwhile, an American resident in Europe, Walter Pach, used his personal connections to cajole artists and Parisian galleries to part with their work.21 A significant proportion of the artworks which eventually made it across the Atlantic reflected Pach’s biases and relationships. New York, the city Loti had extravagantly declared the ‘capital of modernism’, was now to be exposed to the contemporary art of Europe for the first time, on a truly American scale.
Pach estimated that, over the course of a month, some 100,000 New Yorkers came to see the International Exhibition before it moved on to Chicago and, in slimmed-down form, Boston. Held under the auspices of the Association of American Painters and Sculptors, much of the exhibition was given over to American artists. But most spectators came to gawp at works by modern European artists never before displayed in America in such numbers, or at all: Picasso, Duchamp, Brancusi, Van Gogh, Cézanne, Braque, Matisse, Degas, Renoir, Gauguin. Of these, it was the more shocking exponents of modernism – the Cubists in particular – who grabbed the attention of the public, and who raised the ire of the critics, breaking away from plainly figurative art in a leap towards deformation and abstraction. That the Armory Show would cause a scandal was, of course, expected by the organisers. Indeed, that constituted a critical element of success. This was not to be just an exhibition, it was to be a cultural event, a revolution even.
Former President Theodore Roosevelt thanked the organisers for putting on such an important and necessary exhibition. But this did not mean that he accepted the artistic proclivities of those he termed ‘European extremists’.22 Granted, he wrote, ‘there can be no life without change, and to be afraid of what is different or unfamiliar is to be afraid of life’. Nonetheless, it did not follow that all change was life – sometimes change meant death, ‘retrogression instead of development’. The Armory Show, he contended, was just such an instance. But perhaps such philosophical reflections were to take some of its art too seriously, he wrote:
It is likely that many of them [the pictures] represent in the painters the astute appreciation of the power to make folly lucrative which the late P. T. Barnum [a circus-owner] showed with his faked mermaid. There are thousands of people who will pay small sums to look at a faked mermaid; and now and then one of this kind with enough money will buy a Cubist picture, or a picture of a misshapen nude woman, repellent from every standpoint.
Most professional art critics agreed. Kenyon Cox, writing in Harper’s Weekly, proclaimed his belief that ‘there are still commandments in art as in morals, and still laws in art as in physics’.23 He had no doubt that the art of the Armory Show would not last – but it could yet do serious harm, corrupting public taste and leading some young artists to abandon the hard graft of study in the belief that success could be won through scandal instead. He advised the public: ‘If your stomach revolts against this rubbish it is because it is not fit for human food.’ But he saved his most stinging criticisms for the artists themselves. Of Van Gogh, Cox wrote: ‘All I can be sure of is an experiment in impressionistic technique by a painter too unskilled to give quality to an evenly laid coat of pigment.’ In the works of Rodin, ‘how far mental disease mingles with inordinate self-esteem … it is difficult to say’. Finally, in the paintings of Matisse, ‘it is not madness that stares at you … but leering effrontery’.
Others showed less drama, and more wit, in their denunciations. Puck magazine pictured hens laying Cubist eggs.24 A group of artists mocked the pretensions of the Armory Show by promising to ‘out-cube the Cubists’ with an exhibition held by the ‘Academy of Misapplied Art’ in the auditorium of the New York Association of the Blind. Invitations promised ‘an exclusive exhibit of works of the most distinguished American artists from the Cubistic, Post-Impressionist, Futuristic, Neurotic, Psychopathic and Paretic schools’. Robert Sewell, one of the artists involved, said that he intended to ‘put the Futurists into the middle of the past tense’. Some reviewers called the Armory Show ‘freak art’. ‘Wouldn’t it be awful if someone got locked in here overnight’, a reporter heard an exhibition-goer say.25 But whatever the papers said, it was a commercial success – and that, in New York, counted for a lot. When the exhibition moved to Chicago in March the New York Sun ironised: ‘Cubists migrate; Thousands Mourn’.
American art would not be the same after the Armory Show. Joseph Stella, an Italian-born American who had spent the previous few years in Europe, painted his first Futurist painting – Battle of Lights, Coney Island – in the show’s wake. New York had begun the journey from a city which bought and revered European art, to a city which would ultimately surpass it.
For Americans who could trace their families back more than a couple of generations to the fields of northern Ireland or southern Scotland – President Wilson himself claimed Scots-Irish heritage – New York presented a paradox. While foreigners thought of New York as the symbol of America, many Americans viewed the city, with some suspicion, as the country’s most foreign. The figures backed them up. In 1910, the thirteenth national census revealed that fully four-fifths of New York’s population, more than any other major city, were of ‘foreign stock’ – either born outside the United States or natives born to foreign parents. Was New York still an American city, or was it increasingly a European city stranded on the wrong side of the Atlantic?
In truth, the attitudes of the city’s latest European arrivals towards their European past were mixed. Many had come to America from Europe to escape hardship, marginalisation and persecution. For some – the Irish or Italians, for example – the national homeland could, in time, acquire a warm glow. Its finer points were recalled and celebrated; inconvenient facts were forgotten. Occasionally, distance simplified politics, sharpening distinctions between right and wrong, between us and them. For many others – particularly those who had no land to call their own, driven across the Atlantic by targeted persecution rather than by generalised poverty – Europe was a much more problematic inheritance. For these immigrants, particularly Jews from Russia, America was not only a land of economic opportunity, but a refuge from the rest of the world. They were often viewed as the most ‘foreign’. Yet as all these groups met and forged their new identities as hyphenated Americans – Jewish-American, Italian-American, Polish-American – they began to forge a new identity for America itself.
Around two million New Yorkers had been born outside the United States. Of these, a quarter of a million each were born in Germany and Ireland, with a further 100,000 from Great Britain. They joined communities that were well established in New York, and which had sister communities in cities, towns and villages across America. They were the backbone of the migrants of the previous century. Every President the United States had ever had was of North European heri
tage – mostly English, Scottish and Protestant Irish. What was relatively new to America, and most acute in New York, was the prominence of immigration from Europe’s southern and eastern fringes. Over 300,000 New Yorkers had been born in Italy. Nearly 800,000 were from central and eastern Europe: from Russia, the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and Romania. In 1870 these countries had accounted for one in a hundred of New York’s foreign-born population; now they constituted one in four. Many were Jewish, doubly distant from the Protestant ascendancy. In 1913, over 100,000 Jews arrived in America. Most settled in New York, contributing to the ethnic kaleidoscope of the city’s Lower East Side.26
John H. Girdner had described New York as a ‘huge mill, into the hopper of which is annually thrown raw material in the form of brain, brawn, money, and character drawn from the outside world’. Out of these elements was produced ‘the metropolis’. Israel Zangwill, a British Jewish playwright and essayist, chose a different metaphor: the melting pot.
His 1908 play of the same name, performed for the first time in New York in 1909, was set in one of the city’s outlying boroughs. In the Jewish Quixano household a picture of Wagner – a great German composer, but a renowned anti-Semite – hangs on the wall, and a book by Nietzsche stands in the bookcase, symbolising the family’s German-language culture. Mrs Quixano speaks only German. Her nephew David, brought to America when his parents are murdered in an anti-Semitic pogrom in the Russian town of Kishineff, is more readily assimilated – in love with the idea of America as a new start, a place purged of the ancient feuds and vendettas which plagued Europe:
Oh, I love going to Ellis Island to watch the ships coming from Europe, and to think that all those weary, sea-tossed wanderers are feeling what I felt when America first stretched out her greater mother-hand to me!27