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NY to Paris is the city in the world the most represented.
Symbol of modernity for over a century,
it captivates painters, cartoonists, photographers and filmmakers for its architectural daring.
Everyone seems to convey a subjective experience of verticality
so that urban landscapes are rare with the exception of impressionist paintings
of E. Cucuel, of French origin, and Guy Wiggins, trained in Europe.
Some reflect the complexity of the metropolis
by creating images where the labyrinthine streets and buildings
blend into a singular density. This is the case of
Paul Citroen, dutch artist,
born in 1896 and died in 1983, who participated in the avant-garde Bauhaus
adventure. Student of Paul Klee and Wassily Kandinsky,
realizes, in the 1920s, photo collages
from photos taken here and there, cut and arranged to give a chaotic impression
of accumulation. These arrangements,
known "Cities" or "Metropolis", show a vertical cluster of monumental architecture
reflecting the birth of the Society of Consumer
Fritz Lang is inspired to create the sets of his
film, "Metropolis".
But the filmmaker did not just rebuild a modern city.
As a visionary, he created a stratified city,
symbolic theater of Class Struggle. Using views alternately diving and cons-diving,
he takes his camera from the top of skyscrapers,
where live the capitalist elite,
to the basement, where the energy of the upper town is provided by the Proletariat.
But stop to "push open doors",
let us be captivated by the beauty of the images,
the elegance of black and white and consider the special posterity of "Metropolis" !\
In fact, from "Frozen Assets" to "Immortal
(ad vitam)", we find the brand of the expressionist master.
Diego Rivera's mural, "Frozen Assets", painted in 1931,
reflects the ambivalence of Mexican for the United States in general and especially for
NY. It is designed as a triptych vertival,
says his admiration for Modernity and his hatred of social inequality.
The upper panel depicts the iconic skyline, reconstructed by the artist:
it focuses more financial institutions among which recognizes,
from left to right, the Irving Trust building, the Daily New building,
the Bank of Manhattan building, the Rockefeller Center, the Chrysler building and the Empire
State building. The image of triumphant capitalism is more
dense than in reality! The central panel shows a shed of steel and
glass, transformed into a dormitory for the homeless,
victims of the Great Depression.
They are dehumanized because they are faceless
and, as dangerous revolutionaries, they are guarded by a security guard, back;
and they are lying in serried ranks
as human animals. The lower panel illustrates the hidden wealth.
It represents the coffers of a bank, buried deep underground,
protected by three employees, painted face or profile.
This room is preceded by a grotesque hall,
where wait patiently some elegant customers,
preserved by the crisis and identified:
the old man sitting on the bench is John Rockefeller senior,
who commanded D. Rivera decorating the lobby of his building
and who had partially destroyed it, because the fresco painter had represented
Lenin, on the right,
between the wings of the Man Crossing.
In Enki Bilal' s feature film, "Immortal (ad vitam)",
the capitalist symbol is at its worst. The action takes place in 2095 ,
in a stricken NY, Central Park is unsanitary;
the town is dominated by the Eugenics Corporation,
a pharmaceutical company, who has a medical and genetic dictatorship
over the people and the political parties. A struggle against non-humans genetically
modified undertakes; despite the help of the gods of ancient Egypt,
their bout is lost.
For Enki Bilal, Socialism is finally defeated by Globalization.
Unsafe down is an opportunity to create a festival of digital images diving,
whose poetry reminds less sophisticated images of the 1930's picture, "King Kong".
If we had learned to read these vertical images,
very symbolic,
we would have been less shocked by the tragic events of 11/09/2001;
they were approached by visual artists but also literary,
as Hart Crane,
the modernist poet, who wrote in 1932
"the Broken Tower", a visionary poem about a skyscraper bloodied, in central NY.
A poem that is reminiscent of the Gerhard Richter' s painting
"September",
painted in 2005 and offered at MoMA. This painting has a special place in the Gerhard
Richter's work: because of its size, which is unusually small
(72 x 52 cm), and because of its technical,
material is scraped until it gets a ghostly image,
more suggestive of the shock than a photographic document.
But NY is not only an urban monster,
devouring human lives! NY is also a passionately loved city for its
architectural geometry. We can feel this excitement in the work of
photographers and painters.
The "Flatiron", finished in 1902,
immediately attracts the eye of pictorialist photographers,
like Alfred Stieglitz and Edward Steichen;
they have the ambition to enter the picture in the field of art
and they rival with painters.
Stieglitz's photo, \
taken under the snow, during the winter of 1903,
strikes by its verticality. The skyscraper is in the background, it occupies
the entire composition; in the foreground,
there is a trunk of tree whose top is deliberately cut
to highlight the fork that recalls the rounded architecture.
This well studied composition emphasizes the subject,
which stands out against a wispy background.
Steichen's crepuscular photo
was taken in 1906; it is striking by an against backlight effect:
in the foreground,
pedestrians, cabs, coachmen and tree branches,
are relegated to the glistening shadow of a rainy evening.
The tight framing deliberately cut the top of the building to increase the impression
of gigantism and to put more emphasis on perspective.
With architectural fever during 1920s and 30s, the photographers move away from Pictorialism
and opt for a radical Modernism. Stieglitz, Walker Evans and Berenice Abbott
observe the transformations of Manhattan,
focuses on stone, glass and steel, and they sublimate their city
with diving and cons-diving views, who say their feelings of domination and depth.
So the competition between Painting and Photography
is inverve: painters are now trying to make
working drawings from the new photography. This produces wonders of simplicity!
Tamara de Lempicka stylises skyscrapers with its more realistic than abstract post-cubist
style. In urban studies
and in neo-Mannerist portraits, she chooses a strange light,
a tight framing, limited colors and variations on a major key
to reflect the omnipresence of the mineral.
Georgia O'Keeffe gives geometric shapes to her representations,
which come near to the Abstraction. Instead of copying the real,
Stieglitz' wife explores line, color and shadows,
she works the contrast between daylight and electric light
and interested in the composition to tell the monumental verticality of NY,
against which she comes up.
Edward Hopper opts
for a very particular point of view, limited to a fragment of the urban landscape,
so that one has the impression that he paints
a human-sized city! Up roofs and their typical reservoirs,
up a skytrain or on a street corner,
he seizes instann\'e9s as a townsman, perfectly adapted to the megacity.
Impossible not to mention the legendary Brooklyn
Bridge, another icon of new yorker Modernism!
Poets, painters, photographers and filmmakers
have immortalized this suspended work-of-art,
terminated in 1883, whose neo-Gothic architecture
symbolizes the momentum of America forward.\
Walker Evans photographed the bridge
from different angles, at different times of the day and night
to illustrate the Hart Crane's poetic sequence,
"The Bridge", hymn to the bridge and the America as a whole,
published in 1929.
Each of these pictures is an admirable stylization of the bridge!
Georgia O'Keeffe' painting
is focused on warheads arches and on ropes, which cut the sky,
it looks like a stained glass almost abstract. Where Henry James saw "a mechanical monster,"
Georgia sees a geometrical rigor,
close the sacred. This is really the enthusiasm!
I invite you to dream with Thierry Cohen, /Finally,the photographer of "Extinct Cities" ,
who replaces the Milky Way to Megawatts and reinvented the image of megacities,