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In planning our spots for Channel 13, we faced the challenge of choosing two particularly engaging paintings from among the many works on view objects in our American Art galleries. We often select groups of works for inclusion in the tours we give to students and adult visitors, but there is usually some sort of thread—historical, thematic, or artistic—that links them together. In choosing single works, we think more about which objects have come to represent the entire collection. And in the case of the Museum’s pre-1945 American paintings, two works instantly come to mind. Each has come to represent the American art collection, even though one was acquired in 1846, and the other entered the collection more than one hundred years later . . . .

Francis Guy’s “Winter Scene” was painted about 1819, and made its exhibition debut in Manhattan in 1820. Viewers were bowled over to see such a remarkably accurate “portrait” of a locale that was familiar to many of them. Guy had painted this townscape of Brooklyn’s one-time center from the vantage point of his rented rooms on Front Street, and he included actual physical features of the place as well as the likenesses of many of the area’s most prominent inhabitants. In shaping the scene, he probably intended to contrast the old-fashioned barnyard that occupies the center of the image, with more the stylish residences of the more affluent residents at the far left of the scene—the latter component sadly was lost when the painting was damaged in a fire in 1881, and the left-hand edge was cut away.

The Brooklyn Museum’s predecessor, the Brooklyn Institute, held a series of important art exhibitions, featuring hundreds of works, in the 1840s, and Guy’s “Winter Scene” was prominently exhibited in two of them. Among the visitors who marveled at the picture was the young Walt Whitman, then the vocal editor of the Brooklyn Daily Eagle and an active advocate for the arts in Brooklyn. In his review of the 1846 exhibition, Whitman called attention to the work’s power to suggest to present and future viewers how rapidly and completely this once rural village had changed: “. . . few things will be able to bring before the next race the fact how rapidly Brooklyn has ‘went’ in the progress of improvement, more fully than this well-delineated picture.” Whitman’s comments and a number of popular prints based on the painting guaranteed its public profile. Interestingly enough, when the new Brooklyn Museum building was opened to the public in 1897, “Winter Scene” once again occupied a prominent position, although not in the primary galleries of American and European paintings on the fifth floor; the early American portraits, and what were described as American “landscapes of great historical value,” were installed near the entryway on the third floor. The segregation of what was considered at the time to be “antiquarian” material from “contemporary” turn-of-the-century art was typical of many young American art institutions. Even after Brooklyn dedicated separate American art galleries in 1907, the “historical” works were exhibited separately from the modern American paintings.

Today, a wide array of the Museum’s American paintings is on view in the American galleries, grouped in a sequence of themes rather than by strict chronology. Guy’s “Winter Scene” is the focal object in our introductory gallery, which is entirely Brooklyn-centric. In reorganizing these galleries in 2001, our goal was to use this space to introduce viewers to the art-life that has existed in Brooklyn for centuries. Every object in this space has something to do with Brooklyn—Brooklyn as a longtime center of manufacturing, of creative expression, and of collecting, and Brooklyn as subject. A broad spectrum of New Yorkers, and visitors from much farther afield, still marvel at Guy’s townscape, as they consider how vastly different the Brooklyn environment is today.

Over the course of the 20^th century, American collectors and museums became increasingly more interested in collecting 18^th and 19^th-century American art. Brooklyn was among the leaders in this direction in the teens, when the Museum actively purchased and exhibited colonial and Federal era portraits. American landscape painting surprisingly lagged in the revival of interest in pre-Modern American art. It was not until the 1930s that a germ of interest began to develop—in part out of a renewed Nativism in the Depression era, and a concerted effort to establish the independence of American art from European influence. Interest in Hudson River School landscapes grew steadily during the mid-20^th century; most of the museum’s best Hudson River pictures were purchased during this period, beginning in the 1950s. The collecting market was most dramatically boosted, however, by the build-up toward and the celebration of the American Bicentennial of 1976. It was in 1976 that the Brooklyn Museum purchased its monumental Bierstadt painting, “Storm in the Rocky Mountains, Mount Rosalie”. Since entering the Museum’s collection, this painting has captured the interest and imaginations of thousands of visitors to the museum, owing to the impact of its size, and the dramatic nature of the artist’s portrayal of the American West. Bierstadt based it on his own expedition to the Colorado Rockies in 1863, and conceived the final canvas as a blockbuster that would introduce the remote western landscape that few individuals had experienced into the consciousness of largely urban audiences in America and Europe.That a painting as large and well-publicized as this one fell off the radar screen by the early 20^th century had to do in part with the fact that it was purchased immediately by the Englishman Thomas William Kennard, a civil engineer who had presided over the building of the Atlantic and Great Western Railway in the United States. At the outset of the revival of interest in 19^th -century American landscape art, preference was given to artists who were considered to have been less reliant on European landscape models. Since Bierstadt was associated so closely with the German Dusseldorf school, his work initially lagged in popularity. By the 1970s, however, when art historians began to revalue work by foreign-trained Americans, Bierstadt’s reputation was gradually revived.”Storm in the Rocky Mountains, Mount Rosalie” remained officially “unlocated” for almost ninety years—even reported by some sources to have been destroyed by fire. After Kennard’s death in 1896, it entered the inventory of a London dealer and resurfaced only in 1974. Today, Bierstadt’s grand canvas speaks to innumerable viewers who are captivated the artist’s vision of the West despite their own broader familiarity with the region it recorded. Most people gravitate toward this painting even while understanding the hyperbole of Bierstadt’s composition—a composite of various landscape elements in a super-sized view, animated by theatrical atmospheric and light effects. The painting still conveys the natural force and resources that were directly associated throughout the late-nineteenth century with the might and rising potential that the United States would bring to bear on the world stage. For contemporary viewers, it also presents a nostalgic vision of an unspoiled place, just as Guy’s “Winter Scene” allows us to time travel nearly two hundred years into the past.

It is the power of both of these pictures to make us pause and look that has made them among the popular favorites on view in “American Identities: A New Look“.

The history of Coney Island from the 1890s and through the first decade of the 20th century is very much the history of three successful amusement parks: Steeplechase, Luna Park, and Dreamland. The Tilyou family had been influential in developing Coney Island ever since Peter Tilyou established one of the area’s first hotels and taverns in the 1860s, and the first of the three important parks was also a Tilyou creation. In 1897, Peter’s son George combined the family’s many sprawling concessions around the Bowery and opened Steeplechase Park on the beach between West Sixteenth and West Nineteenth streets. He was inspired by the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago in 1893 and by an earlier enclosed amusement park at Coney, Paul Boyton’s Sea Lion Park. Tilyou charged admission and provided affordable entertainment (a roller coaster, a scenic railroad, a Ferris wheel, a funhouse, a bathing pavilion, food, and dancing) for a mass audience inside an enclosure that was supposed to keep crime and violence outside. The main attraction was a mechanical horserace that gave the park its name and reflected the popularity of horseracing at Coney, at this time the country’s horse-racing capital. (Racetracks had been built at Brighton Beach, Sheepshead Bay, and Gravesend to serve the wealthy and fashionable clientele in the 1870s and 1880s.) Tilyou rebuilt Steeplechase after a fire in 1907, and many of the rides, from the Earthquake Stairway to the Human Pool Table, were moved indoors to the Pavilion of Fun, a large steel and glass building. The most long-lived and profitable of Coney’s three historical amusement parks, Steeplechase did not close its doors until 1964, and even today, Tilyou’s emblem, the funny face, is considered Coney Island’s mascot. (more…)

Coney Island has a long history as a place for entertainment. Even before the creation of the three great amusement parks around 1900, the area was enormously popular with visitors looking for fun. The first inn, Coney Island House, was established in the island’s Gravesend section, to the east, in 1829. Guests arrived by stagecoach, and the journey from the city was often grueling and time-consuming. By the 1840s, a daily ferry connection to the western part of the island brought visitors to Coney Island Pavilion, an early pleasure dome offering dancing, dining, and bathing. The eastern edge of the island catered to a middle-class and wealthier audience, but the western part, known as Norton’s Point and the site of present-day Seagate, was closer to Manhattan and attracted a much broader range of people. Excursion boats and ferries were still the most convenient modes of transportation, with just about an hour’s ride from Fulton Ferry or Peck Slip in Manhattan, but the railroad soon became an efficient competitor. With the arrival of the first rail lines in the 1860s, bars, music halls, and entertainment contributed to the grittiness, especially around the terminus, where many small hotels and taverns – Peter Tilyou’s Surf House is an example – opened up. By the late 1870s Coney Island was one of the most visited summer resorts in the United States; an estimated one hundred thousand people visited on the Fourth of July in 1879. It was one of the few resorts that attracted people from all different social and economic backgrounds, including the poor urban working class, which was afforded some leisure time toward the end of the nineteenth century, with a decreased number of working hours and often Saturdays as well as Sundays off.

After establishing Surf House, the Tilyou family in 1882 developed the Bowery, a lane that ran parallel to Coney Island’s main drag, Surf Avenue, between West Tenth and West Sixteenth streets. It was famous for its gambling, dance palaces, concert halls, burlesque theater, and sideshows with snake charmers, jugglers, and acrobats, as well as many independently operated concession stands, arcades, and carousels. From the 1860s through the 1890s, the west end of the island attracted a very mixed crowd, including many prostitutes and criminal gangs, and this part of Coney came to be known as Sodom by the Sea. Nearby attractions such as the Midget’s Palace, a Convention of Curiosities (essentially a “freak show”), a Camera Obscura (where moving images from the surrounding area were projected onto a revolving screen), roller coasters and other thrilling mechanical rides, and spectacular nighttime fireworks contributed to Coney’s immense popularity well before the creation of Steeplechase, Luna Park or Dreamland, the great amusement parks of the turn of the century.

Sea bathing was another important aspect of early entertainment at Coney Island. It started in eighteenth-century Britain as a fashionable upper-class pursuit of health, an extension of the spa experience. Growing in popularity in the second half of the nineteenth century, especially after the seaside became more accessible through public transportation, sea bathing soon became associated with pleasure more than health and spread to the working classes. Mixed bathing was frowned on until the mid-nineteenth century, and although it was acceptable for men and women to swim together at the turn of the twentieth century, they were expected to be more or less fully covered. Bathers were advised to wear woolen or flannel bathing suits, and both men and women were prohibited from exposing the nipples. At this time, public beaches with free access existed only on the far edges of the island. The high-end hotels had their own facilities on the east end while the west side was lined with bathhouses such as Balmer’s. Visitors to the bathhouses paid to use lockers and to get access to the beach, where long ropes attached to poles a hundred feet offshore provided a safer experience in the surf.

As Julian Ralph wrote about Coney in Scribner’s Magazine in July 1896: “It is New York’s resort almost exclusively; our homeopathic sanitarium, our sun-bath and ice-box combined, our extra lung, our private, gigantic fan.”

Slideshow created with Admarket’s flickrSLiDR. Having trouble seeing the slideshow? Photos are also on Flickr.

The next time you enter the Grand Lobby of the museum, make sure you cast your eyes upwards. In one of the openings in the old brick façade you will find two newly on view objects. They are a Pair of Bronze Owls, two of twenty-two, which originally stood along the roof line of the old Herald Tribune building when it was built in 1893. At that time the owls eyes were electrified, blinking on and off. The owls were created by sculptor Antonin Jean Paul Carles. When the building was torn down in the 1920’s, the owls, Minerva and the Bell Ringers were given to NYU. The latter two sculptures and two owls with outstretched wings were loaned to the city in 1940 for display in Herald Square, where they remain today. The two owls that entered the Brooklyn Museum in 1971 are also on long-term loan from NYU.

To prepare for installation, the owls were first cleaned with a soft brush and vacuum to remove surface dust and then with a detergent and water to remove the more tenacious grime.

Pictured above is Emy Kim, fourth year conservation intern from the NYU IFA Conservation Program, rinsing the owls.

Before the owls were placed into the brickwork they were secured to a mounting board for safe transport and installation. Since the owls weigh in at 251 and 232 pounds they had to first be rigged onto their respect mounting boards. Soldered brass mounts were then created to secure the owls to the boards.

Pictured below at left are Paul Daniel, mount maker, and Jakki Godfrey, project conservator, rigging one of the owls onto a mounting board. Pictured below at right is a detail image of the mounting system.

Finally it was time to install the owls. The mounted owls were secured to a forklift and then gently lifted to their new location. Once in position the owls were secured in place to the brickwork.

Pictured above at left is Jason Grunwald, art handler, making sure the owl is safe as it is raised. Pictured above at right are Jim Hayes, senior art handler and Barbara Duke, art handler securing one of the owls in place.

Last week we finished the installation of the small photography show Goodbye Coney Island? in the Luce Alcove on the fifth floor of the Museum. When I was told over the summer that this space would become available, I immediately thought of the discussions on the future of Coney Island and that this could be a great opportunity to revisit the history of the neighborhood and look at the evolution of Coney Island as an entertainment haven over the past 125 years.

Apart from about thirty photographs – in both color and black-and-white – looking at Coney Island from many different perspectives, the exhibition also includes almost thirty prints from the Brooklyn Museum’s great collection of glass plate negatives. Together they cover almost every decade from the 1870s until the present. Glass plate negatives are fragile and to produce high quality digital scans from which a new picture can be printed is a fantastic way to make these images available. They show scenes from the late nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century and are a wonderful contribution to the exhibition.

Big changes are anticipated in the near future, with proposals for redevelopment presented by the city as well as by private developers. Coney Island was always a contested playground with disputes over land use occurring at every stage of its evolution. Seventeenth-century power grabs by Dutch and English colonialists, late nineteenth-century corruption scandals, firm management by New York City Parks Commissioner Robert Moses in the mid-twentieth century, and present-day real estate speculations over valuable beachfront property are all part of the history here. In the past few years, structured attempts to rejuvenate the area have increased, signaling an interest in preserving Coney Island’s character and its accessibility for a socially and ethnically diverse audience. At the same time, developers have presented elaborate commercial and residential schemes that many fear would dramatically alter the nature of Coney. I included a question mark after the title, Goodbye Coney Island?, in order to address both the fear that Coney Island will disappear and the uncertainty of what will come out of the renewal efforts. I believe Coney Island will remain, but yet again change guise as a new incarnation takes shape in the next decade.

Slideshow created with Admarket’s flickrSLiDR. Having trouble seeing the slideshow? Photos are also on Flickr.

A major factor influencing Brushed with Light’s design was due to the delicate nature of watercolors themselves. Because the works are light sensitive it is required that they be exhibited in low light. This being said, a dim room is not always the most comfortable environment to view works of art.

As a solution, I designed the inner walls of the room to be recessed at the top so I could install lighting fixtures, which were then colored with gels and diffused to give the room an inviting glow, without subjecting the paintings to additional light. I repeated this technique in the gallery entrance so the visitor is reminded before even entering the space the important role light plays within these beautiful paintings. In addition the walls were painted with a deep berry palette which functions to make the paintings “pop”, due to the fact that light is reflected off the pictures while being absorbed by the wall around them, highlighting the pictures rather than the room.

In my previous post, I discussed how an adhesive introduced with an ultrasonic mister can be used to stabilize paint layers. Now you can see that close up as illustrated here of another watercolor in the exhibition, Quarry by William Thon, ca. 1952 (pictured above). Much of our work is done under a microscope which magnifies the area we are working on enabling us to be more precise and to see things not visible under normal conditions. As we work on a piece we can take photographs through the microscope known as photomicrographs which are included below. In this watercolor the artist used a range of techniques to apply his paint including a brush and a sponge, and by pouring and dripping paint onto the surface, wet on top of wet layers. Unfortunately, some of these layers are not well adhered to each other.

In the photomicrograph above you can see the top layer of brittle black paint which is lifting away from the underlying powdery yellow paint. We used the ultrasonic mister to treat this watercolor which worked very well for consolidation of the powdery yellow paint, where it would have been otherwise difficult and time-consuming to introduce an adhesive with a brush. For some of the larger paint flakes it was necessary to use the more traditional technique of inserting the gelatin adhesive to specific areas with a minute brush under magnification. See the after treatment photomicrograph below where the black paint has been set down and is no longer lifting away from the yellow layer below.

In preparation for the Museum’s current exhibition, Brushed With Light, conservators in the Paper Conservation Department examined over ninety watercolors. It was great to work on familiar works as well as those never examined or exhibited before. A common condition problem we observed during examination was the presence of unstable paint layers. Watercolors consist of pigments ground in gum arabic, a water soluble gum usually from the acacia plant, which holds or binds the pigment particles together and allows the color to be brushed onto a paper support. There are numerous causes for the paint to become unstable and lift away from the paper, including an insufficient amount or deterioration of the gum binder which can cause cracking and if left untreated, can result in paint loss. Some artists painted their images thickly, squeezing paint right out of a tube to create raised areas of paint called impasto. These areas are vulnerable to loss due to expansion and contraction of the paper and to a lack of adhesion to the paper. Some artists occasionally mixed additional gum into their paint, or as a glaze on top to add saturation to areas of flat color. With age these areas can become brittle and tend to crack and loosen.

In this photograph, I am consolidating lifting and powdery paint on the watercolor, The Samuel Fleet Homestead by Frances Flora Palmer, from the 1850s. The watercolor depicts a house which once stood at the corner of Fulton and Gold streets in Brooklyn and was reproduced in an 1884 publication, History of Kings County and Brooklyn by Stiles.

The piece was previously attached to a stretcher and in the image above you can see it was darkened in the central area where it was once exposed to light. It had been treated extensively in the past, but recent examination under magnification revealed areas of lifting paint where the artist used additional gum binder to enrich shadows in the trees and foreground, and to add dimension to the horses and some of the figures.

To consolidate, or re-adhere the loose pigment particles and flakes, I applied an adhesive using this ultrasonic mister. Most of the time consolidation is done with an adhesive introduced with a very small brush under the microscope under one paint flake at a time. The advantage of the mister is that the adhesive—in this case a photo-grade gelatin in ethanol and deionized water—is formed into minute particles which are smaller than the pigment particles. Because of their size they are easily absorbed into the pigment without changing the appearance of the paint layer and can be applied to a larger area at one time. This is an incredibly successful and useful technique for stabilizing powdery paint and small, light paint flakes as with this watercolor. In this case I am carrying out the treatment on a suction table which creates a downward pull to further enhance the absorption of the consolidant into the paper.

In my next post, we’ll go under the microscope to see the before and after effects of consolidation with an ultrasonic mister on another watercolor in the exhibition.

Jook Leung from 360VR came in today to shoot a few panoramas of our Luce Visible Storage area. These should be on our website within a month and I’ll post an update here when they go live. Recently, Jook shot a VR of The Dinner Party by Judy Chicago and we are pretty excited to be able to show off these exhibitions in this dynamic way.

Shown here under construction in 2003 (left) and as it is today (right), Visible Storage, was the second and final phase of the Luce Center for American Art. The space was completed in 2005 and includes 5,000 square feet of visible storage area.

Hand-finished aluminum cabinets (shown here during construction and after completion) contain ceramics, pewter, glass, silver, Tiffany lamps, twentieth-century design objects, and nineteenth-century furniture with original upholstery, as well as a significant number of large- and small-scale bronze and marble sculptures.

Two large, glass-walled bays contain nearly six hundred paintings from the collection, all on oversized, rolling screens.

Using computer kiosks incorporated into the cases, visitors have access to portions of the Museum’s collections database. The database, which includes information on the roughly 2000 objects in the installation, can also be searched on our website.

One of the great challenges of working with the Brooklyn Museum’s large and important collection of American watercolors is determining how best to share it with our audience. Like most works of art on paper, the watercolors are vulnerable to light exposure—they can fade easily—and require careful limits on the amount of time they can be displayed in a gallery. Our conservators keep a detailed record of light exposure for each of these paintings.

It is all the more exciting, then, when we have the opportunity to put them on view, both through loans to other museums and in the larger exhibitions, like Brushed with Light, that we organize here at Brooklyn once or twice a decade. Since our last large American watercolor exhibition (in 1998) was a survey selected from the entire collection, we decided to focus our efforts this time on American landscape subjects. Ranging in date from the late eighteenth to the mid-twentieth centuries, the selected watercolors offer a fairly comprehensive survey of the evolution of American landscape art from its inception. At the same time, one can trace through these works the major shifts in watercolor practice. While it was an art practiced primarily by amateurs and illustrators well into the nineteenth century, watercolor gained tremendously in prestige in the latter half of the century, when it was embraced by many leading artists of the day.

In making our selections, we also tried to balance the inclusion of major works by famous artists (there are eight important works by Winslow Homer) with watercolors by some less familiar names. We also wanted to offer groups of works that are particularly indicative of strengths of the collection and highpoints in watercolor practice in the field of landscape. One of these areas is our modernist watercolors. A number of the leading American early modernists—John Marin and Charles Demuth to name two—did their most compelling work in the medium. The modernist works also offer the chance to consider how the unique aspects of the medium responded to the new modes of composition employed by these artists. Often favoring the use of partial or fragmented forms, they allowed large areas of unpainted paper to play a part in their compositions.

A slightly different version of Brushed with Light was exhibited at the Frist Center for the Visual Arts, in Nashville, last spring. Another, slightly different version of the exhibition will go on view at the Taft Museum, in Cincinnati, in 2008.

Brushed with Light opens September 14, 2007. I look forward to hearing your responses to the exhibition.