LIE'S ICY RIVER

Morning on the River

LIE’S ICY RIVER

By Joan K. Yanni

Morning on the River (13.6) is on view again.  Jonas Lie’s dramatic painting of the Brooklyn Bridge emerging from smoke and shadow and breaking into luminous white clouds is again attracting the attention of visitors to the American galleries.

The large work (50 x 60 inches) presents the bridge from below.  Though dominating the painting, the structure takes up less than half the canvas. It is in shadow, spanning a river covered in patches of ice. The smoke from industrial plants and steam from the icy river rise upward to explode into the sunlit morning sky at the top of the picture.

The small structure to the right of center anchors a crane used to hoist goods, probably coming from the Erie Canal, and transfer them in chutes emerging from the right of the building to the warehouse at the end of the pier. The red glow of a warming fire can be seen in the ground floor of the building.

The artist uses thick yellow paint to reflect the morning sun, and strong, deliberate brush strokes to add color to the painting and to highlight the water between the bridge and the pier. The color also silhouettes the heads of the workmen assisting with the transfer. A wooden fence, or railing, separates the water of the river from the snowy land behind the warehouse.

Lie’s paintings consistently celebrate the power of modern industrial civilization, romanticizing that power through dramatic coloring and perspective.  Morning on the River is a perfect illustration of this technique.

Jonas Lie (1880-1940) was born in Moss, Norway.  His father was a civil engineer and his mother a New Englander. They named their son after his uncle, a renowned novelist and friend of Ibsen and Grieg. After his father’s death in 1892, Lie spent a year studying art in Paris and then joined his mother and sisters in New York.

From 1897 to 1906 he worked days at a textile plant in Plainfield, New Jersey, and spent nights in evening classes at the National Academy of Design and the Art Students League in New York. In 1912 he was elected an Associate of the National Academy and exhibited his works both there and at the Amory Show in 1913. His best known early works are dramatic scenes of the building of the Panama Canal. One if these, The Conquerors, 1913, is now in the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Lie was a close friend of The Eight, and helped organize the new Society of Artists in 1919 to protest the Academy’s refusal to admit George Luks, Jerome Myers, John Sloan and Maurice Prendergast. (All of these artists are in the MAG permanent collection.)

                                       

As one can see from the accession number, Morning on the River was the sixth work to come into the permanent collection. The donor, Ruth Sibley Gade, was the first cousin of James Averell, in whose memory the Gallery was founded. The painting, chosen from the Gallery’s inaugural exhibition of 1913, was donated in Averell’s memory.

Ruth was the daughter of Hiram Watson Sibley, Emily Sibley Watson’s brother. The two families were very close; they lived near each other--Ruth on East Avenue at the corner of Alexander and James (called JG) on Prince Street. JG and Ruth, close in age, grew up together.

Ruth married John Gade, the architect who designed MAG. Gade was a Norwegian by birth, and this fact may have led to the purchase of Norwegian Jonas Lie’s painting. Gade was a founder and first president of the American-Scandinavian Foundation, which sponsored an exhibition of Scandinavian art; Jonas Lie was chairman of the reception committee.

When the painting was given in 1913, Lie was on the way to a promising career as a painter. One critic noted that, in the beginning of his career, Lie painted landscapes--Norwegian winter scenes as well as American settings. In an exhibit of his work at the Folsom Galleries in New York in 1911, Lie’s focus changed from landscapes to paintings of wharves, bridges, and workmen at the waterfront.  According to one review, Lie “has become a scientist as well as a poet. His bridges rest on solid foundations and are splendid mathematical constructions...the vital forceful construction of earth itself seem to underlie the imaginative beauty which Mr. Lie now puts into his painting.”

Morning on the River is one of those splendid mathematical constructions.