A BRIDGE TO THE SKY

Whitestone Bridge

A BRIDGE TO THE SKY

by Joan K. Yanni

The fascinating Whitestone Bridge is a stop on most tours. Its bold colors and strong linear perspective attract the eye of even a casual visitor. What’s going on in the painting?  Whitestone is a bridge in New York City. Where are the cars? The buildings? Does it really go into the sky as the cloud on the right implies?

The bridge, which spans the East River and connects the Bronx and Queens, was constructed under the leadership of the legendary Robert Moses. The Triborough Bridge, which had opened in 1930, was a traffic nightmare. In addition, the Depression had created a need for new jobs, and Moses, Parks Commissioner and Arterial Coordinator for New York City, was on hand to provide them. A further impetus for the building of the bridge was the coming of the 1939-40 New York World’s Fair, a project chaired by Moses.  A direct link was needed so that upstate New York and New England motorists could be enticed to visit the Fair with less hassle from traffic. As an added bonus, the bridge would provide a link to a new airport which ultimately became LaGuardia. Moses received authorization to build the Bronx-Whitestone Bridge in April 1937.

Construction proceeded on a tight schedule. Othmar Ammann, a famed bridge designer, introduced innovations to slash building time and produce a safe, efficient structure.  . When it was constructed, the 2300-foot main span was the fourth largest suspension bridge in the world. The bridge was completed in April 1939, only 23 months after construction began and six months ahead of schedule; its cost was $19.7 million. The bridge, with its sleek, art deco design, won acclaim from architects as well as from New York City Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia.

MAG’s Whitestone Bridge (51.2) was painted by Ralston Crawford in 1939 and was part of MAG’s 1951 Encyclopedia Britannica purchase, the core of our American collection. The picture of the bridge is Precisionist, with Surrealist touches. The Precisionists celebrated the new American industrial landscape in clear, sharply delineated colors, often based on carefully-composed photographs. Their interest in analyzing real objects reflects the influence of Cubism, but whereas Cubists tend to dissolve the contours of objects into refracted forms, Precisionists’ images remain clear and recognizable. Crawford used linear perspective to create a dramatic effect, reducing detail to an absolute minimum while emphasizing color, shape and form. His work is linked to others associated with the Precisionist movement, including Charles Sheeler, Charles Demuth and Georgia O’Keeffe. 

Crawford was born in Ontario, Canada, in 1906 and in 1910 moved with his family to Buffalo. At nineteen he became a

sailor on a tramp steamer and after a year ended up in California, where he started his art training at Otis Art Institute in Los Angeles. While in LA he worked briefly for Walt Disney, drawing Oswald the Rabbit.   Between 1927 and 1930 he continued his art studies at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts in Philadelphia and at the Barnes Foundation.  He moved to New York City in 1930 and in 1932 went to Europe, studying in Paris, Spain and Italy.

By the time he returned to New York in 1933 he was painting in the Precisionist fashion, using the urban subjects that fascinated him: industrial scenes, coal and grain elevators and bridges. He began to paint canvases of large, flat color shapes without details, rarely showing movement or human figures, concentrating on architectural forms. Crawford admitted that in this absence of human forms there was a relationship between his work and Surrealism. “It was not my primary concern, but it was also not an inconsequential concern.”

In 1942 he enlisted in the US Army Air Force, becoming chief of the Visual Presentation Unit of the Weather Division, a job in which he prepared pictorial presentations of weather, air flow and terrain for the use of fliers and military personnel without technical backgrounds in meteorology. The war, climaxed by the test firing of the atomic bomb at Bikini Atoll in 1946, which he witnessed as a reporter-artist for Fortune Magazine, was deeply upsetting for him; and the theme of destruction can be seen in many of his later paintings. His art became more abstract. He also became an accomplished lithographer and a more active photographer, documenting his continuous travels and creating spare, architectural images in his photographs.

During his travels he had given special attention to the New Orleans jazz scene,. and in 1961 he was appointed  a photographic research consultant to the Archive of New Orleans Jazz at Tulane University. By this time he was well known and had been given numerous one-man exhibitions --over fifty-five during his lifetime.  He died of cancer in Houston in April, 1978, and was given a traditional jazz funeral in New Orleans.

The Gallery has more recently acquired two of Crawford’s preliminary sketches and a silver print photograph of  Whitestone Bridge. These images illustrate his working method --creating a series of works on a theme before starting his oil painting.

In 2000, MAG’s Whitestone Bridge became part of an exhibition installed at the Pompidou in Paris and at the Montreal Museum of Fine Art.  It consisted of 250 works of art featuring Romanticism, symbolism, and Surrealism, all picturing fear and surprise--subjects that would have appealed to Alfred Hitchcock. The exhibition was called Hitchcoc and Art: Fatal Coincidences. What do you think Hitchcock would have made of our bridge into the sky?

Source: curatorial files; Arnason, HH, History of Modern Art, New York: Harry Abram, Inc; Tsujimoto, Karen:  Images of America Precisionist Painting and Modern Photography, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art