Lower Manhattan from the harbor, from Brooklyn, from across the Hudson and from the air has been exploited to such an extent as to destroy for the native New Yorker much of the impressiveness of this majestic panorama, but lower Manhattan as seen from within by the man in the street has a different kind of impressiveness and pictorially has hitherto been somewhat neglected. Five drawings are devoted to this theme—“Lower Broadway,” “Wall Street,” “The City Hall,” “The Tombs,” and “Exchange Place.” These five drawings as a group seem to me to represent the culmination of the artist’s achievement. They show a simplicity and ease of method, a definite conception and an admirable sureness of values and textures. In imaginative power and sinister suggestion, “Exchange Place” brings to mind Bochlin’s “Isle of the Dead” and it is not like that, a creation of the imagination but a truthful characterization of locality. A second group of five are “The Metropolitan Tower,” “Times Square,” “Grand Central Station,” “The Municipal Building,” and “The Cathedral on the Avenue.”
As these take us further up town into wider streets and more extended surfaces of sky, distance and silhouette become increasingly important in their composition, and what we lose in concentration we gain in tonal interest.
“The Old Bridge,” “Washington Bridge,” “Queensboro Bridge,” and “The Viaduct,” fall naturally into a third group. Here we have a different manifestation of energy, the architecture of the engineer, crisp and nervous in rendering, beautifully expressive of structure unadorned.
If in the drawings thus far mentioned certain qualities of Piranesi, Méryon and Brangwyn are brought to mind; in “High Bridge,” “The Soldiers’ and Sailors’ Monument,” “Hell Gate Bridge,” “Grant’s Tomb,” and “The Cathedral on the Heights,” there is equally a suggestion of Whistler. Less vigorous than the others in draughtsmanship, they are full of the suggestion of subdued color. By reason of the more subtle quality of their rendering, they lend themselves less readily to reproduction but even the reproductions convey beautiful impressions of shadowy foliage and quiet waters, bare, wind-swept branches and lonely spaces.
It is safe to predict that if he continues his interest in charcoal as a medium, Peter Marcus will gradually and naturally acquire a more characteristic personal manner, but it will come from ease of mastery not from assumed eccentricity, and whatever he may achieve in future this series of drawings will stand as the most comprehensive and broadly discerning study of New York in its entirety that has yet been made.
J. Monroe Hewlett
President of the
Architectural League of
New York