American Stories: Paintings of Everyday Life, 1765–1915: Cliff Dwellers by George Bellows
Exhibition Dates: October 12, 2009–January 24, 2010
Joyce Mendelsohn and Annie Polland—two historians of New York’s Lower East Side—discuss Cliff Dwellers, George Bellows's 1913 depiction of the neighborhood, now on view in the exhibition “American Stories: Paintings of Everyday Life, 1765–1915.”
Episode Date: January 4, 2010
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Barbara Weinberg: This is Barbara Weinberg, curator—with my colleague Carrie Rebora Barratt—of the exhibition “American Stories: Paintings of Everyday Life, 1765–1915” at The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. The exhibition includes more than a hundred iconic works by many of America’s most acclaimed artists, who tell stories about their own times by depicting ordinary people engaged in life’s tasks and pleasures. Their paintings range in date from the Revolutionary era to the eve of World War I. In Cliff Dwellers, George Bellows captures the colorful crowd on New York City’s Lower East Side. It appears to be a hot summer day. People spill out of tenement buildings onto the streets, stoops, and fire escapes. Laundry flaps overhead and a street vendor hawks his goods from his pushcart in the midst of all the traffic. In the background, a trolley car heads toward Vesey Street. The painting, made in 1913, suggests the new face of New York. Between 1870 and 1915, the city’s population grew from one-and-a-half to five million, largely due to immigration. Many of the new arrivals—Italian, Jewish, Irish, and Chinese—crowded into tenement houses on the Lower East Side—the area north of the Brooklyn Bridge, south of Houston Street, and east of the Bowery. Among them were thousands of Eastern European Jews, who found temporary or permanent shelter along streets such as East Broadway, the setting for Cliff Dwellers. The city |
