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Lot Essay
In December 1927, Bernard Boutet de Monvel received a commission for a decorative panel, following the success of the retrospective of his works organised by Rue Winterbotham Carpenter for the Arts Club of Chicago. The commission came from none other than Robert Schaffner, the director of the investment bank A. G. Becker & Co. situated on Chicago’s LaSalle Street. The building had just undergone a total refurbishment under the direction of the architect Samuel A. Marx, and the commission was intended for the new reception hall.
The artist took this commission as a mark of growing recognition of his talent as a decorative painter. Only two years earlier, in 1925, he had met with resounding success at the International Exhibition of Modern Decorative and Industrial Arts and held in Paris two years prior. (Boutet de Monvel was a member of the Compagnie des Arts Français, which had participated in the exhibition). He began to carry out preparatory studies and sketches for the work in as early as January 1928, to ensure that it would be ready for installation in the autumn of that year. The panel, a celebration of the American steel industry, depicts an allegorical scene of Abundance Feeding America's Children, against the backdrop of a train connecting a blast furnace to a Manhattan building which is in the process of being constructed. Despite the complexity of the composition, Boutet de Monvel skilfully creates a sense of rhythm and contrast between the more three-dimensional and dynamic rendering of the gas pipes and the cowpers in the left half of the composition, against the flatter depiction of the facades and recesses of the buildings on the right, which in turn, are broken up by the jolted rhythm of the spider-like crane arms and steel suspension ropes, which open out like a fan as they hoist up construction beams.
New York is, to our knowledge, the only study for this commission to exist on canvas. The urban landscape it depicts is nearly identical to the one that appears in the right half of the final version – though with a few variations. The most significant difference in the final work is the omission of the steel beams, which have been replaced with the delicate structures of long, slender cranes.
Unable to make the trip to New York to work in situ, Boutet de Monvel created the composition using a series of photographic images he had taken the previous year during his exploration of the city, which appeared to him as a futurist metropolis constantly in a state of flux. Despite this, the artist effortlessly recreates the cold crisp, bright light that falls upon the east side of the city, employing a fresh yet restrained palette constituting solely of tones of white, burnt umber and cobalt blue. The present work was the first in Boutet de Monvel’s New York landscapes executed between 1928 and 1932. Already, it is possible to see the artist beginning to experiment with elements such as the sense of perspective, flat planes of colour, and creating geometric motifs out of components such as the repetition of windows, resulting in a precisionist composition, which oscillates between hyperrealism and cubism.
Stéphane-Jacques Addade
Membre de la Chambre européenne des Experts d’Art
The artist took this commission as a mark of growing recognition of his talent as a decorative painter. Only two years earlier, in 1925, he had met with resounding success at the International Exhibition of Modern Decorative and Industrial Arts and held in Paris two years prior. (Boutet de Monvel was a member of the Compagnie des Arts Français, which had participated in the exhibition). He began to carry out preparatory studies and sketches for the work in as early as January 1928, to ensure that it would be ready for installation in the autumn of that year. The panel, a celebration of the American steel industry, depicts an allegorical scene of Abundance Feeding America's Children, against the backdrop of a train connecting a blast furnace to a Manhattan building which is in the process of being constructed. Despite the complexity of the composition, Boutet de Monvel skilfully creates a sense of rhythm and contrast between the more three-dimensional and dynamic rendering of the gas pipes and the cowpers in the left half of the composition, against the flatter depiction of the facades and recesses of the buildings on the right, which in turn, are broken up by the jolted rhythm of the spider-like crane arms and steel suspension ropes, which open out like a fan as they hoist up construction beams.
New York is, to our knowledge, the only study for this commission to exist on canvas. The urban landscape it depicts is nearly identical to the one that appears in the right half of the final version – though with a few variations. The most significant difference in the final work is the omission of the steel beams, which have been replaced with the delicate structures of long, slender cranes.
Unable to make the trip to New York to work in situ, Boutet de Monvel created the composition using a series of photographic images he had taken the previous year during his exploration of the city, which appeared to him as a futurist metropolis constantly in a state of flux. Despite this, the artist effortlessly recreates the cold crisp, bright light that falls upon the east side of the city, employing a fresh yet restrained palette constituting solely of tones of white, burnt umber and cobalt blue. The present work was the first in Boutet de Monvel’s New York landscapes executed between 1928 and 1932. Already, it is possible to see the artist beginning to experiment with elements such as the sense of perspective, flat planes of colour, and creating geometric motifs out of components such as the repetition of windows, resulting in a precisionist composition, which oscillates between hyperrealism and cubism.
Stéphane-Jacques Addade
Membre de la Chambre européenne des Experts d’Art