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Art, Essay, The City in Art

Organized Complexity | The City in Art

Kathleen Patrick’s In a Mellow Mood – Sax Solo, oil on canvas, 36″ x 48″, Chicago Museum of Contemporary Art.

Organized Complexity | The City in Art
by Dr. Mark David Major, AICP, CNU-A

Kathleen Patrick is best known for her late 20th-century urban scenes (usually of Chicago), whether wildly colored, energy filled abstracts or highly imaginative cityscapes. Her work strikes a balance between likeness and abstraction. These highly abstract works often contain some pictorial reference to cities and the cityscapes frequently exhibit whole areas, which read as abstracts. This creates a scale and a continuum of abstraction and representation intrinsic to the works of this artist (Source: Chicago Museum of Contemporary Art). Some examples of these abstract cityscapes are below.

Kathleen Patrick’s Chicago – (left to right) In the Afternoon, The City at Dusk, and In the Evening.

However, for this latest edition of The City in Art series, we have selected a painting by Kathleen Patrick that is not explicitly (at least, according to its title) about the city: In a Mellow Mood – Sax Solo (at the top of the page). It seems entirely appropriate – for an artist who has so often taken the cityscape of Chicago as a subject – that something of the urbane would find its way into her paintings about other subjects. This appears to happen in her painting, In a Mellow Mood – Sax Solo, which manages to capture in an abstract manner the “organized complexity” of the city once described by Jane Jacobs. In jazz, a rhythm and order emerge from what, at first hearing, is a seemingly discordant series of notes. Such as it is in the city, too. Patrick’s painting could easily be an impressionistic rendering from above of bodies in motion over time through an urban space or even a notional urban pattern. At first glance, it is seemingly chaotic. However, there is an order and a rhythm to be discovered amidst the chaos.

About Kathleen Patrick
Kathleen Patrick is a highly collected artist with both corporate and private collectors around the world. She has been represented by several major galleries in Southern California and has exhibited her work in the Chicago area for over ten years. Her works appear in the collections of Gucci, the Bank of America, the University of Illinois and the University of Wisconsin and hang in the Sears Tower, the John Hancock, and many other major buildings in the Chicago area. She includes among her influences the color and freedom of Chagall, the energy and passion of Van Gogh, and the spatial collage of time and space of Picasso (Source: Chicago Museum of Contemporary Art).

The City in Art is a series by The Outlaw Urbanist. The purpose is to present and discuss artistic depictions of the city that can help us, as professionals, learn to better see the city in ways that are invisible to others. Before the 20th century, most artistic representations of the city broadly fell into, more or less, three categories: literalism, pastoral romanticism, and impressionism, or some variation thereof. Generally, these artistic representations of the city lack a certain amount of substantive interest for the modern world. The City in Art series places particular emphasis on art and photography from the dawn of the 20th century to the present day.

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The Kinetic City | The City in Art

Olga Rozanova’s City (1916).

The Kinetic City | The City in Art
by Dr. Mark David Major, AICP, CNU-A

Olga Rozanova has been labeled a Futurist, a Cubo-Futurist, and Suprematist (focused on geometric forms and a limited range of colors, see Piet Mondrian’s Neo-Plasticism), all of which places her in the middle of the early 20th century Russian Avant Garde Movement. The number of works she completed is impressive both in terms of the quality, many of her abstracts are intricately beautiful, and quantity, given her untimely death at such a young age (see this Pinterest page). However, the quality and quantity of her work ultimately – and sadly – indicates her unfulfilled promise as an artist. Because of this, her contemporaries have largely overshadowed Rozanova.

Olga Rozanova’s City (1916) is a wonderful abstract painting, which takes the city as its subject. Her city is all kinetic energy, the canvas almost ‘alive’ with movement. Her painting builds on the Cubist tendency to compress time and space into a single glance at a subject, which conveys a plenitude of information to the viewer. This, in itself, builds on the earlier Impressionist technique, which included movement as a crucial element of human perception and experience in the painting. However, in the case of Cubism, it is not the movement of human perception that depicted in the painting but rather the movement and energy inherent in the subject itself across time and space, which is both compressed and captured in the representation. Olga Rozanova’s City is a brilliant look at all that is inherent in the city: people, buildings, movement, transportation, streets, setting, and light. The city she depicts is not an inanimate object but an animate organism worthy of our attention. I love this painting.

One of the few photographs of the Russian artist, Olga Rozanova.

About Olga Rozanova
Olga Rozanova (1886-1918) was born in 1886 in Malenki, Vladimir province in Russia. She trained at the Bolshakov Art School and the Stroganov School of Applied Art in Moscow. In 1911, she moved to St. Petersburg where she became an active member of the Union of Youth Group, exhibiting with them regularly from 1911 to 1914. She also attended the Zvantseva School of Art from 1912 to 1913. In 1912, Rozanova began illustrating books of Futurist poetry written by her husband, Aleksey Kruchonykh. She also wrote trans-rational Futurist verse (sound poetry), experimented with Cubism and Futurism in painting, produced abstract constructions, and created Suprematist embroidery and textile designs. By 1917, she had developed a completely individual abstract style of painting. After the Revolution in 1917, she supervised the reorganization of craft workshops in provincial towns. She died in Moscow on November 8, 1918, due to diphtheria at 32 years of age.

The City in Art is a series by The Outlaw Urbanist. The purpose is to present and discuss artistic depictions of the city that can help us, as professionals, learn to better see the city in ways that are invisible to others. Before the 20th century, most artistic representations of the city broadly fell into, more or less, three categories: literalism, pastoral romanticism, and impressionism, or some variation thereof. Generally, these artistic representations of the city lack a certain amount of substantive interest for the modern world. The City in Art series places particular emphasis on art and photography from the dawn of the 20th century to the present day.

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Form Arranged in Light | The City in Art

Georgia O’Keeffe’s Radiator Building – Night, New York (1927), oil on canvas, 48” x 30”, The Alfred Stieglitz Collection, Fisk University.

Form Arranged in Light | The City in Art
by Dr. Mark David Major, AICP, CNU-A

Many descriptions of Georgia O’Keeffe’s Radiator Building – Night, New York (1927) unduly focus on the expressed title and the (presumed) subject of the artwork itself. For example, “Towering above the viewer’s eyesight, the Radiator Building extends almost to the top of the work, illuminated in silhouette by its own lights and several spotlights that shoot into the black sky, giving it a slight red hue. Most of O’Keeffe’s paintings of New York City feature various skyscrapers of the city of the time, such as the Ritz Tower” (Source: Cultural Mechanism). Such descriptions are limited because they appear to be missing the point of O’Keeffe’s cityscape paintings. It seems likely this is not helped by O’Keeffe’s own vagueness on the subject of this painting (or her many others), saying she had “walked across 42nd Street many times at night when the black Radiator Building was new — so that had to be painted, too” (Source: Georgia O’Keeffe, Georgia O’Keeffe, New York: Penguin Books, 1976).

O’Keeffe is not painting a building. She is painting light and the form of the Radiator Building and surrounding cityscape emerges solely from the arrangement of light. We can say this with some confidence because if you were to remove all of the ‘painted light’ from this painting, only a black canvas would remain. It is this ‘painted light’ that provides a subtle richness and contextual depth to the best of O’Keeffe’s cityscape paintings. Later, we will see more explicit examples in her other paintings, for example in The Shelton with Sunspots (1926). In this sense, the subject is the artifice of form emerging from the arrangement of light. The fact the words ‘Radiator Building’ and ‘New York’ are in the title of the painting is completely inconsequential and accidental to the subject of the piece. It is also misleading on O’Keeffe’s part by naming the painting in this manner. However, this is completely consistent with her tendency to be opaque when it comes to the subject matter of her own paintings. As architects and planners, O’Keeffe’s painting shows us how we can expand our perception of the city beyond the conventional (form) to see its richness in other, more subtle – and, perhaps, richer – ways (light).

Georgia O’Keeffe by Alfred Stieglitz.

About Georgia O’Keeffe
Georgia O’Keeffe (1887-1986) was born in Sun Prairie, Wisconsin. She studied at the Art Institute of Chicago and the Art Students League in New York. She revolutionized modern art during her time and, in the present, she was the first female artist to have a retrospective show at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Her paintings vividly portrayed the power and emotion of objects in nature. Her charcoal drawings of silhouetted bud-like forms exhibited in 1916 first brought her fame. During the 1920s, she explored this theme in magnified paintings of flowers, which to this day enchant people amorously, although her purpose was to convey that nature in all its beauty was as powerful as the widespread industrialization of the period. After spending a summer in New Mexico, enthralled by the barren landscape and expansive skies of the desert, she would explore the subject of animal bones in her paintings during the 1930s and 1940s. Just as with the flowers, she painted the bones magnified to capture the stillness and remoteness of them, while at the same time expressing a sense of beauty within the desert. O’Keeffe was married to the pioneer photographer Alfred Stieglitz (1864-1946) in 1924. It was at his famed New York art gallery “291” that her charcoal drawings were first exhibited in 1916. The union lasted 22 years until Stieglitz’s death. O’Keeffe was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters, awarded the Gold Medal of Painting by the National Institute of Arts and Letters and Medal of Freedom (the United States’ highest civilian honor). In 1985, President Reagan presented to her the National Medal of Arts. She died March 6, 1986, at the age of 98 in Sante Fe, New Mexico (Source: Women in History).

The City in Art is a series by The Outlaw Urbanist. The purpose is to present and discuss artistic depictions of the city that can help us, as professionals, learn to better see the city in ways that are invisible to others. Before the 20th century, most artistic representations of the city broadly fell into, more or less, three categories: literalism, pastoral romanticism, and impressionism, or some variation thereof. Generally, these artistic representations of the city lack a certain amount of substantive interest for the modern world. The City in Art series places particular emphasis on art and photography from the dawn of the 20th century to the present day.

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All That Floats | The City in Art

Rene Magritte’s Golconda (1953), oil on canvas, 100 x 81 cm, Menil Collection, Houston, Texas, USA.

All That Floats | The City in Art
by Dr. Mark David Major, AICP, CNU-A

The Social Logic of Space (1984) by Bill Hillier and Julienne Hanson.

The selection of Rene Magritte’s Golconda (1953) for The City in Art series is a direct homage to Bill Hillier and Julienne Hanson’s The Social Logic of Space (1984), which famously used Magritte’s Golconda for its cover (see right). The piece depicts a scene of nearly identical men dressed in dark overcoats and bowler hats, who seem to be drops of heavy rain against a backdrop of buildings and blue sky (or to be floating like helium balloons, though there is no actual indication of motion). The latter is our preferred interpretation: hot air rises. These men are full of hot air because of their conformist nature, which causes them to float. The men are spaced in hexagonal grids facing the viewpoint and receding back in grid layers. Charly Herscovici, who was bequeathed copyright to the artist’s works, commented on Golconda: “Magritte was fascinated by the seductiveness of images. Ordinarily, you see a picture of something and you believe in it, you are seduced by it; you take its honesty for granted. But Magritte knew that representations of things can lie. These images of men aren’t men, just pictures of them, so they don’t have to follow any rules. This painting is fun, but it also makes us aware of the falsity of representation.” Another interpretation is Magritte is demonstrating the line between individuality and group association, and how it is blurred. All of these men are dressed the same, with the same bodily features and all are floating/falling. This leaves us to look at the men as a group (Source: Wikipedia).

Mm, why might this be important when it comes to the subject of city planning, we pointedly ask? The use of Magritte’s Golconda for the cover of The Social Logic of Space is reminiscent of Jean Baudrillard’s quote in America (1982) that “space is what prevents everything from being in the same place.” However, it seems unlikely this was Magritte’s original intention since the buildings appear to be firmly anchored to the (unseen) ground outside the plane of the canvas. It is also interesting that the architecture in the painting can be characterized as equally conformist like the men in bowler hats. In any case, it is somewhat whimsical to take both Magritte and Baudrillard in tandem to suggest rather, it is gravity (of Nature, of the person, etc.) that keeps everything from floating away. Magritte’s Golconda is a wonderful painting precisely because of the obscurity of its real meaning about people and architecture.

About Rene Magritte
René François Ghislain Magritte (November 21, 1898–August 15, 1967) was a Belgian surrealist artist best known for witty, thought-provoking images and the use of simple graphics and everyday objects, thereby giving new meanings to familiar things. Magritte studied at the Académie des Beaux-Arts in Brussels from 1916 to 1918. Before finding success as an artist, Magritte designed wallpaper and advertisements. After a poorly received solo show in 1927, he moved to Paris and became involved with the surrealist movement. His surrealist style is mysterious and full of magic, created by combining realistic depictions of everyday objects in discrepancy with the known in perceiving everyday life. Magritte diverges proportions and changes the image’s texture. He combines real objects with abstract figurations. His most famous painting “La trahison des images” (Betrayal of the Images) (1929) shows a pipe with the words “Ceci n’est pas une pipe” (This is not a pipe) next to it. René Magritte died in Brussels on August 15, 1967 (Source: Wikipedia/Art Directory).

The City in Art is a series by The Outlaw Urbanist. The purpose is to present and discuss artistic depictions of the city that can help us, as professionals, learn to better see the city in ways that are invisible to others. Before the 20th century, most artistic representations of the city broadly fell into, more or less, three categories: literalism, pastoral romanticism, and impressionism, or some variation thereof. Generally, these artistic representations of the city lack a certain amount of substantive interest for the modern world. The City in Art series places particular emphasis on art and photography from the dawn of the 20th century to the present day.

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Buildings in Motion | The City in Art

Rejcel Harbert’s The Blue City (2012), 22″ x 28″, acrylic on stretched canvas, private collection.

Buildings in Motion | The City in Art
By Dr. Mark David Major, AICP, CNU-A

The city is always in motion. Generally, this statement is understood by professionals to refer to movement through urban space at street level (pedestrians, automobiles, and so forth) and/or the outward physical growth of the city in plan. However, the city is also – and always – in motion at its vertical dimension. It is not merely the movement of people and things vertically across interior elevations (such as elevators) but the buildings themselves move and, metaphorically speaking, grow. A structural engineer understands the need to account for wind shear in building structures, especially the taller the building. Anyone who has worked in and/or visited a skyscraper will have probably experienced the phenomenon of wind shear motion in that building, if only on a barely perceptible level. However, in a metaphorical sense, the buildings of the city are also ‘growing’ as new and higher buildings are erected over time. Harbert paints the buildings much like trees bending against a strong wind, providing a counter-motion horizontally, but also sprouting ever-upwards in a counter-motion against gravity associated with the plane of the ground. In The Blue City (2012), the ground plane is not represented by the solidity of terra firma but the fluidity of a nurturing water, which anchors the buildings much like water feeding the roots of trees. This gives the abstraction a dynamic and organic quality not normally associated with the vertical dimension of the city.

There is an eternal attribute about the city that Harbert captures in depicting a waterfront city at dusk. The onset of dusk is indicated both by the colors of the painting’s background and the use of white in representing the internal lights of the buildings, much in the same way as Georgia O’Keefe’s Radiator Building-Night, New York (1927). In The Blue City, the lights of the city buildings are abstractly reflected in the water at the base of the painting. There is a vibrancy of color contrasted between the upper (reds, browns, and greens) and lower portions (blues, whites, and greens) of the painting. The Blue City reminds us in an abstracted form that the city is always in motion in every dimension (length, width, breadth – the horizontal and vertical – and time itself). In this sense, Harbert captures something about the eternal dynamic of motion in the city. When it comes to the existential being of the city, we may not see it from afar – for example, as we gaze at the skyline of a city – but motion is an essential fact of the thing itself.

BIAS ALERT: I own this painting. I love it so much that I bought it for my private collection. Rejcel usually writes a short description of her paintings on www.rejcel.com but she has not done so for The Blue City. However, when I purchased the painting in 2012, I do recall her telling me the image for The Blue City came to her after a dream.

About Rejcel Harbert
Rejcel Harbert has over eight years of experience as the owner of Art by Rejcel, where she sells photographic services, paintings, and abstract and expressionistic acrylic arts. She received her bachelor of arts in business, economics, and Spanish from Jacksonville University in 2001. She is a member of the Business Fraternity Alpha Kappa Psi, the Honor Society Phi Kappa Phi, and received an award from the Women’s Business Organization for Achievement. Ms. Harbert does religious volunteer work including construction and repair work for community members in need. For more information on Art by Rejcel, visit www.rejcel.com.

The City in Art is a series by The Outlaw Urbanist. The purpose is to present and discuss artistic depictions of the city that can help us, as professionals, learn to better see the city in ways that are invisible to others. Before the 20th century, most artistic representations of the city broadly fell into, more or less, three categories: literalism, pastoral romanticism, and impressionism, or some variation thereof. Generally, these artistic representations of the city lack a certain amount of substantive interest for the modern world. The City in Art series places particular emphasis on art and photography from the dawn of the 20th century to the present day.

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