Press Release

What Goes Up Must Come Down: Order and Disorder: Architectural Transitions in Prints and Photographs on View Through April 3

The crumbling ruins of an 1871 complex of row houses in Paris and a brave construction worker atop a girder suspended above a 1930s New York are among the images in Order and Disorder: Architectural Transitions in Prints and Photographs, an exhibition at The New York Public Library depicting the constantly changing manmade environment. Prints by artists such as Joseph Pennell and Jacob Kainen and photographs by Lewis Hine and Walker Evans -- drawn entirely from The New York Public Library's Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Division of Art, Prints and Photographs --  provide fascinating juxtapositions of the life cycles of built structures. Order and Disorder opened January 30, 1999, at The New York Public Library's Humanities and Social Sciences Library, Fifth Avenue and 42nd Street, and will remain on view through April 3, 1999. Admission is free.

Prints
One half of Order and Disorder consists of 61 prints dating from the early 20th century to the present which illustrate the construction of homes and office buildings, and the destruction of older edifices, sometimes by design, occasionally by accident. A twentieth-century phenomenon, the skyscraper, especially in New York City, is particularly well represented in Frank Nankivell's and Joseph Pennell's atmospheric, romantic depictions of these behemoths. Prints by Benton Spruance, David Burke, and Blendon Campbell, present a more clear-eyed, realistic view of the city undergoing transformation. But such activity is not unique to urban centers: it shapes suburban and rural worlds as well, as in Rockwell Kent's print of a builder at rest, and Jacob Kainen's vision of a community devastated by a flood.

The construction and destruction of the transportation lifelines of the city ? bridges, subways, and ships ? have also been a focus for printmakers. Depictions by Louis Lozowick and Gottlob Briem of the massive towers of the George Washington Bridge celebrate impressive early twentieth-century engineering efforts. Streets in chaos, excavated for subway and sewer projects, as captured by Abbo Ostrowsky and Saul Berman, contrast with Jack Markow's image of deserted, derelict elevated tracks, made obsolete by the advent of the subway. Patriotism may have inspired Thornton Oakley's wartime lithograph of a ship under construction, while John Alexander Noble shows a crew at work dismantling a ship.

Printmakers working under the auspices of the Federal Art Project of the Works Progress Administration, such as Margaret Lowengrund and Hugh Botts, recorded the cycles of growth and decay during the Depression. Transformations of the built environment still fascinate comtemporary artists, such as Frederick W. Mershimer, and those with a realist bent continue to record the ever-changing scenes.

Photographs
Since its introduction in 1839, photography has had a natural affinity with architecture. Because of the extended exposure times required by mid-nineteenth-century emulsions, edifices were easier to record than activity; space could be captured more gracefully than movement. Architectural photography is well represented in the collections of The New York Public Library. The 97 photographs on display in Order and Disorder  range from examples spanning the 1850s to 1998. Nineteenth-century photographs include views of ancient ruins by Maxime Du Camp, Francis Frith, and Désiré Charnay to the government-commissioned photographs by Édouard Baldus that record the birth of the modern city in the reconfiguration of Paris in the 1850s. The twentieth century saw the apotheosis of urban modernism in the construction of New York City's skyscrapers, captured in the 1930s in the heroic images of Lewis Hine and in the 1970s in the ominous profiles of Todd Watts.

Disaster, war, and the passage of time impose their own alterations of the human landscape. Glimpses of the resulting devastation include scenes from the battlefields of the American Civil War by Alexander Gardner, the aftermath of the San Francisco earthquake and fire of 1906 by George Knight, and Farm Security images of the Depression-era South by Walker Evans. Camilo Vergara's bleak view of the Camden Public Library in the 1980s shows us a more contemporary ruin, rendered especially poignant by its juxtaposition with photographs of the construction of The New York Public Library at Fifth Avenue and 42nd Street, exhibiting turn-of-the-century optimism.

All the prints and photographs in the exhibition are drawn from the Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Division of Art, Prints and Photographs. The curators for the exhibition are Margaret Glover (prints) and Sharon Frost  (photography). This exhibition has been made possible through the continuing generosity of Miriam and Ira D. Wallach.
 

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The exhibition Order and Disorder: Architectural Transitions in Prints and Photographs is on view from January 30 through April 3, 1999, in the Print and Stokes Galleries on the third floor of The New York Public Library's Humanities and Social Sciences Library, Fifth Avenue and 42nd Street. Exhibition hours are Tuesday and Wednesday, 11 a.m. - 7:30 p.m., and Monday, Thursday thrugh Saturday, 10 a.m. - 6 p.m. (Closed Sunday.) Admission is free. This website has more information about events and exhibitions at The New York Public Library; or please call (212) 869-8089.

Image at top: Tower Under Construction, Washington Bridge NYC, n.d., etching.by Gottlob Briem (1899-1972). Rights and permissions.
 

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