Manhattans, Sweet & Dry

At moments, when the sun or street light hits it right, New York City has a unique beauty which U.S. painters have tried time & again to catch. Last week, as a part of New York's Golden Anniversary celebration as a five-borough city, Manhattan galleries were exhibiting portraits of the city by some of its admirers.

Most artists had been content to sketch typical New York scenes--Central Park, Times Square--in gay or dramatic lights. Others had hoped to do for Manhattan what Pissarro did for Paris, Guardi for Venice and Whistler for London. Among those who had made the difficult attempt to discover Manhattan's essential qualities and translate them into art, at least four had partially succeeded:

John Sloan, 77, who has spent the past 20 years painting red-striped nudes in a downtown studio, remembers pre-Prohibition Manhattan as being "sweet . . . sweet and sad," and that was how he painted it. For him the canyon-like streets flowed with pretty girls and hurrying men--a warm swirl of humanity that his quick brush (trained for newspaper illustration in the days before news photography), caught in full flood. At night he painted Manhattan's vast, far sparkle, and did it tenderly enough to make onlookers sense the million lives behind the million lights.

Georgia O'Keeffe spends half of each year in Manhattan and the other six months in New Mexico's canyon country --an equally steep and angular land. She has painted both homes with appropriate simplicity. Her Manhattan oils (many of them done from a window of the midtown Hotel Shelton) were pavement-hard and needle-sharp.

Edward Hopper's Manhattan canvases all looked as if they had been painted on a Sunday morning when few were up yet or else late at night. The few figures he did introduce looked stiff and lonely; they were transients, put there to emphasize the frozen rigor of the streets and buildings Hopper loves. At 66, in his deceptively simple pictures, he has done more than any other painter to define the beauty of Manhattan's steel, brick and brownstone shell.

Reginald Marsh had looked at the people, not the architecture. The bald, bull-necked Yale graduate who says "Well-bred people are no fun to paint," made his beat the Bowery, the burlesque shows, and raucous Coney Island, painted it with a Hogarthian incisiveness and strength.

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