The fascination of artists and photographers with the city of New York is — in architectural terms — a bit inexplicable.
Chicago always has been visually unique among cities in that its extraordinary architecture set so spaciously along its lakeshore presents one with a feeling of a vast architectural exposition.
The buildings can be admired (or not) and photographed singly. But the entire sweep of the skyline can be taken in as well from numerous vantage points.
With its mass and density, the buildings and skyline of New York are elusive to the eye and lens. The whole is seen not as the sum but as glimpses of its parts. It may be one of the reasons so many paintings and photos of the city are more of people in the streets rather than the buildings that line them.
The Museum of the City of New York has just prepared two exhibitions that for the first time in my experience as a former and now part-time New Yorker give one the same sense of the city one would obtain on an architectural walk of Chicago.
Both manage that in large part by reducing people to minimal, incidental figures or eliminating them from the scenes entirely, lending the iconic subjects and settings an oddly ethereal aura.
“The Mythic City: New York, Photographs by Samuel Gottscho 1925-1940,” which runs Nov. 1 through Feb. 20, is a show of 130 images by a Brooklyn-born architectural photographer whose specialty was portraits of the city.
They are unique not only in the artistry of sun, shadow, and (in the nocturnes) city light, but in their ability to capture a Chicagoesque sweep of the skyline: the East River shoreline as seen from Queens from beneath the Queensboro Bridge, the Chrysler Building from the vantage point of the Empire State Building, the Art Deco facades of 5th Avenue shops and, of course, Rockefeller Center.
“New York,” wrote F. Scott Fitzgerald in “The Great Gatsby,” “seen from the Queensboro Bridge, is always the city seen for the first time, in its first wild promise of the mystery and the beauty of the world.”
Gottscho captures that.
Also, though they were taken during the most desperate depths of the Great Depression, Gottscho’s pictures contain none of that. As the exhibition’s title implies, this is an idealized city, seen not in economic collapse but in grandeur.
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“Still New York: Watercolors by Frederick Brosen,” which opens a week later on Nov. 8 and remains on view through Feb. 26, presents 18 idealized works by the artist of almost photographic realism that were completed in the last decades of the 20th Century.
A Pratt Art Institute graduate, Brosen transcends mere architectural rendering and produces, like Gottscho, a dreamlike appreciation of the city.
Brosen brings us mansions, the great bridges, historic buildings and favorite old streets, all with a sense of awe.
Brosen’s is a grimeless, peaceful, unhurried New York. The use of the term “Still” in the exhibition’s title is doubly apt, for there is an uncanny stillness to every scene — even, amazingly, one of a normally swarmed-over Chinatown street.
“It is fitting that this museum will be the first to present Rick Brosen’s watercolors,” said museum director Susan Henshaw Jones. “A true son of the city who celebrates every urban detail from the most lavish and opulent landmarks to our most humble, neglected curbsides, Rick Brosen paints with exquisite virtuosity. He is an artist who helps us see anew the treasure that surrounds us.”
It would be fascinating to see what either would do with Chicago, but, upon reflection, one suspects it would not be the same.
The Museum of the City of New York’s Web site is www.mcny.org.
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