Life Under the El, The Bronx
Scenes of a Self-Taught Artist’s Youth
— A mother strolls across Tremont Avenue in the Bronx with her baby-blue baby carriage.
— A man walks his dog under the marquee of a movie house showing Dark Passage, the 1947 Bogie/Bacall classic.
— A young boy pulls on his mother carting her groceries on their way home under the elevated train or “el,” as a fish truck comes rattling toward them.
These are the narrative highlights of this remarkable triptych of paintings, from the late-1960s when Stephen Brophy was still a relatively young artist. They show his growing interest in capturing scenes of everyday, observable life, whether set in the city of his youth or the country of his later life.
We see ordinary people as if surveyed from some high vantage point, going about their business amid shops, work vehicles, residential buildings. All part of a vivid tapestry of street life, but painted of an earlier, probably idealized time — some decades before. Steve was born in 1940. I can only guess that this is the Bronx he remembered from his childhood.
Putting it all together.
Yet, from the beginning, Steve strove to attain something more than the realistic depiction of what he observed. His work can be read on many levels that are more and less tangible. They represent his world view at the time he painted them. And both the man and the art take quite a trip.
Steve had no formal arts education. He was self-taught by reading art books and mags and, time to time, learning from other artists. Later, when we talked about art and visited museums and galleries together, I often wondered at this early and somewhat isolated pursuit of his — I wanted to better understand what motivated him and who influenced him.
Life Under the El reveals sources both urban and rural, from Steve’s century and what preceded it. So it’s a good “study” work to get at the 30 years of artmaking that came after. Besides the utter charm of the paintings, they tell a story of his homage to the art and artists he loved. They were his mentors.
Learning from the masters.
Here are just a few stabs at artists I think may have influenced Steve, because, in reality, I can’t really know for sure at this early point in his career:
— Perhaps the work of the Ash Can School, in an artist like John Sloan, who depicted early 20th-century life in some of NYC’s poorest neighborhoods. While Sloan may have wanted his art to bring attention to social ills, Steve was more interested in the way contemporary subject matter could uncover the memories, references and symbols of one’s own life.
— Or, perhaps he was looking to more rural antecedents: like Thomas Hart Benton’s WPA-era scenes or Grant Wood’s iconic American Gothic of 1930. Their brand of Depression-era, anti-modernist American art was surely more sophisticated than it might seem (Benton was Pollock’s teacher, after all) —with the immediacy, energy and staying power of any good art.
— Leaping back to another century and country, there’s no doubt some affinity with the naturalism and humor of the Dutch Renaissance master Pieter Brueghel. Steve may have admired Brueghel’s ability to look down on a busy scene and give it to you straight, without sentimentality or high moral judgment. The great Peasant Wedding of 1566–69 is just one example.
— Finally, while Steve told me he wasn’t familiar with German Expressionist Franz Marc, just checking out Blue Horse I of 1911 showed Steve that he shared an affinity for Marc’s use of bold, primary colors. And like Marc, Steve’s talent and confidence as a young artist were already evident in the way his own color so brightly animates Life Under the El.
Like I say, a lot of this is guesswork. Once I entered his life, I knew the artists he studied. His books on his favorites, Paul Cézanne and Henri Matisse, to name the biggies, were well dogeared and coffee stained. Under their tutelage, his art would shift dramatically. But that was later.
Steve meant for the paintings to be seen together. Here they are in single file, for the detail:
And so far I’ve found one of the original drawings. Here it is:
One final note: and I credit this comment with an insight from a reader (okay, my brother) about how the paintings seem “rural” — that is, not the populous scenes one would expect of a busy Bronx street in the late 1940s (dated by the Bogie film being shown). This preparatory drawing shows a grittier city. More claustrophic space, more traffic, something more immediate about the man looking in the shop window with a sale sign. I keep learning.