The Light and Dark City
in the Tremaine Collection

An unusual aspect of the Tremaine collection of modern art was that it had a recurring motif of the city. It was not as if Emily Hall Tremaine covered her walls with urban landscapes in the same way a collector of seascapes covered her walls with ships. The city motif was subtle, in alignment with Tremaine’s interest in the architectonic and her regard for the real city of crowded streets, neon signs, and shoeshine stands. Windward by Robert Rauschenberg is an example with its dynamic imagery of factories, skyscrapers, even an eagle.

While the city motif did not dominate the collection, it provided a unique cohesiveness. The motif first appeared in 1944 with the acquisition of Piet Mondrian’s incomparable Victory Boogie-Woogie, a geometric abstraction of a jubilating New York City alive with musical rhythm. Convinced that the painting was vital to the future of art, Tremaine made a lifelong effort to invite artists to see and study it. Jasper Johns recalled that when he was young Tremaine showed him Victory Boogie-Woogie and Premier Disque by Robert Delaunay. Initially, he was not impressed but then he changed his mind. “The Delaunay and the Mondrian became extraordinary paintings.”

When Mondrian arrived in New York City in 1940, he was entranced by the robust verticality of the skyscrapers as well as the city’s grid pattern with some streets in shadow while others were in sunlight. It was as if his artistic vision had become real. He felt free of the oppressive wartime fear that engulfed Europe. He also felt free of the great weight of European art and architectural history. Jean Arp who visited New York City in 1949 expressed the same feelings. “On my second visit, New York made a deep impression on me. It is a vast, wild city in which high-rises shoot into the sky like abundant tropical vegetation.”

Burton and Emily Tremaine shared that excitement. In a 1969 interview for Vogue Magazine with Gene Baro, a curator and art journalist, they spoke about returning from Europe and being struck by New York’s vitality. “They had arrived this way often, but this time they became particularly aware of the city, its glittering sprawl at a distance. It seemed a new, living thing, an embodiment of force. Later, as they drove toward midtown, the darting yellow taxis, the demanding billboards and throbbing neon seemed to them emblematic of a way of life. After the somberness of Europe, where they had just been, these things proclaimed America, her energy and directness.”

There was also Paul Klee’s Structural II. A teacher at the Bauhaus in Germany in the 1920s, Klee envisioned in the painting an overview of architecture from Germanic timber houses to a Moorish onion dome, connected by bridges and arches accentuated by night. Two other aspects of the city motif—darkness and stillness, point toward Tremaine herself, an enigmatic person whose connection with art was deep and spiritual. She often quoted Aristotle, “The aim of art is to represent not the outward appearance of things but their inward significance; for this and not the external mannerism and detail is their reality.”

Over the years the Tremaines acquired many works that conveyed darkness and stillness, among them New York Night (aka City Night) by Georgia O’Keeffe with its soaring skyscrapers angling over an empty street lit by a single lamp. There was also the Moon Garden Series by Louise Nevelson that felt like a vast necropolis in moonlight. On a scrap of paper probably written in the 1950s, Nevelson jotted down several titles such as Portrait of a City at Night, Savage Majesty, Floating City, The City that Turned Black at Noon, and the City in the Sea. (See also “More Than the Sum of Its Parts: Louise Nevelson and Emily Hall Tremaine”.)

There was also Fragment for the Gates to Times Square by Chryssa with its blue neon lights within a Plexiglas box meant to be viewed after dark. In 1966, Chryssa completed The Gates to Times Square, a large work (12 x 12 feet) owned by the Albright-Knox Art Gallery in Buffalo, NY. Then she created smaller works called fragments in which the neon blinked in unpredictable ways as if trying to send a message without anything to say. If city gates implied triumphal arches, then Chryssa’s fragments pointed to the diminishment of what once had been victorious.

Yet all was not dark and foreboding. There was also the vibrant city in full thrumming daylight. Part of Tremaine’s attraction to pop art was the realization that the artists were awake to what they saw on the city streets. This began when she saw Claes Oldenburg’s 7-UP at the Green Gallery and decided she and Burton had to visit Oldenburg’s store-front studio. The taxi-driver dropped them off at the wrong location which led to an eye-opening stroll.

“We lost our way and looking for the address we walked through the whole-sale district where brides’ dresses are sold, and the windows were full of them. Then we turned a corner onto Second Avenue and as we walked up the avenue toward the street where Oldenburg had his store, we passed a mission on the roof of which was a cross and crown. We passed a restaurant with pies in the window. Just before we got to the store, there was a youngster with an improvised shoeshine stand. He had written out in pencil “fifteen cents.”

“The first thing we saw when we entered the Ray Gun Store was a bride made in the same plaster and enamel as the 7-UP we had seen at Dick Bellamy’s Green Gallery. There were also plaster cakes, pies and things that were in the window of the restaurant and the cross and crown we had seen on top of the mission, and I immediately remembered a collage I had seen at the Green Gallery in which Oldenburg had used the 7-UP, a piece of cake and a fifteen cent sign. Of course, I bought this collage as soon as I got back to the Green Gallery and I also bought the 7-UP plaster relief. Having gotten lost was, I am sure, a great help in showing us at once what was going on.”

Sinjerli Variation IV by Frank Stella entered the collection in 1970. The name referred to a temple in an ancient Mesopotamian city, yet the painting also hinted at the intricacy of Islamic art. A large tondo ten feet in diameter, when it was exhibited at the Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartford, Connecticut it was given its own wall to which it drew all eyes. While conjuring up the circular layout of a city, it also had about it the energy of an urban traffic circle with roads entering and exiting. If Nevelson’s Moon Garden suggested a city in darkness, Stella’s suggested a city in fluorescence.

In 1984 the Tremaines acquired Venus by the graffiti artist Jean-Michel Basquiat. Always on the lookout for new talent, Tremaine turned her attention to the work of 24-year-old Basquiat. An anatomical female torso, a building labeled “the great circle,” geometrical diagrams, scribbled words such as radium and asbestos, a waving dark figure—all added up to an edgy urban world. (See The Emily Files, “Graffiti Art, Detritus, and Social Provocation.”)

As Venus makes clear, the city motif was both positive and negative. Even in seemingly optimistic and patriotic works in the collection there was often a mordant quality. For example, Rauschenberg’s Windward showed broken windows, smokestacks, and dripped paint that occluded the Statue of Liberty as if in a cloud of smoke. Ultimately the city’s bright and dark aspects merged, with darkness splintered by light, and light fractured by darkness.