Artist/Maker
Richard Haas
(born 1936)
View of 55th and Fifth
1977
Watercolor and graphite on paper
18 3/4 x 22 3/4 in.
Promised gift of Elie and Sarah Hirschfeld, Scenes of New York City
IL2021.51.110
Growing up in Spring Green, Wisconsin—site of architect Frank Lloyd Wright’s Taliesin home and school, where the artist’s uncle was a stonemason—Richard John Haas became understandably transfixed by architecture. Following graduate studies, Haas taught art for over ten years, and then in 1979 gave up teaching full-time to pursue a career as a large-scale muralist of urban architectural vistas. Two years earlier he painted this watercolor.
Precise draftsmanship and meticulous watercolor technique join remarkable skill with linear perspective in View of 55th and Fifth. The artist’s vantage point is from a rooftop on West Fifty-sixth Streetlooking southeast toward Fifth Avenue. At the center is the NeoGothic spire of the Fifth Avenue Presbyterian Church (1875); and at the left, on the southeast corner of Fifth Avenue, rises John Jacob Astor IV’s luxury, French Beaux-Arts–style St. Regis Hotel (1901–04). It stands at the beginning of the area formerly known as Millionaires’ Row, named for the now-demolished mansions that once flanked the avenue. To the right of the spire, on the southwest corner of Fifty-fifth Street and Fifth Avenue, is the elegant, Italian Renaissance–style hotel the Gotham (1905). The Gilded Age property changed hands many times until 1988, when the Peninsula Group purchased it, renovated it, and renamed the five-star hotel the Peninsula.
Haas painted his first mural in 1975—at the intersection of Prince and Greene streets in the SoHo area of Manhattan. Soon thereafter, he changed his professional focus to the challenging mural genre, and turned from Mid-Manhattan subjects to painting on the façades of the nineteenth-century, cast-iron industrial buildings in SoHo.
Over the years, Haas has completed over 120 murals in an ultra-realist style. They enshrine his obsession with monumental architecture and embellish the interiors and exteriors of public and private buildings. Many showcase his specialty: trompe-l’oeil paintings that create fictive “openings” on blank walls, like the pair of doors for a private interior that appear to be glass, with a view toward St. Patrick’s Cathedral past the iconic Art Deco sculpture of Atlas holding up the world by Lee Lawrie and Rene Chambellan. For that commission, the artist assumed a droll vantage point inside the doors of the Rockefeller Center complex on Fifth Avenue between Fiftieth and Fifty-first streets. Building on Italian art’s illusionistic fresco tradition for animating extensive blank surfaces, he has brought that idiom into the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. His fool-theeye paintings revitalize buildings in eroding city centers by creating life-size “false façades” that seamlessly blend into the existing urban environment. Today, his murals can be seen in cities across the U.S. BREAK Haas works in many media, including paintings, watercolors, and prints. View of 55th and Fifth has a dialogue with a large number of the artist’s works held by the N-YHS. They include twenty-eight monumental oil paintings (1982) that once opened up the basement of the employee cafeteria of the Philip Morris Company, now known as Altria, to a fictive 360-degree City vista. The Historical Society also holds his maquettes for this circular panorama, an additional painting, eleven watercolors, and two prints.
COMMUNITY VOICE
A layered glimpse of midtown Manhattan, captured from a rooftop. A brownstone church, a row of townhouses, two Fifth Avenue hotels, several 1920s office towers.
So much to process and discover. Where to begin?
Matthew A. Postal
Architectural historian
ClassificationsDRAWINGS
Collections
- Scenes of New York City: The Elie and Sarah Hirschfeld Collection
