Artist/Maker Ben Benn (American, born Ukraine, 1884 – 1983)

Landscape, Staten Island, N.Y.

1920

Oil on canvas

Unframed: 16 × 20 in. (40.6 × 50.8 cm)
Framed: 20 1/2 × 24 5/8 in. (52.1 × 62.5 cm)

Promised gift of Elie and Sarah Hirschfeld, Scenes of New York City

IL2021.51.43

Ben Benn (originally Benjamin Rosenberg) was born on December 27, 1884, when Czar Alexander III ruled Russia with a heavy hand and his anti-Jewish policies resulted in widespread pogroms against the Jews. At the age of nine, Benn and his family fled Podolia, Russia and arrived in New York on the Fourth of July, 1894. Between 1904 and 1908 Benn attended art classes at the NAD in New York. There he befriended young fellow artists William Zorach and Leon Kroll, who also went on to successful careers as painters. During the Gilded Age American industrialists were spending their fortunes on the finest European Old Master paintings they could find. The new century, however, opened with a rebellion in America as the painters of the so-called Ashcan School pioneered more mundane images of the City, such as immigrant children playing, summer in the tenements on the Lower East Side, or young women shopping or doing household chores. Although more revolutionary than the art of the 1890s in America, Ashcan images still lacked the bold experiment with form and color of contemporary European painting. While Benn had not visited western European capitals, he was aware of modern initiatives and probably saw them at Alfred Stieglitz’s avant-garde gallery 291 or in the 1913 Armory Show. By the early teens Benn’s world encompassed many of the most avant-garde artists and thinkers in New York, people whom he met at the Modern School where he took classes and exhibited, and where he associated with such notable artists as Man Ray, Abraham Walkowitz, and Max Weber; journalist Hutchins Hapgood; and poet Alfred Kreymborg. In 1916 Benn was part of the “Forum Exhibition of Modern American Painters,” the American modernists’ answer to the Armory Show, which Europeans dominated. In the catalogue he wrote that the modern masters opened his eyes “to the necessity for something of more permanent value—interdependence of parts . . . [and] pattern . . . and rhythm to unite these elements.” By 1920, the year he painted Landscape, Staten Island, N.Y., Benn’s artistic style was well established. The broad swaths of color, learned at the NAD, define Staten Island’s topography. Nevertheless, the more modernist patterns of landscape, with trees and fields building up from the fore- and middle grounds, relate to Cezanne's images of mountain landscapes. Staten Island had become a borough of New York City in 1894, and during the next twenty-odd years its population grew, especially with the large influx of immigrants who settled on the island. As seen in the rolling hills set against a mountain in the background of Benn’s painting, they found a surfeit of bucolic spaces. Regular ferry services to Staten Island also made it convenient for commuters to the City, as well as an appealing get-away spot for those seeking an escape from the din of Manhattan—a peaceful place so well represented by Benn in this image.

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