© 2022 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris

Artist/Maker Marcel Gromaire (French, 1892 – 1971)

Queensboro Bridge

1951

Watercolor and black ink on paper

Unframed: 13 × 17 in. (33 × 43.2 cm)
Framed: 22 1/8 × 27 in. (56.2 × 68.6 cm)

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

IL2021.51.58

In 1950, the year before he created this watercolor, French artist Marcel Gromaire traveled to the United States to serve on the jury for the first Carnegie Prize offered by Pittsburgh’s Carnegie Museum of Art after the World War II hiatus. During his sojourn, he visited New York City and executed works recording his stay; the following year he exhibited ten paintings and ten watercolors of New York, including Queensboro Bridge, at the Galerie Louis Carré in Paris. Among the other subjects in this series were the Brooklyn Bridge, Central Park, and Times Square at night. In 1952, Gromaire was awarded a Carnegie Prize, followed by a Guggenheim International Award in 1956, after which he was made a commander of the Légion d’honneur. The artist, who is known for his watercolors, paintings, and prints, also participated in the artistic revival of Aubusson tapestries. In Queensboro Bridge, Gromaire emphasizes the structure’s imposing presence, infused with the sublimity of the etchings of Giovanni Battista Piranesi, by employing emphatic strokes, which betray knowledge of Abstract Expressionism, to define its massive spans. His vantage point is from below the Manhattan approach, looking toward Queens, with the bridge’s five spans impossibly foreshortened toward the horizon. A tugboat passing below one span emits a swirling column of smoke that rises in semicircles of calligraphy and communicates the artist’s excitement about the City. Gromaire’s vessel is similar to the one in Hayley Lever’s earlier work. The Frenchman’s style—with its spidery lines and patches of brushwork in watercolor washes—is typica of many representational artists in the late 1940s and 1950s who were grappling with the challenges of Abstract Expressionism. Gromaire’s subject is also known as the 59th Street Bridge, because its Manhattan end falls between Fifty-ninth and Sixtieth streets; in 2011, the structure was officially named the Ed Koch Queensboro Bridge after the City’s former mayor. Completed in 1909, it connects the borough of Queens with the Upper East Side of Manhattan, passing over Roosevelt Island (formerly Blackwell’s Island). It is the northernmost of four toll-free East River bridges, along with the Williamsburg, Manhattan, and Brooklyn bridges. Henry Hornbostel was the architect of the two-level, doublecantilever bridge over channels on each side of Roosevelt Island. The Queensboro Bridge is a cultural icon, which has caught the imagination of many artists including George Bellows. In F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, as Jay Gatsby and Nick Caraway traverse the bridge, Nick remarks that Manhattan seen from the bridge is “always the city seen for the first time, in its first wild promise of all the mystery and the beauty in the world.” In the children’s novel Charlotte’s Web by E.B. White, Charlotte the spider tells Wilbur the pig that the bridge took eight years to build, while she could build a web in a single night.10 In 1967, Simon & Garfunkel immortalized it in “The 59th Street Bridge Song (Feelin’ Groovy).” And countless films have paid tribute to it, among them Woody Allen’s Manhattan (1979), where the lovers played by Allen and Diane Keaton are silhouetted on a bench before the bridge at dawn. COMMUNITY VOICE The Queensboro is my neighborhood bridge, the one I’m most likely to be found photographing or drawing, and it is dear to my heart. Gromaire’s joy is evident in the boldness of strokes describing the bridge’s structure and contrasting with the delicate whirls rising from the nearby smokestacks, which repeat the curves between the towers. In his enthusiasm, he has added a few extra towers to the bridge, which only increases the sense of playfulness that this lovely watercolor evokes. Anne Bascove Artist

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