Artist/Maker Rainer Fetting (German, b. 1949)

Pier to Manhattan

1985

Oil on canvas

Unframed: 8 ft. 8 in. × 7 ft. 10 in. (264.2 × 238.8 cm)

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

IL2021.51.119

“I expect my paintings to have life in them.” Rainer Fetting’s statement captures the vibrancy and dynamism of the Neo-Expressionist styles that swept West Germany, the United States, and Italy in the eighties in reaction to the asceticism of Minimalism and Conceptual art. In the late 1970s, the German artist helped to found Galerie am Moritzplatz in Berlin, which aimed to create a space for exhibitions of emotionally charged figurative painting. Fetting produced cityscapes and portraits that tapped into the atmosphere of protest and societal change roiling West Berlin, and his large canvases of smeared and turgid brushwork and pumped-up colors made him a leading figure in what became known as the Neue Wilde (New Wilds) art movement. Fetting currently divides his time between Berlin and New York, and his New York cityscapes share with his views of Berlin a commitment to representation based on an aesthetic of simplified forms, often discordant coloration, and direct feeling. Referring to Abstract Expression, the artist commented, “I have a lot of enthusiasm for American expressionist painter[s], but I took it back into figurative painting. How can I catch New York in a typical way and transfer it to painting?” Pier to Manhattan dates to the artist’s first extended stay in the City, from 1983 to 1994, when he painted such emblematic subjects as Yellow cabs, police officers in uniform, and the Hudson River landings, then an isolated and derelict area and preserve for the LGBTQ community. This composition includes a foreshortened pier, rendered with the primitivist roughness of a woodcut, a medium identified with German Expressionism of the early twentieth century. New York—seemingly evacuated of human life—looms beyond like a geometric fortress. And a centrally placed and abstracted Empire State Building, laid down with thinner paint, punctures an almost nuclear yellow and red sky, which casts an unnatural glow upon the dark waters. The tone is at once eerie and brutal, the scale overwhelming. As the artist recalled in 2017, “New York was very run down those days . . . different from anything civilized like it is now, and I tried to express a certain melancholy and loneliness, which maybe was also part of how I felt then.” COMMUNITY VOICE When Fetting painted this view of Manhattan from the Hudson River piers, the waterfront was a ruin of the city’s maritime past. Men cruised for sex along the collapsed West Side Highway. I can almost hear the trains rumbling beneath Fetting’s feet as they plunge below the surface of the water. This sherbet sunset, melting onto the frosted deco spires of midtown, is now an impossible sight, obscured by the grim glass and steel of Hudson Yards. I never really knew that old West Side—before the AIDS epidemic and gentrification transformed it into a corporate graveyard—but, sometimes at twilight, I feel it haunting me. Evan Moffitt Writer and critic

ClassificationsPAINTINGS

Collections