Artist/Maker Philip Reisman (American, born Poland, 1904 – 1992)

Love Canal

1983

Oil on canvas

Unframed: 24 × 36 in. (61 × 91.4 cm)
Framed: 27 in. × 38 3/4 in. × 1 1/2 in. (68.6 × 98.4 × 3.8 cm)

Gift of the family of Philip Reisman

2022.10.2

Born in Poland, Philip Reisman moved with his family to New York City at the age of four to escape widespread anti-Semitism in his home country. He grew up in a tenement on the Lower East Side of Manhattan where, as the artist recounted, he and his siblings sometimes had to sleep on six kitchen chairs tied together in order to make room for newly arrived relatives. Reisman first developed an interest in art when he saw one of his older siblings working on a perspective drawing assignment for a correspondence course in art. He began his training at the Manual Training High School but, frustrated with the slow pace of the courses, left to study at the Art Students League. There, perhaps inspired by such leading teachers as John Sloan and Reginald Marsh, Reisman developed the penchant for social realism that would define the rest of his career. The artist, who kept a studio near Union Square, is best known for his scenes of gritty New York, and particularly the people who inhabit it. As he explained, “This is my city. I have lived in it most of my life. I have tried to paint the human condition—those aspects of city life that have moved me and seemed significant to me—street people, tenement dwellers, people hungry for love, or just hungry people.” He continued: “Those who see my paintings will react to them according to their understanding of the city, whether it be an aesthetic response, a glimpse of the poetry in ordinary life, a social insight, or echoes of the humor and vitality of the people.” At first glance, "Love Canal" seems like a departure for Reisman: it moves outside the urban scene and beyond the artist’s characteristic human subjects. Yet the painting continues what Reisman himself described as his “humanist point of view”: it focuses on an infamous environmental catastrophe in the working-class Love Canal neighborhood of Niagara Falls, New York. Conceived of by William T. Love, the neighborhood, about four miles south of Niagara Falls, was intended to be a model community—one driven by access to major shipping markets and fueled by inexpensive hydroelectric power generated via a navigable power canal between the upper and lower Niagara Rivers. The plan never came to fruition—it manifested only as a partial ditch where construction of the canal had begun in the 1890s. In the 1920s, this ditch became a municipal and chemical dumpsite. Beginning in 1942, the Hooker Chemical Company filled it with a multitude of 55-gallon drums holding approximately 21,0000 tons of toxic chemicals. In 1953, the company covered the dumpsite with clay and sold the land to the Niagara Falls School Board for $1. An elementary school was built on the property, and private residences developed on the adjacent land. In the late 1970s, a series of heavy rains and wet winters caused the water table to rise, and the chemicals in the canal waste dump began leaching into the school and nearby homes. Community members suffered from a host of maladies including epilepsy, rashes, asthma, migraines, nephrosis, miscarriages, and birth defects. After a public outcry and under pressure from activists, President Jimmy Carter declared a federal state of emergency in 1978 and again in 1981, relocating all families out of the area. The Love Canal disaster became the first story of a toxic waste site to reach national proportions. It spurred passage of the Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation and Liability Act of 1980—also known as Superfund—which continues to this day to provide for liability, compensation, cleanup, and emergency responses related to hazardous waste disposal sites. In Reisman’s grim portrayal of the Love Canal site, toxic waste drums litter an otherwise barren field, beyond which lies a densely packed town. Black vapors emanating from the barrels gather into the forms of three ghostly figures cloaked in black—one with its skeletal hand outstretched. The vision of chemical toxins, personified as Death and pervading the air, stands as a haunting memorial to the environmental catastrophe and a stark reminder of the continuing threat of industrial pollution.

DescriptionOil painting of toxic waste drums in a field next to a town; three ghostly figures emerge from the drums.
ProvenanceCreated by Philip Reisman [1904-1992], the artist, 1983; via widowhood Louise Reisman, 1992; by descent to Louise Reisman's nephews including David Lander by 2015; gift to New-York Historical Society, 2022.

ClassificationsPAINTINGS