Manhattan

Manhattan 

Engineering 

1 Corinthians 14:5
“I would that ye all spake with tongues, but rather that ye prophesied: for greater is he that prophesieth than he that speaketh with tongues, except he interpret, that the church may receive edifying.” 

Chess: "Manhattan" "Engineering" 

 

 

Work
Ford Madox Brown
Date: 1852 - 1863
    Style: Romanticism
    Genre: allegorical painting

 

 

 

Don Pepe
 

 

 

 

 

La Calle: Teatro Nacional, Villalta y Rodríguez
 

 

 

 

 

 

 

'The shapes arise!' said Walt Whitman, writing in the 1860s.
Shapes of factories, arsenals, foundries, markets,
Shapes of the two-threaded tracks of railroads.
Shapes of the sleepers of bridges, vast frameworks, girders, arches.

 
I fancy that Walt Whitman was thinking of Brooklyn Bridge [231], designed by a great engineer called Roebling in 1867. Its towers were for long the tallest buildings in New York - in fact, all modern New York, heroic New York, started with Brooklyn Bridge. 'Vast frameworks, girders, arches.' Whitman would have been equally delighted with the Forth Bridge, and so am I, although it is an anachronism, a sort of prehistoric monster - a brontosaurus of technology. Because by the time it was built, 1892, the new shapes had gone in the other direction, the way of lightness and economy, the characteristics of the suspension bridge.
The new Forth Bridge is our own style, which expresses our own age as the Baroque expressed the seventeenth century, and it is the result of a hundred years of engineering. It is a new creation, but it is related to the past by one of the chief continuous traditions of the western mind: the tradition of mathematics. For this reason the builders of the Gothic cathedrals, the great architects and painters of the Renaissance - Piero della Francesca and Leonardo da Vinci, and the great philosophers of the seventeenth century - Descartes, Pascal, Newton and Wren, would all have looked at it with respect.
It may seem rather odd to consider nineteenth-century art in terms of tunnels, bridges and other feats of engineering. Certainly this point of view would have horrified the more sensitive spirits of the time. Ruskin's rage against railways produced masterpieces of invective, although, characteristically, he also wrote a rhapsodic description of a railway engine. An answer to these aesthetes would have been a visit to the Great Exhibition of 1851, The building, the so-called Crystal Palace [233], was a piece of pure engineering on Brunei's principles (and in fact greatly admired by him). It was impressive, in a somewhat joyless style, and was praised by the 'functionalist' architects of the 1930s. But inside this piece of engineering was art. Well, funny things happen in the history of taste. But I doubt if many of the works of art so trustingly admired in the Great Exhibition will come back into favour : the reason being that they do not express any real conviction and so are not controlled by any stylistic impulse. The new shapes of the time were based on straight lines - the straight lines of iron girders, the straight streets of industrial towns: the shortest way between two points. The ornamental art exhibited in the Crystal Palace was based on curves ~ unctuous, elaborate and purposeless curves, which caricature the luxury t of the preceding century. 
Of course, works of art in the conventional sense, pictures and sculpture, were being produced at the time of the Great Exhibition - but for the most part not very good ones. It was one of those slack periods in the history of art which occur in almost every century. The great artists - Ingres and Delacroix - had grown old ; and their work (other than portraiture) was concerned entirely with legend and mythology. The younger artists tried to cope with the present and showed what is called a social consciousness. In England the most famous attempt was made by Ford Madox Brown in a picture called Work [236], begun in 1852. It projects the philosophy of Carlyle, who stands on the right grinning sardonically (with his friend Frederick Denison Maurice, the Christian Socialist). At the centre of his composition are the navvies, on whose labour all nineteenth-century prosperity depended, heroically strong, although, as always with Madox Brown, slightly grotesque. They are the men who made the Box Tunnel, and why they should be digging such an enormous hole in this quiet street in Hampstead I can't imagine. Round them are the idlers, elegant and fashionable, furtive and destitute, or merely naughty. Madox Brown looked at people, especially at cruel people, with an intense gaze which saves his work from the usual banality of social realism. All the same, this is descriptive painting, and as such, slightly provincial. But in France, at exactly the same time, there emerged two painters whose social realism was in the centre of the European tradition - Gustave Courbet and Jean Francois Millet. They were both revolutionaries; in 1848 Millet was probably a communist, although when his work became fashionable the evidence for this was hushed up; Courbet remained a rebel and was put in prison for his part in the Commune - very nearly executed. In 1849 he painted a picture of a stonebreaker - alas, destroyed in Dresden during the war. He intended it as a straightforward record of an old neighbour, but it was seen by his friend Max Buchon who told him that it was the first great monument to the workers etc., etc. Courbet was delighted by this idea, and said that the people of his native town of Ornans wanted to hang it over the altar in the local church. This, if it were true, which I very much doubt, would have been the beginning of its status as an objet de culte, which it has retained till the present day. It is indispensable to all Marxist art-theorists. The following year Courbet painted an even more impressive example of his sympathy with ordinary people in his enormous picture of a funeral at Ornans [235]. By abandoning all pictorial artifice, which must inevitably involve a certain amount of hierarchy and subordination, and standing his figures in a row, Courbet achieves a feeling of equality in the presence of death."~~~KENNETH CLARK: Civilisation. Ch. 13 Heroic Materialism