The City
Streets, crowds, skylines, slums and building sites: the modern city as a subject for painters and photographers.
9 works · 10 related artists
About
Cities gave modern art much of its energy: crowds, traffic, new boulevards and hidden poverty. Gustave Caillebotte's Paris Street; Rainy Day (1877) shows Baron Haussmann's rebuilt Paris as a geometry of wide pavements and umbrellas, while Jacob Riis carried flash powder into New York tenements for How the Other Half Lives (1890), exposing crowded rooms few readers had seen.
Early 20th-century artists tried to paint the city's speed and strain. Umberto Boccioni's The City Rises (1910) turns construction into a surge of horses and straining workers, and George Grosz's Metropolis (1916–17) floods a Berlin street with red, lurching figures. Berenice Abbott's Changing New York project of the 1930s recorded a skyline being rebuilt. Later photographers followed cities through destruction and growth: Gabriele Basilico documented the ruined centre of Beirut in 1991, and Xing Danwen's Urban Fiction series, begun in 2004, inserts human dramas into architectural models of new Chinese housing.
Related artists
More in Subject Matter
The Domestic and Domesticity
The Elements
The Environment
The Fantastic
The Mundane
The Seasons
The Senses
The Sublime
Time
Times of Day
Traces, Indexes, and Implied Presence
Trauma and Struggle
Urbanization
Utopia
Vacant and Vacated Spaces
Violence
Virtue and Vice
Visual Perception
War and Military
