The Politics of Urban Beauty: New York and Its Art Commission

by Michele H. Bogart

Overview

Since its founding in 1898, the Art Commission of the City of New York (ACNY) has served as the city’s aesthetic gatekeeper, evaluating all works of art intended for display on city property. And over the years, the commission’s domain has expanded dramatically to include everything from parks and courthouses to trash cans and sidewalks. In ThePolitics of Urban Beauty, Michele H. Bogart argues that this unprecedented authority has made the commission host to some complex negotiations—involving artists, architects, business leaders, activists, and politicians—about not only the role of art in urban design, but also the shape and meaning of the city and its public spaces. 

A former vice president of the ACNY, Bogart tells its story here from an insider’s perspective, tracing the commission’s history from its origins as an outgrowth of progressive reform to its role in New York’s reconstruction after 9/11. Drawing on archival correspondence, drawings, and photographs from commission collections, Bogart presents bracing examples of works—ranging from New Deal murals to Louis Kahn’s unbuilt Memorial to Six Million Jewish Martyrs—that illuminate the ACNY’s subtle yet powerful role in shaping New York’s identity. 

The Politics of Urban Beauty is thus a fascinating history of a New York art world that paralleled—and sometimes unpredictably intersected with—the more familiar realm of prominent architects, painters, galleries, and museums. Bogart’s fresh view adds a critical dimension to our understanding of “the city beautiful” and makes an important and lively contribution to the study of art history, urban design, and New York City itself.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780226063058
Publisher:	University of Chicago Press
Publication date:	11/15/2006
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	352
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 1.20(d)

About the Author

Michele H. Bogart is professor of art history at Stony Brook University. She was vice president of the Art Commission of the City of New York from 1999 to 2003 and is a member of an advisory group to the commission. She also is the author of Public Sculpture and the Civic Ideal in New York City, 1890–1930 and Artists, Advertising, and the Borders of Art, both published by the University of Chicago Press.

Read an Excerpt

THE POLITICS OF URBAN BEAUTY NEW YORK & ITS ART COMMISSION
By MICHELE H. BOGART
THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO PRESS Copyright © 2006 The University of Chicago
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-226-06305-8



Chapter One FROM CHAOS TO STRUCTURE IN NEW YORK'S PUBLIC AESTHETIC REALM

The charter of Greater New York that took effect on January 1, 1898, provided for an art commission, charged with approving all works of art acquired for city property. Its emergence as the Art Commission of the City of New York (ACNY) has been told as a story of simple origins, based on a 1910 account by architect John Carrère. But, as with many origin myths, the truths are more complicated. The formation of the art commission had an immediate impetus but also stemmed from broader local, and even national, impulses.

This chapter will map out that "prehistory" to shed light on the shaping of the landscape in late nineteenth-century, precharter New York City, particularly on the fractious political machinations of both public and private sectors when dealing with the placement of monuments on municipal property. The story reveals the intricate and changing sociopolitical configurations of art worlds during this period, as well as the pliancy of such categories as "public" and "expertise." It also reveals the shifting contours of elite and popular tastes and their relationship to the development and implementation of a form of a kind of "aesthetic police power."

As we shall see, the ACNY was born out of a perceived need not only to order the city's public spaces but also to give some consistency to a chaotic decision-making process with many civic, political, and aesthetic dimensions. Each point of discussion threatened to fracture whatever fragile civic unity and stability existed in that instance. Irreconcilable opinions about expertise, quality, affiliation, nationalism, and artistic authority in conflicts over public art and urban representations more generally, convinced artists and civic activists that there was a need to put into place a consistent legal mechanism for the city to control the design of its built environment and public spaces. The Greater New York charter commission, through providing for an art commission, legalized a claim that the city should be empowered to override the efforts not only of individual citizens and groups but also of the city's own departments to relay their own values in urban public places. Such prohibitions were deemed necessary to represent municipal identity on behalf of all citizens.

Under what circumstances would a city government legislate, in effect, against its own interests, as defined by the particular powers-that-be of the moment? The specific cases that became the impetus for establishing the commission illuminate the pertinence of this question and encompass other peculiar tensions created within urban cultural history. The rights of neighborhoods and interest groups have been pitted against those of the public or the municipal government. So have the articulations of ethnic affiliation, cultural distinctiveness, and citizenship and the relative powers of professionals, connoisseurs, and amateurs on questions of aesthetics. The debates over urban public monuments that inspired the ACNY's formation revealed crucial differences between proponents of what constituted elite versus popular aesthetics and their relationship to stylistic modes and hierarchies: simple as opposed to complex, clean rather than cluttered, nuanced as opposed to simplistic. Negotiations over the relationship between such distinctions and the civic interest would continue long after the ACNY was established.

A Progressive belief in the power of municipal government to control its own affairs did not jibe with the conviction that government oversight of itself was needed in matters of taste. The formation of an art commission also acknowledged that urban aesthetic matters were, in the end, public political matters, too murky and contentious for private citizens to negotiate effectively. The story to be told here is about how the new New York City acquired a framework for rendering aesthetic judgments by the public, for the public, and in the public eye. The events leading up to the ACNY's creation were driven by monuments. However, this discussion is not principally about sculptors or artworks but about who would control the disposition of monuments, the structure of urban spaces, and the appearance and identity of the city. Some of these circumstances and the organizational structure of the patronage process are discussed elsewhere at greater length, but a brief overview of relevant issues will help to clarify subsequent developments.

MONUMENT MANIA

One of the major concerns from the post-Civil War period on into the 1890s was how to order and manage large cities and protect their citizens. These preoccupations encompassed public health, sanitation, and safety, areas with an undeniable bearing on the quality of life for city dwellers and visitors. Municipal departments were reorganized, officials passed new legislation, and citizens formed civic groups to implement reforms and improvements. Matters of health, hygiene, and policing all involved values and judgments but were widely believed to be grounded in objective knowledge about the world and its workings. Whether the same general principles should apply to the realm of public beauty, encompassing memorials and municipal buildings, for example, was a question that remained uncertain.

Among the late nineteenth-century advocates of urban reform and regulation were some who believed that public aesthetics were just as bound up with the public welfare as sanitation and health and, thus, deserved management. As early as the immediate postwar period, aesthetic judgment emerged as an organized public issue, not just a matter of private experience and taste. Beginning in the 1870s (especially around the time of the Centennial), many groups sought to leave their mark on cities by sponsoring monuments to political, ethnic, labor, and cultural heroes. Each project had its own distinct subject and site, and each entailed its own peculiar avenues of influence in order to be implemented. In New York City, for example, these monuments included a Seventh Regiment memorial (John Quincy Adams Ward, 1869) and bronzes of Daniel Webster (Thomas Ball, 1876), Fitz-Greene Halleck (James Wilson Alexander McDonald, 1876), Giuseppe Mazzini (Giovanni Turini, 1876), and Simon Bolívar (Rafael de la Cova, 1884) in Central Park and a portrait of Benjamin Franklin on Park Row (Ernst Plassmann, ca. 1872). The wave of new monuments continued on. United States letter carriers erected a statue of a former Ohio congressman Samuel Sullivan Cox (fig. 1.1) at Lafayette Street and Fourth Avenue in appreciation for Cox's successful efforts to get them a pay raise. In 1892 the state legislature, following a well-trodden path, authorized creation of a soldiers' and sailors' monument to commemorate the Civil War and the preservation of the union. The urge to commemorate acquired additional force as a result of the successful World's Columbian Exposition, an astounding temporary spectacle showcasing public monuments and murals as proof of the nation's new global eminence.

By the mid 1890s the commemorative enterprise had become a veritable industry. In 1895, for example, the New York Times reported happily that, in addition to the proposed soldiers' and sailors' memorial, plans were in the works for no fewer than sixteen other monuments for New York City alone. Some commemorated long-dead patriots; others were inspired by a recent death. Subjects included Simon Bolívar, William the Silent (or William of Orange, Dutch statesman), Louis Kossuth, Aloys Senefelder (inventor of lithography), Irish poet and nationalist Robert Emmet, Thomas Jefferson, Gouverneur Morris (representative of Pennsylvania at the Convention in Philadelphia in 1787), the Marquis de Lafayette, banker and philanthropist Jesse Seligman, architect Richard Morris Hunt, Judge Charles P. Daly, Congressman James G. Blaine, Chester A. Arthur, Peter Cooper, a late Brooklyn Commissioner of Public Works, General Henry Warner Slocum, and Henry C. Work, composer of "Marching through Georgia" the rousing Civil War anthem.

During the early 1890s, artists and the arts establishment sought to participate in the monument-building process and began staking claims on public space. They formed professional organizations with national memberships and civic groups with a more local emphasis in order to assert their centrality. In 1893 a group of prominent sculptors, joined by New York Times art and literary critic Charles de Kay, formed the Sculpture Society (renamed National Sculpture Society [NSS] in 1896), an organization dedicated to advancing the medium in the United States through exhibitions, interorganizational alliances, and other forms of public education and outreach. The NSS hit the ground running, actively lobbying the press and other arts groups and government officials to sponsor more public monuments, to set their aesthetic sights high, and to heed the society's advice on matters aesthetic. The Municipal Art Society (MAS), established the same year by artists William Vanderbilt Allen, Evangeline and Edwin Blashfield, Richard Watson Gilder, and Richard Morris Hunt (among others) to advance urban beautification, saw its mission initially as being sponsors of public art and design for donation to the city. To that end, the MAS raised money to commission fine works of art, and an electrolier (a large street lamp), from members of the NSS or other professional societies (like the National Society of Mural Painters). That particular aspect of the MAS enterprise quickly foundered, but the MAS remained a vocal spokesman on matters of preservation and urban aesthetics. Together with the NSS, the MAS insisted on being actively involved in decisions about which monuments belonged in municipal public spaces. The NSS in turn took an active interest in securing some of the proposed projects for its own members.

The NSS and the MAS, representatives of professionals and civic elites, aspired initially to be a positive influence on the design of New York's changing public spaces. They contended that expertise, whether gleaned through the experience of superior practitioners or that of cultivated and learned connoisseurs, should determine the delegation of authority for decisions affecting the aesthetics of the public realm. It would be misguided to develop the city on the basis of political exigencies as a response to popular enthusiasms. Paralleling the concerns of other civic groups agitating for reform, the NSS and MAS, along with groups like the Architectural League (formed in 1881 to advance the artistic development of architects), argued that government needed oversight from the private sector; its involvement was needed to put a check on laissez-faire monument policy and thereby reduce the potential for urban chaos.

The NSS and MAS would seek to broker the delegation of major public commissions as well. Thus in 1894, along with the Architectural League, they formed a "triple alliance" to try to develop a "number of good designs" for the state-legislated Soldiers and Sailors' Memorial Monument. In spite of their efforts, the organizations encountered difficulty convincing others to accept their recommendations. Too many other interest groups were sponsoring too many other monument projects for a limited number of choice municipal sites. The professional groups feared that those who raised the money first would win the race. Competition developed into conflict. By the late 1890s, the NSS and MAS changed emphasis, from participation to policing: from placing good works on city property to preventing the installation of bad ones.

Desires for aesthetic administration had already been communicated. The 1893 World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago may have exemplified the promise of civic monuments, but New York City's humiliating 1890 loss of that event to the "Second City" had spurred demands for greater control over public aesthetics. Despairing spokesmen for the real estate industry blamed New York's defeat on the corruption and tawdriness of its civic, political, and artistic cultures. Linking the unfortunate aesthetic condition of the city's built environment with a breakdown of sanitation, health, transportation, and overall civic engagement, the Real Estate Record and Guide sent a wake-up call: the public, through its government, had to take charge of the city.

Some art practitioners suggested what such aesthetic policing practices might entail. For example, in an 1895 lecture "How to Make New York a Beautiful City," designer Candace Wheeler envisioned for New York a board of municipal art, with sweeping powers, related to other realms of government dedicated to employing the police power to protect public health and welfare. Wheeler's board would encompass private as well as public structures; it would deal with "the tenement house question," "cooperate with the Board of Health and Department of Buildings," and "bring expert knowledge to bear on public safety as well as artistic knowledge to bear on improvements of public property." It would offer the "power to accomplish," to help change "squalor into dignity, ugliness into attractiveness, and eliminat[e] dirt and disorder." The board would be composed of men "educated in all means of art-architects and painters and landscape gardeners, who should agree on schemes of improvement and be able to carry them out." Wheeler contrasted her vision of the ideal board member with a less desirable group of New Yorkers "whose early and respectable occupation was that of a hod-carrier, or whose later business is the sustainment of the grog-shops." Her comparisons were not arbitrary; they were a direct put-down of men like George Ehret, a brewer who was a key benefactor of the memorial to Heinrich Heine (see below).

For Wheeler, municipal aesthetics, sanitation, and public health were integrally connected, but in the real world of New York City artistic affairs, her proposals were taken, for a time at least, as a mere woman's fancy. In fact, however, the issue of regulation had already arisen within the isolated, idiosyncratic context of public parks. Since 1873, a three-man art Committee of Experts, in effect the city's first art commission, had advised the Board of Parks Commissioners on the aesthetic merits of the numerous monuments and structures being proposed for the municipal parks. The committee consisted of the presidents of the National Academy of Design, American Institute of Architects, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art but did not include a sculptor, even though it dealt primarily with monuments.

The scope of regulatory action broadened in 1890 in Boston. There, during the late 1880s, Brahmin leaders had agitated against the persistent "foisting" of Cogswell (temperance) fountains and clunky "mortuary monuments," on the Public Garden. (The rectilinear and stone temperance fountains, built by dentist Henry D. Cogswell to discourage consumption of alcohol, typically consisted of a four columned square water source supporting a hipped roof with a statue on top.) These actions were spearheaded, the New York press implied, by the Irish. In an act of "self protection," a group of Bostonians successfully petitioned the Massachusetts legislature to pass an 1890 bill authorizing a municipal art commission. Comprising five members, selected by the mayor, the Boston commission was empowered to "accept or reject" public monuments (only) and in some cases to select the sculptor and site. New Yorkers had better take comparable action, the New York Times warned, or the parks would be flooded with tawdry monuments. Such calls were ultimately heeded in the metropolis, but the process took longer and was far more complicated.

These earliest attempts to control monuments and public spaces were crucial. They were nonetheless limited in scope, since they pertained mostly to parks, regulated districts where aesthetics had long been acknowledged to be legitimate concerns. In New York City, the transition went from positive to negative, from guiding to policing aesthetics within a more general municipal setting. This can be tracked concretely in the saga of the Heine Memorial, also known as the Lorelei Fountain (fig. 1.2). The NSS and MAS initially became involved not because they objected to the design but also because they had competing ideas for the site. Those differences developed into an extended debate. Questions were raised about the relationship of subject matter to site, style and quality of execution and expression, social networks and pressure politics, and the relative authority of expertise and Anglo-American nationality versus popularity regarding decisions on public aesthetics. These controversies were consequential not only in their own right but also as backdrops for the activities that resulted in the creation of an art commission, a formalized mechanism for policing urban beauty.

(Continues...)

Excerpted from THE POLITICS OF URBAN BEAUTY by MICHELE H. BOGART Copyright © 2006 by The University of Chicago. Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

Table of Contents

List of Illustrations
Acknowledgments
Abbreviations
Introduction
1. From Chaos to Structure in New York's Public Aesthetic Realm
2. In Search of Visual Culture
3. Monuments, Place, and Municipal Identity
4. Culture Wars
5. Restraint
Appendix A: The ACNY and Monument Conservation
Appendix B: The Approval and Selection Processes
Notes
Index

Editorial Reviews

"It is an informative work with fascinating and little known facts and adds much to our understanding of how actors create urban environments. Using concrete artifacts as point of entry, it provides new leads for researching power, organizational process, and aesthetic sensibilities."

City & Community - Harvey Molotch

"Bogart successfully demonstrates how the longevity of the ACNY as an administrative body is due to the ability of it commissioners to reconcile their transcendent visions of municipal beauty with a willingness to admit the political, pragmatic and cooperative nature of their work."

Sociology - Sophia Krzys Acord

"I would strongly recommend this book, and not only to those with a prior interest in the arts. This is the story of how one city has shaped its public built environment, and in its tales of monuments, murals, and mailboxes one can discern a full history of a city's social and political transformation."

Urban Affairs Review - Elizabeth Strom

Eminently readable, Michele H. Bogart’s political analysis of design excellence relates tales, familiar and obscure, of the transformation of our city’s character and aesthetic quality through the efforts of the Art Commission of the City of New York.  From controversies about newsstands, signage, and memorials, to debates over parks, public art, and major public buildings, The Politics of Urban Beauty candidly speaks of the dramatic circumstances under which projects get built or blocked. Along with the passion of an engaged participant, former art commission member Bogart brings an historical perspective that edifies, clarifies, and excites any reader of the urban scene.”

Rick Bell

"Bogart combines shrewd historical analysis with pragmatic experience. Her book is rich with information. . . . This volume should provide a mandatory starting point for any study of work in New York City's public realm and also serve as a model (perhaps a cautionary one) for writing about such bodies elsewhere."

Winterthur Portfolio - Harriet F. Sente

Outstanding. The Politics of Urban Beauty will be the definitive history of the Art Commission of the City of New York. The depth of the research is remarkable, as is Bogart’s ability to narrate a highly complex story of New York politics and culture.”Max Page, author of The Creative Destruction of Manhattan

Max Page

"In telling the story of the ACNY (Art Commission of the City of New York), this book makes an important contribution to our udnerstanding of urban history and design."

Urban History - Patricia J. Fanning

Who decides how a city ‘looks’? In Paris, it’s been the government. In New York, it’s been more a free-for-all, with contending classes and cultures battling to leave their stylistic mark on the metropolitan landscape. Still, for a century now, as Michele Bogart argues in this intriguing study, a major player in the aesthetic wars has been a municipal agency called the art commission, whose decisions on everything from mailboxes to monuments have had an outsized (and largely beneficial) impact on Gotham’s public appearance.”

Mike Wallace

"As [Bogart's] tightly written account demonstrates, despite the high aims of the Art Commission, politics has generally triumphed over art."

New York Times - Christopher Gray

The Art Commission of the City of New York ‘reviews all works of art designed for City property’ from benches and streetlamps called street furniture to works of art placed on city buildings’ walls as well as in the parks. The history is fascinating and some of the descriptions of the participants fighting with the art commission are hilarious. I recommend The Politics of Urban Beauty. It’s easy and delightful reading and you will learn a lot.”Edward I. Koch, former mayor of New York City

Edward I. Koch

"I would strongly recommend this book, and not only to those with a prior interest in the arts. This is the story of how one city has shaped its public built environment, and in its tales of monuments, murals, and mailboxes one can discern a full history of a city's social and political transformation."

— Elizabeth Strom

Urban Affairs Review

"In telling the story of the ACNY (Art Commission of the City of New York), this book makes an important contribution to our udnerstanding of urban history and design."

— Patricia J. Fanning

Urban History

"Bogart combines shrewd historical analysis with pragmatic experience. Her book is rich with information. . . . This volume should provide a mandatory starting point for any study of work in New York City's public realm and also serve as a model (perhaps a cautionary one) for writing about such bodies elsewhere."

— Harriet F. Sente

Winterthur Portfolio

"Bogart successfully demonstrates how the longevity of the ACNY as an administrative body is due to the ability of it commissioners to reconcile their transcendent visions of municipal beauty with a willingness to admit the political, pragmatic and cooperative nature of their work."

— Sophia Krzys Acord

Sociology

"It is an informative work with fascinating and little known facts and adds much to our understanding of how actors create urban environments. Using concrete artifacts as point of entry, it provides new leads for researching power, organizational process, and aesthetic sensibilities."

— Harvey Molotch

City & Community

"As [Bogart's] tightly written account demonstrates, despite the high aims of the Art Commission, politics has generally triumphed over art."

— Christopher Gray

New York Times