The Brooklyn Bridge is celebrating its 143rd birthday on May 24, the day Gilded Age New Yorkers could finally walk across this wondrous span and celebrate the uniting of Brooklyn and Manhattan.
Over close to a century and a half, the Brooklyn Bridge has taken the honor of the city’s most painted and photographed structure. I’d bet it’s also one of the most popular subjects for artists all over the world.
The Brooklyn Bridge over peaceful waters, the bridge and its smoky harbors, the turbulent river and the sturdy bridge lighting the way, the Ashcan school bridge, the Abstract bridge—every artist sees and creates something different when they portray this steel, granite, and limestone beauty.
The various takes on the bridge really hit me when I came across the two paintings in this post. Though both were completed in the early 20th century with the Brooklyn Bridge as a focal point, they conjure very different emotions and insight.
The first is by Jonas Lie, entitled “Path of Gold” and completed in 1914. Lie, a Norway-born artist, gives us an Impressionist bridge as a gateway to good fortune, with tugs and other crafts all heading in the same direction without confusion.
“Lie painted this work from slightly above the boats heading upriver—a perspective that seems to include the viewer along the path to prosperity,” states the High Museum of Art in Atlanta, which has the painting in its collection.
A very different painting from 1931 is “The Bridge Pier” by Robert Ryland. Grainy and textured, Ryland’s Brooklyn Bridge is less a gateway to prosperity than a steel barrier to it.
“‘The Bridge Pier,’ in which a man in a white shirt seems to slump beneath the weight of the city,” wrote the New York Times in 2013, when both paintings were featured in an exhibition at the Hudson River Museum called “Industrial Sublime: Modernism and the Transformation of New York’s Rivers, 1900-1940.”
Lie’s Brooklyn Bridge celebrates its magnificence, showing the entire span, the industrious Brooklyn harbor, and the steel skyscrapers of business on the Manhattan side.
Meanwhile, Ryland’s Brooklyn Bridge disappears into the chaos and melancholy of the modern world, with a forgotten man wondering if there’s a place for him.
“Painted during the Great Depression, it looks up at the dark, hulking forms of the Brooklyn Bridge and Manhattan’s Municipal Building and sees oppression,” the Times wrote.