Manhattan Skyline
Manhattan Skyline
Artist
Creation date
1934
Materials
watercolor over pencil on off-white paper
Dimensions
19 1/2 x 13 3/4 in.
Credit line
Mary B. Milliken Fund
Accession number
71.184
Collection
Currently On View In
Paine American Modernism Gallery
Held began his career as a commercial artist, and his illustrations defined the extravagance and exuberance of the Roaring Twenties. With the onset of the Great Depression, however, the artist began to create simple, austere views of the Manhattan skyline.
Painted from a vantage point high up in a building near New York’s Central Park, Held transforms the massive skyscrapers into flat geometric patterns of color and light. Liberal use of the white paper helps define the sharp angularity of the buildings’ sunlit façades.
Piece was purchased from the artist's widow.
American Modernism
John Held, Jr.
Manhattan Skyline, 1934
watercolor over pencil on off-white paper
19 ½ x 13 ¾ in.
Mary B. Milliken Fund
Learn More
John Held, Jr. was born in Salt Lake City Utah to a father who was a copperplate engraver and illustrator. While still in his teens Held began his illustration career after only a brief apprenticeship with a sculptor. He moved to New York and continued working as a commercial artist. Held’s illustrations defined the “Roaring Twenties Jazz Age.” They were humorous, risqué and bold. The flapper became associated with Held’s drawings of a woman with a high hemline, cloche hat, and long, thin limbs. When the Depression hit, demands for his flapper art diminished, and he turned to other forms of art. At the height of Held’s career he was extremely successful and earned over a million dollars a year, had a home in Miami, a penthouse in New York and a 156-acre estate in Westport, Connecticut, with its own zoo and golf course.
From 1934-1936 Held’s view of the world turned more sober. During this time, he created a suite of strangely wistful views of the Manhattan skyline. Most of the watercolors were painted during sunrise and sunset hours, including Manhattan Skyline. Painted from a vantage point high up in a building on Sixth Avenue near Central Park, the artist transforms the massive New York skyscrapers into flat patterns of right angles and colored shadows. Making liberal use of the white paper, Held defines the building’s sunlit façade. His deep purples and blues with tinges of red delineate the shadowed surfaces.
Reference
Sally Armitage, Laurenda S. Dixon, John Held, Jr.: Illustrator of the Jazz Age, Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1989. ISBN-13: 978-0815602385
