Lower Manhattan, Abstracted

Born in Dresden in 1918, Peter Ruta moved to New York in 1936. He studied at the Art Students League, where his teachers included Will Barnet and Jean Charlot. Soon, Mr. Ruta began painting New York cityscapes. “Picturing New York,” curated by Andrea Henderson Fahnestock, gathers the largest number of Mr. Ruta’s New York pictures ever to be exhibited in this country.The starting point is 1970. In that year, Mr. Ruta moved into Westbeth. On West Street in Greenwich Village, Westbeth is a vast complex of late 19th-century buildings that served for many years as the Bell Telephone Laboratories. In the late 1960s, the J.M. Kaplan Fund renovated the buildings into below-market-rate housing and studio space for visual, performing, and literary artists. Many of Mr. Ruta’s paintings in “Picturing New York” are of views from his studio window and from the roof of Westbeth. Looking due south on West Street, he observed the construction of the World Trade Center, which appears in many of the paintings. In 2000 and 2001, the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council invited Mr. Ruta to work in a studio on the 91st floor of the World Trade Center, from which vantage he might make great panoramic cityscapes.Early on in his career he decided to eschew the total abstraction that came to triumph in the New York scene. He opted instead for a representational method that captured the already abstract form of the cityscape. His paintings depict the forms or silhouettes of city buildings, streets, bodies of water; render, often breathtakingly, the vertiginous perspectives of his aerial views; and seek to capture the city’s often dramatic “atmospheric conditions,” as the weatherman might say.He thus purposely ignores architectural detail. He renders buildings as boxes, without fenestration let alone ornamentation. His city comprises masses of simple geometrical forms. He uses a muted palette.Yet closer inspection of the paintings belies the initial impression of an overabundance of browns and grays and taupes. The palette, while muted, is in fact quite deep. And it is the combination of perspectives and colors that make these paintings sing.Mr. Ruta’s method does not serve up-close views to my taste. The absence of building detail makes everything in the city look like a modernist box. Much of New York’s beauty comes from the play of shadow and of shimmering light effects on the surfaces of buildings with deeply modeled facades. We lose that in some of Mr. Ruta’s paintings. In long views, however, Mr. Ruta’s method yields intoxicating results. Few painters in my experience so deftly render the close-packed spires of the skinny island’s grid, framed by water and sky. In the end, Mr. Ruta’s depictions of sky and water are marvels of subtle observation of the way this city’s brilliant light creates infinite and dramatic variations of hue and tone.If, therefore, the 91st-floor views are this show’s highlights, not far behind are the studio views from Westbeth of the West Side waterfront. In a “theme and variations” approach, Mr. Ruta shows us the evolution of the waterfront over 30 years. To this artist’s eye, the Hudson River never stands still. Frothy or placid, its color changes with the season, the time of day, encompassing a palette ranging from deep to light blue, lavender, green, silver, gray, pink, and snow white. A marvelous 1988 diptych is my favorite, with its foamy white river.One close-up I do like, the 1977 “Untitled (Northern view from Westbeth),” captures the peculiar density and arrangement of varied buildings, yards, streets, water, and sky of the West Village in a way as perfect as that of some paintings by John Sloan.In the show’s catalogue, curator Fahnestock notes that Mr. Ruta cites among his “affinities” such artists as Fairfield Porter, David Hockney, Rockwell Kent, Albert Marquet, Giorgio de Chirico, and Neil Welliver. In each case, we easily sense such affinities in the Ruta paintings on display. One artist he does not cite is Charles Sheeler. Yet in his blanked-out facades, emphasis upon spire-like forms, fascination with shorefront effects, and even in his palette, the casual viewer readily senses a Sheeler affinity in many of Mr. Ruta’s oil paintings.In addition to the oils, we have at the MCNY a small selection of lovely gouaches, which in the end were my favorites in the whole show. The softer edges, the way that the “atmospheric conditions” veil the cityscape, place these gouaches in a discernible tradition of New York cityscape painting. A great master of that tradition, Childe Hassam, is abundantly on exhibit 20 blocks south of the MCNY. One need travel only from the MCNY’s first floor, however, where the Ruta show is mounted, to the fifth floor to see a diminutive and lovely pastel of 27th Street at Madison Avenue, dated circa 1905-10, by Birge Harrison. This snowy scene, dominated by building outlines with indistinct details, shows that Mr. Ruta has merely carried forth into the 21st century a time-honored manner of seeking to bottle the New York genie.

Lower Manhattan, Abstracted

Lower Manhattan, Abstracted

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