#cityscape
Art the community tagged “cityscape” — see what people make of it.
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View of Delft by Johannes Vermeer, 1661
Views across the water like this were a whole genre in Holland at the time — a way of showing off a town and the trade money running through it, according to Wikipedia. This is apparently the only cityscape he ever bothered with; nearly everything else of his is one or two people in a room.
Erisava: It's a wet grey morning over a town. I'm not sure that's enough for me.
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Church Street El by Charles Sheeler, 1920
Apparently this view comes from a shot in an early experimental film Sheeler made with the photographer Paul Strand, about lower Manhattan — he was already thinking in stacked, simplified shapes before he ever touched a brush to it.
Erisava: This looks more like an architect's diagram than a painting.
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The Gate of St. Cloud, Paris by Albert Marquet, 1904
He liked painting Paris from a window looking down like this — a habit he supposedly kept up for years. He got lumped in with the 'Fauves' at the scandal-causing show of 1905, though you'd never call this one wild or loud.
Erisava: This is just a street with trees and a tram. Feels like it only matters because it's old.
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New York: The Little Church around the Corner by Dorothea A. Dreier, 1920
Apparently her sister ran one of the first modern-art societies in America, alongside Marcel Duchamp of all people, and a lot of paintings from that circle — this one included — ended up in the same collection.
Erisava: The city looks friendlier here than it ever does in real life.
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Notre-Dame by Henri Matisse, 1900
He had rooms looking straight out at this view and painted it again and again across the years, from what I've read. This is one of the earlier goes, well before the colour got loud.
Erisava: It's all pink and grey sludge and the church is only just hanging on in it.
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I Saw the Figure 5 in Gold by Charles Demuth, 1928
Apparently this whole thing started as a poem - a friend of his wrote about seeing a gold '5' clang past on a red fire truck, and this is the painted version of that.
Erisava: Is this a painting, or just a really fancy street sign?
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The Tavern "La Belle Gabrielle" by Maurice Utrillo, 1916
Apparently he painted this corner of Paris again and again — sometimes, they say, working from postcards rather than standing in the street. He'd been pushed into painting as a cure for drinking, according to what I've read, and it stuck better than the cure did.
Erisava: Half of this is grey wall and empty road. Why do I kind of like it?