Visual Commissions: New York City, 1880-1915

Artists and journeyman illustrators, project- and freelance-photographers, and map- and diagram-makers, represented New York, from its subway tracks and service ducts through to the now-famous sights of a city whose growth-spurt, either side of 1900, coincided with refinement of the last categories of visual media before our own digital era. The research seeks to make these unpromising, as well as famous, images communicate again, across the years, by reconstructing core questions as visual commissions. These commissions also pose overlooked theoretical and methodological questions that bear upon debates in iconology, visuality and historical evidence.

Commissioning and delivering images was never a mechanical process, and even the tight contracts and monitoring practices of urban developers could not control the generation of visual meanings; the extent to which an image became iconic; and the mismatch of expectations and practice. New York City was explicitly in transition, but what is not understood is the role of visual commissions, as urban narratives, in conveying and sometimes disguising the impact of invisible systems upon the promotion of New York, the organisation of extensive urban projects, and the aesthetics of the city. These three core concerns are analysed in three self-contained articles, linked by the central concept of visual commissions and the focus on New York City.

In the first article, Henry James' infuriatingly dense but also authoritarian instructions to photographer, Alvin Langdon Coburn, are a point of reference for an article that also includes the Henry James acolyte, Joseph Pennell. The not-so-simple notion of visual illustration is explored in the work of these three different artists as they engaged with the prospect of representing change in New York City, either side of the turn of the century.

The second article rescues the staid, but occasionally unconventional members of the Society of the Iconophiles, as they set out from the elite Grolier Club on what the founder, William Loring Andrews, called 'the journey of the Iconophiles around New York in search of the historical and picturesque'. Together with the Society of the Typothetae, and, in the mainstream, the Reform Club and the Municipal Art Society, the Iconophiles had a mission to promote New York City through commissioning and collecting visual representations. These clubs interacted supportively as well as antagonistically with the influential critics, Sadakichi Hartmann and Marianna Griswold Van Rensselaer, themselves aligned with the aesthetic editorial policies of leading magazines, The Century, Harper's, Municipal Affairs, and Public Improvements. This network of commercial power, class and visual culture in New York is revealed in a body of paintings, drawings and photographs that was mobilized in the service of the New York City Improvement Commission during the years when the 'City Beautiful' movement reached New York, and sought to endow it with an international profile. By contrast, the visual enterprise of Moses King's guidebooks and Views of New York operate in a populist vein, but subtly mould generic conventions in the effort to promote New York as a global city.

The third article contrasts the commission awarded to the minor American and Paris-educated Impressionist, Jules Guerin, to present Grand Central Terminal in its spatial and cultural environment, with the guidelines issued to illustrators by the Rapid Transit Commission when project-managing the New York Subway prior to and beyond the first line in 1904. Enigmatic photographs of piping and ducts on obscure Subway platforms require, if anything, more detailed frames of knowledge and sustained formal analysis than do formal artworks, if we are to grasp the extraordinary importance attached to envisaging in large construction projects, where spatial and temporal coordinates are quite bewildering.