“The best show is the people themselves.” –Reginald Marsh

The lights of Coney Island glowed on the horizon like a distant inferno, visible from miles at sea. A modern marvel of the Industrial Age, thousands flocked from the metropolis of New York to this beach-side park to witness the marvel of electricity, a crush of humanity drawn to its magical power like moths to a flame. The trap was cleverly set by its designers, combining the timeless allure of the beach with a garish display of carnival rides and circus-like freak show attractions, pushing the limits of human form and abilities. Towering edifices outlined against the night sky with rows of incandescent light bulbs too numerous to count served as a lure for the curious and seasoned visitor, alike. An acres-long boardwalk traced a line between the natural beauty of the sea and manmade wonders of the park. An ‘island’ in name only, the appellation itself—Coney Island—represented more a state of mind, free from life’s cares, than the physical reality of a narrow strip of real estate tucked along the margins of a sprawling cityscape. xxxxxx

On view through the end of May, 2015, the Wadsworth Atheneum’s Coney Island: Visions of an American Dreamland is the first major exhibition to use visual art as a lens to explore the lure that Coney Island exerted on American culture over a period of 150 years. A wide range of artists over the decades have interpreted Coney Island as a microcosm of the American experience, from its beginnings as a watering hole for the wealthy, through its transformation into an entertainment mecca for the masses (called ‘The Nickel Empire’ in the`30s), to the closing of Astroland Amusement Park following decades of urban decline.

Right: William Merritt Chase, ‘Landscape near Coney Island’ (c.1886).

But long before the amusement park’s decline, the crystalline beaches so near the city drew thousands to the clean sands and ocean waves. Early depictions of “the people’s beach” by Impressionists William Merritt Chase, the father of American Impressionism, depict and uncluttered setting and broad vistas. In this work, entitled Landscape near Coney Island (1886) figures are seen standing among the brush and grasses near the bay extending inland behind the park. In the distance, the park rises, including a representation of the giant “Colossal Elephant of Coney Island,” which contained an observation deck, cigar shop and hotel rooms. The ‘elephant’ went up in flames in 1896, never to be replicated.

Left: John Henry Twachtman, ‘Dunes Back of Coney Island’ (c.1880).

John Henry Twachtman traveled and painted with William Merritt Chase, specializing in landscapes and seascapes. Traveling frequently between Europe and America, Twachtman studied from 1883 to 1885 at the Académie Julian in Paris, where his paintings dramatically shifted towards a soft, gray and green tonalist style. His landscapes also exhibited the loosely brushed, shadowy technique taught at Munich, where he spent time early in his career. Twachtman recorded this scene Dunes Back of Coney Island (1880). The scene looks landward toward the towers and attractions that dominated the skyline just a mile or two away. Notable in this work is the then-distant, built environment of Coney Island, still modest in scope and size but already impinging upon the surrounding natural setting as it grew to become a major destination for increasingly mobile, city-bound residents yearning for a breath of sea air.

In the years leading up to World War I, Coney Island held particular appeal because of its innovative use of the electric light. Thousands of lights traced the outlines of the towering central attraction, Luna Park, the nearby rides and adjacent buildings of the arcade. The lighting effects were considered a modern miracle at the time, setting the park apart from anything New Yorkers would have witnessed in their lifetimes. One such resident of Brooklyn, Italian immigrant and painter, Joseph Stella, was awestruck by the scene. Recently returned from Europe where he was exposed to writings of Filippo Marinetti and the radical stylings of his acolytes, Italian Futurist painters, Stella exhibited in and attended the 1913 International Art Exhibition (The Armory Show). Prompted and inspired by both experiences, he set out to find subject matter that would represent a compelling, personal artistic response to the dynamic flow of modern life surrounding him.

Right: Harry Roseland, ‘Coney Island fair Amusement Palace, Night in Egypt, (1932).

Stella’s epiphany came one night on a bus ride to Coney Island in early September, 1913, during Mardi Gras, a post-Labor Day celebration then held annually in the park. The dazzling disarray of light embodied all that the Futurist Manifesto had foretold as symbols of modernism: danger, speed, energy, the fusion of technology and humankind. He described “…a feeling for the great city; the aggressive optimism that results from the cult of muscle and sport;…the enthusiastic imitation of electricity and the machine; essential concision and synthesis; the happy precision of gears and well-oiled thoughts; the concurrence of energies as they converge into the single victorious trajectory”

After days and nights of observation and sketching, on site, Stella began a series of small drawings and paintings capturing the Coney Island motif, adopting a modified Pointillist technique. More Art Nouveau than futurist in their conception, these smaller works managed to capture a fusion of swirling lights, bold colors and chaotic, sensual frenzy of the amusement park’s faceless, surging masses. The important difference between this effort and any that had preceded it, was that he was no longer literally illustrating the Coney Island scene, but rendering figural relationships between the objects, people and energy found there—the first abstract treatment of this subject in the U.S.

Francis Picabia, the Italian modernist painter, happened to be in New York for the Armory Show. Also an advocate for allowing subjectivity and individual emotions to guide the painting process, Picabia described New York as “the cubist, the futurist city. You have passed through all the old schools, and are futurists in word and deed and thought.” This general endorsement from a fellow countryman, reported in press coverage of Picabia’s appearances around the city and at the opening of Alfred Stieglitz’s avant-garde, 291 Gallery, had an encouraging effect on Stella. The general buzz, timed, as it was in the days and months following the Armory Show, propelled him to earnestly apply the futurist lessons—so carefully articulated in his diaries and letters up until now—to his painting. Before long, a remarkable visual statement about America’s turbulent love affair with the pursuit of pleasure under the spell of modern technology began to take shape in his studio.

Left: Joseph Stella, ‘Battle of Lights, Coney Island, Mardi Gras’ (1913-14).

Stella recorded: “Soon after the show I got very busy in painting my very first American subject: Battle of Lights, Mardi Gras, Coney Island (1913-14) …I felt I should paint this subject upon a big wall, but I had to be satisfied with the hugest canvas that I could find. Making an appeal to my most ambitious aims—the artist in order to obtain the best results has to exasperate and push to the utmost of his faculties—I built the most intense arabesque that I could imagine in order to convey in a hectic mood the surging crowd and the revolving machine generating for the first time, not anguish and pain, but violent dangerous pleasures. I used the intact purity of the vermillion to accentuate the carnal frenzy of the new bacchanal and all the acidity of the lemon yellow for the dazzling lights storming all around.”

The electric light bulb was a central symbol for the futurists, and in the landscape of Coney Island, Stella discovered a glimpse into the future, manifested by the power of that bulb to animate every corner of the carnal scene. Futurist spokesman, Marinetti declared that we are all born of electricity, paralleling the intense glow of the electric lamp with that of human life—both, only to be dramatically extinguished in the end. For the futurist, electricity was the life force in Cubism, propelling its imagery to the next level of expression—that of “lines of force,” or implied motion—thematic of Futurism.

Right: Joseph Stella, Study in graphite for ‘Coney Island Mardi Gras’ (1913) [not in the Atheneum exhibit].

While early versions of Stella’s Coney Island motif showed in various cities in 1913, it was not until 1914, that the monumental—now best-known version—made its way into the public arena. Stella referred to “Coney Island” as “my very first American subject.” The monumental 1914 depiction of the amusement park, now in the collection of Yale University Art Gallery, confronts the viewer with an explosion of color and detail. The work invites one to stand back, reading the work, not horizontally like a landscape, or vertically like a portrait, but from the center, outward. Placing the viewer at the center of the action plays on a Marinetti declaration from his, “We Abjure Our Symbolist Masters (1911-15): “We alone [are] able to express the ephemeral, unstable, and symphonic universe that is forging itself in us and with us.” While examining the painting, the viewer is presented with a whirlwind of repetitive shapes, bold colors and dynamic forms , leading the eye in nystagmic, spiraling circles outward, from its starting point on the word fragments, “COM” (for Comet, a popular ride) and “PARK,” for the central motif, Luna Park). The visual array dissolves into abstract color fields, as it continually reconfigures into fractured images of crowds, carnival rides, corkscrewing trajectories, imposing, ambiguous humanoid forms and, at the top center, the suggestion of Luna Tower, a Coney Island landmark studded with a hundred-thousand lamps. This arabesque form beckons all to this gyrating, deranged Bacchanalian celebration. “Pleasure, commerce and technology vie for the viewer’s attention in…this exuberant tribute to the spatial and temporal disjunctures [sic] of the modern urban environment…a fusion of the developing futurist and Whitmanesque impulses in his art.”

Right: ‘Steeplechase Funny Face’ (n.d.), collection of Ken Harck.

A fractured, heavily-trodden terrain anchors the bottom of the painting, and what little sky may appear at the top left of the scene is sliced through by spotlights, nearly obliterated by ambiguous, biomorphic forms whirling, spinning off and exploding in the night air. The chaotic jumble of forms is occasionally broken by linear shapes or beams of light—representing the Futurist ‘lines of force,’ implying the directional vectors of technology in everyday life. Neither colors nor forms appear to recede or diminish as they migrate backward and skyward, creating a sense of spatial tension enveloping the viewer in the action, leaving no chance of escape or relief from the intensity of the scene. At the lower center, beneath the domed ’head’ and lettering—establishing a central axis—an ambiguously rendered, blood-red organ appears to glow, providing a life-sustaining heartbeat for this Medussa-like creature, as it pushes ribbons of crimson in equal measure throughout most of the scene, insuring the perpetuation of beastly revelry through the night.

Walker Evans was interested in anonymous street portraiture all his life. He recognized that the camera, used properly, could reveal the very values of a society in the people’s conscious and unconscious adornments, in their displays and expressions, in their gait and glance, and in their furnishings and entertainments. The photographs of street types reveal Evans’ incipient use of the documentary style, a clear counterpoint to the more stylized and graphic architectural photographs he was producing earlier in his career. In this photograph Couple at Coney Island, New York (1928), left, a man and woman stand above the fray of park activity, observing the action but their body language suggests a greater interest in each other than external events. In this way, Evans’ spontaneous photographs—where little or no ‘action’ fills the frame—came closer to capturing human nature than other artistic treatments of the park at the height of its reputation.

Right: Reginald Marsh, ‘Pip and Flip’ (1932).

Reginald Marsh was a product of city life and spent endless hours at Coney Island, observing and sketch people as the rode the attractions and recreated on the beach. In Pip and Flip (1932), he captured a more bizarre aspect of the park, and the emotional tone of some of its more popular attractions: the freak show. Representing a low point in man’s inhumanity to man, the blatant display of nature’s oddities and anomalous human development drew thousands to the island’s exhibitions and ‘shows.’ In this image, portrayals of two women—twin sisters—Elvira and Jenny Lee Snow are authentically portrayed, calling attention to the carnival-like atmosphere of the park and the thousands who migrated there each warm summer night.

Weegee was the pseudonym of Arthur Fellig (1899-1968), a photographer and photojournalist, known for his stark black and white street photography. He earned the nickname because of his uncanny ability (monitoring police radio calls) to predict the future and show up at the scene of a crime before authorities. ‘Weegee’ worked in Manhattan, New York City’s Lower East Side as a press photographer during the 1930s and ’40s, and he developed his signature style by following the city’s emergency services and documenting their activity. Much of his work depicted unflinchingly realistic scenes of urban life, crime, injury and death. Another favorite subject was Coney Island. In a classic photograph taken on the beach, Weegee got the masses gathered there to face in his direction for a massive portrait shot. More than a group photo, “Coney island” captures the essence of life in the city—a crush of humanity from all walks of life, escaping to the ‘freedom’ of the beach.

Red Grooms’ painting, Weegee 1940 (1998-99), right, greets you at the entrance of “Coney Island: Visions of an American Dreamland, 1861-2008” with a density of humanity that occupies Coney Island every summer. An homage to its namesake, Weegee’s small photograph, it colorizes and intensifies the scene to the point of abstraction. Grooms is a multimedia artist best known for his colorful pop-art constructions depicting frenetic scenes of modern urban life. The question may be asked: why redo the original Weegee photo as a painting? If there is a thematic motif linking the work of Grooms and the itinerant `40s photographer, it can be found in the message of both images—that the pace of city living and the faces and character of the people who thrive there, then and now, is little changed.

Following the bombing of Pearl Harbor, the U.S. government officially labeled Japanese-born Yasuo Kuniyoshi, who came to America as a teenager, an enemy alien. Yet, the modernist artist continued to consider himself an American, working with the Office of War Information to create works of art documenting war atrocities. His painting My Man (1943), left, reveals a deep understanding of the mood of his adopted country in the 1940s, as well as an awareness of Coney Island’s role as a respite for sailors coming into the Port of New York from all over the country (recall the Broadway play, On the Town, 1944; and film, 1949). In the painting, a blond-haired sailor stands on the boardwalk looking out at sea, where he will soon travel to fight for the country. The anguish of the woman he will leave behind—an Asian-American—is expressed by her body language, her averted face and clinging embrace.

George Tookers remarkable painting, Coney Island (1948), below, right, is clearly one of the highlights of the show. Not monumental in its scale (only 19 x 26”), the contemplative drama portrayed in the cool shadows under the boardwalk belies more profound themes that those of distant revelers in the sun. The contrast is riveting. Tooker, a Viennese-born Jew, lost both parents and a brother to the Holocost. His conflated imagery of Coney Island in this and other works represents his earliest memories, as well as the sights and sounds from a nearby amusement park of his childhood, in pre-war Austria.

Tookers style and palette possess a quiet beauty, his egg tempera medium, classical poses and smoothly-modeled sculptural forms lend a Renaissance-style form to this hushed, enigmatic mediation on faith, found in an unlikely setting. In the background, noisy crowds gather and converse. A figure, arms outstretched, crucifix-like, appears to be ready to levitate like a rising, muscle-bound Holy Spirit. In the foreground, he pictures a sleeping man, held in a woman’s arms—evoking images of the Pietà. These proxies for the figures of Christ and Mary retreat into the sanctuary of the boardwalks shadows. Gathered around them, emotionless figures bear witness to the Lamentation. White towels, ordinarily hung to afford privacy in this public place, here resemble shrouds; eyes peak out from around and above them, challenging the viewer to take responsibility for the suffering Christ-like man and the mourning woman. But, does our voyeuristic vantage point allow us to deny any responsibility for events portrayed here?

Left: Arnold Mesches, ‘Anomie 1991, Winged Victory’ (1991).

Coney Island becomes a contradictory place when utopia and the inferno comingle and collide in Anomie 1991 (Winged Victory), 1991. The one-eyed god of war, with lurid purple lips is an incarnation of the Cyclops gargoyle that greets visitors above the Bowery entrance to Spook-A-Rama. This ride, like the tone of the painting, promises ghastly encounters with blood-red waterfalls, tortuous cult scenes and other-worldly figures and animals. The giant ice cream cone to the right also evokes sculpture found at the park. The artist evokes childhood through Luna’s Surf Avenue entrance, the Wonder Wheel and Cyclone and the ruby red slippers made famous by the film, The Wizard of Oz, which also transported visitors to a place as strange, wonderful and dangerous as Coney Island. Hovering above the park, the artist placed helicopters dating from the Gulf War when the picture was painted in 1991. The striding Winged Victory of Samonthrace (2^nd century, BCE), which was originally created to honor a sea battle, is placed at the center of the scene. With this collection of images, the artist reasserts his concern that “the constant threat of war could ignite another global conflict.”

Right: Reginald Marsh: ‘Wooden Horses’ (1936).

The modern American mass-culture industry was born at Coney Island, and the constant novelty of the resort made it a seductively liberating subject for artists. The exhibit at the Wadsworth Atheneum skillfully captures what these artists saw there from 1861 to 2008. How they chose to portray it varied widely in style and mood over time, mirroring the aspirations and disappointments of the era and of the country. Taken together, these tableaux of wonder and menace, hope and despair, dreams and nightmares, become metaphors for the collective soul of a nation.

By Richard J. Friswell, Managing Editor