Nathan Hoffman

"Manhattan from the Rooftops" Nathan Hoffman, Impressionist Cityscape Landscape

1947

Herman Rose (1909 - 2007) Manhattan Looking East (View from Midtown), 1952-54 Oil on canvas 26 x 28 inches Signed lower right Fairfield Porter wrote an essay in ArtNews on this exact painting in 1955. Please inquire for a copy of the article. Literature: Fairfield Porter, "Herman Rose Paints a Picture," ArtNews, April 1955 Volume 54, Number 2, illustrated. Herman Rose was best known for his depictions of cityscapes of New York City. Herman Rappaport was born in Brooklyn, New York. in 1909. Herman Rose was the professional pseudonym of Herman Rappaport. Originally trained as a draftsman and studied at the National Academy of Design from 1927 to 1929, he was later employed by the Works Progress Administration's Murals Division under Arshile Gorky from 1934 until 1939. In 1939, after experimenting with a variety of contemporary expressionistic styles, Rose decided to paint from life. Working mostly in East New York and East Canarsie in Brooklyn, and in Manhattan, Rose began to paint roof tops and street scenes. Rappaport began using the name Herman Rose when he held his first solo art exhibition in 1946 at the Charles Egan Gallery in New York City. Although he initially began as an Expressionistic painter, he became known for small, light-filled Impressionist paintings of still life, cityscapes and skies by the early 1950s. His paintings and images were often composed of very small dabs of paint and tiny, blurry "squares," which combined to create the image on canvas, his favorite medium. Often described as a "lyrical painter" Rose's work "interpreted traditional subjects: landscape, still life and the figure like the Post-Impressionists from whom he developed his own style, Rose built up forms from distinct touches of color that don't entirely blend in the viewer's eye. This gives his surfaces an active quality that flattens forms, one of the great lessons of modernism." Herman Rose's work received official recognition when Ms. Dorothy Miller of Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) included his work in an exhibition called, "15 Americans," alongside work by Clyfford Still, Mark Rothko and Jackson Pollock. New York Times art critic Hilton Kramer wrote of Rose's work in 1981, "{he} must surely be counted among the most beautiful works anyone has produced in this challenging medium for many years." The Art in America art critic Lawrence Campbell...

Lionel S. Reiss (1894 - 1988) New York City Skyline View from the East River Watercolor on paper 13 x 19 inches Signed lower left In describing his own style, Lionel Reiss wrote, “By nature, inclination, and training, I have long since recognized the fact that...I belong to the category of those who can only gladly affirm the reality of the world I live in.” Reiss’s subject matter was wide-ranging, including gritty New York scenes, landscapes of bucolic Bucks County, Pennsylvania, and seascapes around Gloucester, Massachusetts. However, it was as a painter of Jewish life—both in Israel and in Europe before World War II—that Reiss excelled. I.B. Singer, the Nobel Prize winner for Literature, noted that Reiss was “essentially an artist of the nineteenth century, and because of this he had the power and the courage to tell visually the story of a people.” Although Reiss was born in Jaroslaw, Poland, his family immigrated to the United States in 1898 when he was four years old. Reiss's family settled on New York City’s Lower East Side and he lived in the city for most of his life. Reiss attended the Art Students League and then worked as a commercial artist for newspapers and publishers. As art director for Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, he supposedly created the studio’s famous lion logo. After World War I, Reiss became fascinated with Jewish life in the ‘Old World.’ In 1921 he left his advertising work and spent the next ten years traveling in Europe, the Middle East, and North Africa. Like noted Jewish photographers Alter Kacyzne and Roman Vishniac, Reiss depicted Jewish life in Poland prior to World War II. He later wrote, “My trip encompassed three main objectives: to make ethnic studies of Jewish types wherever I traveled; to paint and draw Jewish life, as I saw it and felt it, in all aspects; and to round out my work in Israel.” In Europe, Reiss recorded quotidian scenes in a variety of media and different settings such as Paris, Amsterdam, the Venice ghetto, the Jewish cemetery in Prague, and an array of shops, synagogues, streets, and marketplaces in the Jewish quarters of Warsaw, Lodz, Krakow, Lublin, Vilna, Ternopil, and Kovno. He paid great attention to details of dress, hair, and facial features, and his work became noted for its descriptive quality. A selection of Reiss’s portraits appeared in 1938 in his book My Models Were Jews. In this book, published on the eve of the Holocaust, Reiss argued that there was “no such thing as a ‘Jewish race’.” Instead, he claimed that the Jewish people were a cultural group with a great deal of diversity within and between Jewish communities around the world. Franz Boas...

Rooftop view of the upper West Side Manhattan as it looked in the 1930s. There is a rough indication of a billboard and a glimpse of the Hudson River. The cluster of buildings depic...

Specializing in New York City's vibrant urban landscapes and surrounding harbors, George Herbert Macrum (1878–1970) captured the essence of the city’s architectural grandeur and dyna...