“I was always interested in the movements of humanity in the street,” Childe Hassam recalled of the primary focus of his art,“…There is nothing so interesting to me as people. I am never tired of observing them in every-day life, as they hurry through the streets on business or saunter down the promenade on pleasure” (as quoted in Ilene Susan Fort, The Flag Paintings of Childe Hassam, New York, 1988, p. 105). Throughout his celebrated career, Hassam pursued this interest in the quotidian dynamism of people with zeal, ultimately producing an oeuvre that compellingly speaks to life in the modern city. His relentless investigation of human vitality culminated in a highly significant series of images of New York City executed between 1916 and 1919.

Known today as his flag paintings, the approximately 30 works Hassam painted of the exuberant celebrations held along Fifth Avenue and other major thoroughfares in the context of the First World War mark the most ambitious and sophisticated effort of his mature period. Exhibited together six times between 1917 and 1922, the flag paintings—including Flags on 57^th Street, Winter 1918—were critically and popularly acclaimed during Hassam’s lifetime, recognized as brilliant portrayals of a rapidly modernizing country and its entry into its first World War (Fig. 1). Today, they stand as iconic examples of Impressionism, of which Hassam was a leading proponent in the United States (Figs. 2, 3, 4).

While it is unknown whether Hassam initially conceived of the flag paintings as a formal series, it is clear that he sought to capture the revelry and patriotic spirit that characterized the home front and invigorated the city from the outset. He first engaged with the imagery of flags on the avenue in response to the Preparedness Parade that took place in New York City on May 13, 1916. He explained of the initial motivation for his engagement with the flag subject, “There was that Preparedness Day, and I looked up the avenue and saw these wonderful flags waving, and I painted the series of flag pictures after that” (Ibid., p. 8). Hassam’s experience of this event would have likely been direct and immersive, as his Midtown studio was located only a few blocks from the end of the parade route. Contemporary accounts of these parades attest to their overtly patriotic atmosphere, in which the flag played a central role (fig.5).

By the time Hassam painted his first of the flag series in 1916, he had already cultivated a reputation in the United States as among the most important members of The Ten (Fig. 8), a group of American artists who worked in an impressionist style and exhibited their work together. Having previously lived and worked in Paris, Hassam was sympathetic to the French people and an early supporter of the Allied cause. This position was one taken by many American painters of the age, the majority of whom spent critical years of their careers overseas.

While on the eve of the war American artists were united in their recognition of the new importance their creative contributions could have on the global stage, the onset of the conflict engendered a myriad of creative responses. “World War I was a pervasive presence in the lives of Americans,” explained Robert Cozzolino, Anne Classen Knutson and David M. Lubin, “before and after the United States entered the conflict, and artists of all generations, aesthetic positions, regions of the country, and political points of view took notice and responded” (World War I and American Art, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, 2016, p. 11). Some artists sought to evoke a sense of nationalistic celebration and fanfare, while others wanted to express contempt for the destruction of war. Marsden Hartley explored the military pageantry of the war in semi-abstracted yet deeply intimate terms in the works from his Berlin series (Fig. 6). John Singer Sargent painted his extraordinary Gassed in 1919 after he traveled to the Western Front and witnessed many of the horrors of modern warfare firsthand (Fig. 7). Though an ocean separated many American artists—including Hassam—from the brutal realities of the conflict, its impact was nearly impossible to ignore.

Hassam had completed approximately 12 flag paintings by the time he executed Flags on 57^th Street, Winter 1918. The present work takes the viewer into the heart of New York City, depicting the scene from the window of his studio at 130 West 57^th Street. Although 57^th Street was a central and bustling thoroughfare in the city, it was not typically used for war-related parades and as such, Flags on 57th Street, Winter 1918 offers a perspective of the city that is among the most intimate of the series. Here Hassam crops his composition with an undeniably modern lens, positioning American and military service flags prominently in the foreground. They wave above the busy avenue that slices diagonally through the picture plane, peppered with rumbling automobiles and busy New Yorkers hurrying home to escape the inclement weather. The brilliantly saturated red pigments Hassam applies to render the flags contrast dynamically with the cool tones of white, gray, blue and lavender that he employs elsewhere to emphasize the chilled weather and steely lighting conditions of winter. Indeed, Flags on 57^th Street, Winter 1918 is the only work in the flag series to depict New York on a snowy day, which the artist signifies through the small energized brushstrokes that traverse diagonally through the composition and animate the surface of the canvas.

This vigorous manner of execution is a hallmark of Hassam’s impressionist style, which he cultivated during his frequent trips to Paris in the late 1880s. Though Hassam enrolled at the traditional Académie Julian while in Paris, he worked largely independently, and his art soon evolved away from the dark tonalist character of his earlier Boston pictures, and shifted dramatically towards the high-keyed palette, bright light and painterly style that characterize his most successful paintings. Hassam’s years in Paris also undoubtedly exposed him to the work of Claude Monet and Camille Pissarro and their contemporaries. Flags on 57^th Street, Winter 1918 manifests these artists’ influence in both subject and structure. Hassam similarly presents a view of a city block swathed with flags that is seen in works by the French masters like La rue Montorgueil à Paris (Fig. 9) and Pissarro’s Boulevard Montmartre series (Fig. 10). Hassam’s own depiction of the Paris streets in his 1910 work July Fourteenth, Rue Daunou also anticipates the flag paintings he would begin six years later (Fig.11). Similar to the manner in which Monet painted haystacks (Fig. 12) and Pissarro studied the busy avenues of Paris, Hassam embraced the Impressionists’ use of serial imagery in the flag paintings, revisiting a subject at different times of day and under varying conditions of weather to more deeply understand changing effects of light and shadow. Audiences recognized the connection the flag paintings shared with the ideas of the Impressionist masters, with one New York Times critic writing in response to the Durand-Ruel exhibition that, “Mr. Hassam has done for the Flag what Monet did for the Haystack” (“November Exhibitions in Great Variety; Art at Home and Abroad," New York Times, November 17, 1918). Despite these shared affinities, Hassam disliked the comparisons drawn between his work and Monet’s. Furthermore, he differentiated his compositions from his European counterparts by consistently maintaining an underlying structure and a more controlled manner of execution, never fully dissolving form into light and color.

Though images of the city and urban living pervade Hassam’s body of work, the flag paintings uniquely capture this extraordinary moment in the history of New York City as it transformed into the economic, technological and cultural hub of the United States. They differ dramatically from most of Hassam’s earlier depictions of the city, which frequently focus more intently on its residents. In Flags on 57^th Street, Winter 1918, however, the artist simplifies the figures, dwarfed by steel and concrete edifices that surround them, to quick daubs and strokes of pigment. The inclusion of the elevated train station in the background further emphasizes the frenetic pace of modern urban living. In Flags on 57^th Street, Winter 1918 the city itself is Hassam’s protagonist. “The portrait of a city,” he explained of his attraction to urban subjects, “… is in a way like the portrait of a person-- the difficulty is to catch not only the superficial resemblance but the inner self. The spirit, that’s what counts, and one should strive to portray the soul of the city with the same care as the soul of a sitter” (as quoted in “New York the Beauty City: Childe Hassam Declares that Paris and London Have Nothing to Compare with It, Though we May Not Know it,” The Sun (New York), February 23, 1913, p. 16).

As the United States entered the war, the iconography of the modern American city became more richly layered with patriotic undertones, coming to symbolize the American ability to prevail against its Axis enemies. Though the national flag had long been used for decorations on national holidays and other special events, in the years leading up to the United States’ entry into the war it became almost ubiquitous. As Hassam continued to execute works in the series, his treatment of the motif evolved as well. He developed a basic compositional structure for most of the works based on a high vantage point that overlooked a busy urban street bordered by soaring structures that conveyed a dramatic spatial recession. The flag, which in the early paintings was primarily employed as a visual device that added lively color and pattern to a work, became progressively more central to both the construction and meaning of his image. The flags multiplied in number, increased in size and were positioned more prominently in the composition. Hassam painted Flags on 57^th Street, Winter 1918 two years after he first began to work on the theme of flags on the avenue and as such the work exemplifies this shift. Here he positions three American flags and two service flags boldly in the foreground, framing the composition and waving dominantly above the activity on the street below. The placement underscores their importance to the meaning of the image, while also serving a structural function, as the brightly colored flags placed in the right foreground and left middle distance lead the viewer’s eye through the scene.

The motif appears in several works from the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries that notably rank among the most iconic images of Western art history. In these works, the flag most often serves a narrative purpose, employed by the artist to provide visual cues to the underlying story and imbue them with a level of gravity and seriousness. As exemplified by masterworks like Emanuel Leutze’s Washington Crossing the Delaware (Fig. 12). While Hassam’s focus on the flag in the context of World War I clearly positions him within this art historical convention, it is evident that by the time he completed the last painting in 1918 his use of the motif extended beyond a supporting narrative function. In Flags on 57^th Street, Winter 1918 the flag becomes the narrative of the work itself. Through his distinctive impressionist lens, Hassam presents a vision of the country’s unparalleled modernity and technological prowess. The flag thus becomes a representation of the new America and its leadership on the global stage at this pivotal time in history.

Hassam ceased painting his flag images in 1919, and never explicitly assigned a specific number or formally labeled certain paintings as part of the series. The first exhibition of works that included 24 of the artist’s paintings on this theme opened at Durand-Ruel Galleries in New York on November 15, 1918, four days after the war came to an end. Five additional exhibitions featuring the flag paintings were held during his lifetime, but the number included changed with each presentation as works were purchased or added to the group. Hassam and his gallerist, Albert Milch, approached several private and institutional buyers for the loosely conceived series, with Hassam speculating that the paintings “…will probably be sold in the West somewhere—and the enthusiastic New Yorkers will have to pay railroad fare to go and see them!” (as quoted in Ibid., p. 113). While they were ultimately unable to secure a single buyer for the group, it is clear that Hassam sought to keep the works together as a war memorial and had come to regard them as a cohesive group.

Few motifs in history have ingrained themselves more inexorably in American culture and identity than the flag. Throughout its history and into today, artists have utilized its powerful symbolism and profound connotations to create images that endure as many of our most iconic; images that can speak to the most intimate of experiences or to single moments in history while still remaining universal and timeless. Hassam executed his flag paintings at the height of his creative powers and indeed, the canvases testify to his brilliant handling of light and color, as well as the distinctive lens through which he viewed the world around him. Flags on 57th Street, Winter 1918 effortlessly captures the kinetic energy and dynamism of New York City as it transformed into the thriving center of the modern world. It is a remarkable example of Hassam’s unique approach to depicting this highly significant moment in American history, as well as his distinctive interpretation of Impressionism and his ability to adapt its tenets to a resolutely American idiom.

Artist

Childe Hassam