Bleecker and Carmine Streets, New York
Oil on canvas
25 × 30 in. (63.5 × 76.2 cm)
Gift of Mr. and Mrs. Donald B. Abert and Mrs. Barbara Abert Tooman M1976.14
Photo credit: John R. Glembin
K219
By the early 20th century, Bleecker Street was the nucleus of New York’s cultural underground. One guidebook compared it to Paris’s Latin Quarter, calling it the city’s “headquarters of Bohemianism.” The area was also home to thousands of Italian immigrants, who established a distinctive culture in the neighborhood. George Luks specialized in painting the districts and people of New York, and here he captured the immigrant culture at the corners of Bleecker and Carmine in a picturesque way: the nighttime scene, with light glittering through high-rise windows and pouring through shops filled with goods, masks the tensions that existed around immigrants making a new life in the city.
Exhibition label, The Ashcan School and The Eight: “Creating a National Art,” Bradley Family Galleries, September 23, 2022–February 19, 2023.
Publication History
Kennedy, Elizabeth, and Peter John Brownlee. The Eight and American Modernisms. New Britain, CT: New Britain Museum of American Art, 2009, pp. 100, 172, color Illus. p. 100.
Zurier, Rebecca, Virginia M. Mecklenburg, and Robert W. Snyder. Metropolitan Lives: The Ashcan Artists and Their New York. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1995, color illus. p. 36, fig. 30.
Weinberg, H. Barbara, Doreen Bolger, and David Park Curry. American Impressionism and Realism: The Painting of Modern Life, 1885–1915. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1994, pp. 195–96,cat. 47, color illus. p. 193, fig. 175.
Loughery, John. The Guggenheim Returns in The Hudson Review 45, cat. 4 (Winter, 1993), p. 651.
Elizabeth Milroy. Painters of a New Century: The Eight & American Art. Milwaukee: Milwaukee Art Museum, 1991, cat. 83.
Goldstein, Rosalie, ed. Guide to the Permanent Collection. Milwaukee: Milwaukee Art Museum, 1986, p. 160, b/w illus. p. 160.
Exhibition History
The Eight and American Modernisms. Co-organized by the Terra Foundation for American Art. New Britain Museum of American Art, New Britain, Connecticut, March 6–May 24, 2009; Milwaukee Art Museum, June 6–August 23, 2009.
American Painters of Modern Life: Impressionism and Realism 1885–1915, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, May 2–July 24, 1994; Amon Carter Museum, Fort Worth, Texas, August 22–October 30, 1994; The Denver Art Museum, November 28, 1994–February 5, 1995; Los Angeles County Museum of Art, March 6–May 14, 1995.
Painters of a New Century: The Eight, Milwaukee Art Museum, September 6–November 31, 1991; Denver Art Museum, December 7, 1991–February 16, 1992; National Gallery of Canada, April 16–June 7, 1992; The Brooklyn Museum, June 26–September 21, 1992.
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