New York: Lucinda Rogers
Drawings 1988-2018
West Street Press, 2019
'DRAWING NEW YORK' Introduction by Lucy Sante
Lucinda Rogers has been drawing New York City - specifically Manhattan, the city's centre and most dramatic locus - for more than thirty years. She first visited in 1988, which now seems like several centuries ago, considering the vast changes that have occurred since then. She is a Londoner, but her experience of New York is longer and deeper than that of many people who consider themselves New Yorkers. Becoming a New Yorker is less a matter of heritage than of finding a way to inhabit the city, to understand its dynamic, to take comfort in its contradictions, to milk it for what it offers. By that measure, and for her close and patient observation of its less obvious, more workaday aspects, Lucinda Rogers should at the very least have a key to the city.
Even as a novice visitor, she did not tarry long gazing at the major landmarks (although she rendered sublime views of the Chrysler Building, the Flatiron Building, the Brooklyn Bridge). Instead she found her quarry among the side streets, the sidewalk markets, the signage clusters, the corner newsstands, the delis and luncheonettes, the parking garages and vehicle repair joints, the rooftops, the ruins. Those are the things that New Yorkers notice in the course of their daily lives but that visitors may barely take in. They are primal constituent elements of the urban landscape; unfortunately they are also fragile - as is anything that does not have a great deal of money behind it. Street markets are dispersed by the police; small businesses are rent-hiked out of existence; newsstands are closed by municipal authority or by the passing of the analogue era (there were once hundreds; now there are just a few dozen). This means that Rogers's documentation of the city preserves the image of many informal institutions that have already passed into memory. Every year the specific character of neighbourhoods is further eroded as entire rows of older buildings are erased, along with their stories, and replaced with corporate edifices that appear as blanks in the streetscape.
Among the fallen are the street booksellers (in the drawing Recession Special!), who are nominally protected by the First Amendment to the Constitution but in most places have been harassed away by the police; the Village Voice, once the city's great weekly, its guide to even the most recondite entertainments and a longtime indispensable resource for apartment hunters, which was sacked, plundered, and eventually vaporised by a succession of owners; and the Jefferson Theatre, a phantom from the vaudeville era that stood empty on 14th Street for decades (although it hosted an illegal and shambolic after-hours club in the early 1980s).
There are no more car washes on Broadway and Houston Street - there were two, on opposite sides, both replaced by corporate towers. Canal Street remains a place of energy and chaos, but it has been changing as its quasi-legal open-air marketplace has been gradually dismantled. Rogers documents one of the last, stubborn, holdout meatpacking plants in the Meatpacking District, now one of the most expensive places in Manhattan, in terms both of real estate and of the goods sold in its shops. Orchard Street, formerly the heart of the Jewish Lower East Side and a market for cut-price clothing, is now mostly a street of fancy restaurants. And Times Square, which has been a cavern of billboards since the beginning of the twentieth century, is now a cavern of headache-inducing video screens and becomes more impersonal by the year.
But it hasn't all gone away: witness Eisenberg's Sandwich Shop, still there and looking very much the same as in Rogers's drawing, a dark and alluring survivor from the pre-war quick-lunch boom. There are still corners of the city dominated by small-time enterprises: the Garment District, parts of Hell's Kitchen, much of the length of Lexington Avenue. Chinatown is a special case, remaining largely a working-class community housed in buildings over a hundred years old, with commerce conducted in small storefronts with displays that spill out onto the sidewalk. And then there is the subway, much of which has changed very little in the last eighty years, for better or worse.
Rogers is drawn to views that concentrate a great deal of visual information, often within an interesting polyhedral architectural space. She is open to both chaotic activity and gentle, silent mouldering. She establishes scenes the way the eye does: lighting up certain corners, focusing on certain details, washing out peripheries or fields that register as empty of interest. She matches the background colour to the mood of a scene as much as to its weather or illumination, while picking out a shirt here, a window there, and making it glow. She can faithfully reproduce the finicky curlicues of a nineteenth-century cornice, but she does so sparingly. She is anchored at al times by a strong line, belonging to the central or most pleasing forms, which in its emphasis supplies both weight and volume. In its horizontal manifestation it is often bowed, as if accounting for the curvature of the earth, and background structures will echo the curve in finer lines, like a chorus.
Rogers has an extraordinary feeling for structures of all sizes and conditions - although the older ones, with their eccentricities and aspirational details, hold greater interest than the efficient, unadorned boxes that succeeded them. She also appreciates vehicles, trucks in particular, which, by her rendering, display individual personalities. And of course she observes humans, especially the ones who are fixed in the midst of the rush: the street vendors, the chess players in the park, neighbourhood icons such as Butch the Hat - a disappearing breed - whose nature she grasps in a few quick assured lines. The fact that her work so often concentrates on street scenes and architecture should not obscure her uncanny, penetrating ability to distill the salient aspects of the human face.
Her boldness and rapidity serve her well as a reporter. The series she devotes to the aftermath of 9/11 is intimate and affecting; there is great tenderness in her portraits of the responders, weary and shell-shocked but persistent in their labours. Her feeling for which details to incorporate and which to elide is on full display in these drawings, as she zooms in on a face, a stance, a gesture, an embroidered patch to convey a great deal with strict economy. She can also render the scale and the desolation of Ground Zero at night -a nearly impossible subject - with just a few pinpoints of colour, a few washes of white, a sense of a vortex, the impression of a hush that persists despite the earth-moving vehicles. These pictures, many of them quick and unstudied, amount to an entire narrative, of labour and courage and perseverance in the face of disaster, that can hold its own against any number of written accounts.
Lucinda Rogers is an artist and a journalist. She is in the business of telling the truth about what she sees. She does her work on the spot - and in a place as boisterous as New York City, for a woman especially, that is no small achievement in itself. Making these pictures has required not simply a gift for drawing but a concatenation of skills, including mathematical, psychological, sociological, and architectural annexes. Her work cannot be mistaken for anyone else's - her line is strictly her own - although there are echoes here and there of great New York artists of the past: Joseph Pennell, John Sloan, Reginald Marsh, Edward Hopper, Raphael Soyer. She is extending into our time a tradition of streetscape rendering that has sometimes been eclipsed by photography. And in addition to their beauty, these pictures have a distinct historical function, forever preserving scenes, whether beloved or harrowing or timeless or ephemeral or doomed, in a great city at a time of swift and turbulent change.
© Lucy Sante 2019