Sample Art Critique:

Describe: The painting depicts an elevated wooden railway running ascending into a dense city. On both sides of the railway, line buildings and tall skyscrapers. The dark blue of the sky peek through steam-swirling clouds or fog that amidst the skyscrapers. There is not one human figure in the composition.

Analyse: The buildings on each side of the railway appear as repeated cuboids, without distinctive qualities or design to each facet. We are immediately drawn to the unknown vanishing point of the railway track as it diminishes into the thick of the skyscrapers in the background. The composition places the viewer in the center of the scene on the railway track. This dramatises a sense of scale as the skyscrapers tower over us. The image described by one American critic as 'hard, metallic, unhuman' (quoted in David Cohen 'The Rising City Urban Themes in the Art and Writings of C.R.W.Nevinson', C.R.W.Nevinson The Twentieth Century, p.49), betrays an allegiance to Cubism and Futurism. The narrow chromatic range of mainly brown and grey and the complex facet of the skyscrapers are closely related to Cubism. While the central motif of a railway line receding dramatically into a cluster of tower blocks epitomises a futurist interest in speed, technology and above all modernity.

Interpret: The skyscrapers and railways of New York epitomised the dynamism of the modern metropolis. This painting, originally titled ‘New York – an Abstraction’, shows the former-futurist Nevinson’s enthusiastic response, in which the urgency of the city is matched with a modernist style of painting derived from pre-war abstraction. However, Nevinson’s work did not receive the success for which he had hoped, and his initial excitement gave way to the disillusion indicated by his revised title. 

The modern city had been a staple subject matter for British avant-garde artists before the First World War, but in the aftermath of that conflict the taste for modernity waned. This shift in attitudes was manifested in the visual arts by a 'return to order', that is to say a revival of the classical style and a renewed interest in the countryside and nature as subject matter. Nevinson's work during the 1920s reflected this change. Where the pre-war paintings had been characterised by the angular and dramatic style associated with the machine aesthetic of Futurism, increasingly his postwar works were rendered in a naturalist style. In tandem with this stylistic development, a growing number of Nevinson's paintings were landscapes. When appropriate, however, futurist motifs and subjects were revived, as in The Twentieth Century, 1932-35, his large scale critique of Nazism, Fascism and war.

Judgement: The painting makes me feel so small and alone in a crowded city. It reminds me of one's yearning for deep human interaction in our fast-paced society. When our lives come to a standstill, the city almost becomes a mirror where the reflection of our soulless self emerge. 

Further reading:

C.R.W.Nevinson The Twentieth Century, exhibition catalogue, The Imperial War Museum, London 1999, reproduced as 'Soul of the Soulless City' p.143, pl.85 (colour)

C.R.W. Nevinson: Retrospective Exhibition of Paintings, Drawings and Prints 1889-1946, exhibition catalogue, Kettle's Yard, Cambridge 1988

Jeremy Lewison 'English Painting and the Metropolis in the Twenties', Jean Clair (ed.), The 1920s: Age of the Metropolis, exhibition catalogue, The Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, Montreal 1991, pp.417-31

Toby Treves

May 2000 

Adapted from https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/nevinson-the-soul-of-the-soulless-city-new-york-an-abstraction-t07448