A carnival of humanity is on display in Clifford Addams’ “Union Square,” painted around 1928, after New Jersey-born Addams moved back to the U.S. from London and made Greenwich Village his home for the rest of his life.
Figures jostle on sidewalks, an office tower looms over a church and rooftop water tanks, and a department store sign (Ohrbach’s, which got its start on 14th Street in 1923) all reveal that this is not a park landscape of placid lawns but a vibrant depiction of New York’s nexus of business, theater, and commerce—which perfectly describes 1920s Union Square.
Born in 1876, Addams is a hard artist to categorize. He studied art in the United States and then went to Europe, where he apprenticed with (and became close to) James McNeill Whistler.
In the early decades of the 20th century, Addams earned notoriety for his detailed etchings, many of street scenes and a 1927 self-portrait (posted below). Supposedly he “only does paint for the fun of it,” per a Brooklyn Eagle review of a 1923 exhibition at New York’s Arlington Galleries.
Addams “distinctly does not belong to the host of Whistler imitators,” stated the Eagle. “His work is a strange mixture of the most subtle nuances of color with a violent dramatic massing of light and dark.”
“Union Square” takes a physical place in Manhattan and depicts it as theater. David Adams Cleveland, art historian and author of A History of Amerian Tonalism, put it this way in an essay on Artsy.net from 2015:
“There is a deep affection for the hard life of the streets and the teeming crowds. The packed sidewalk along 14th Street where the sign for Ohrbachs, the famous department store, hangs prominently fairly seethes with rambling shoppers and sidewalk vendors. This is not a tourist view but a non-sentimental evocations of a city electric with felt life. The paint marks are as alive as the fabric of the city they depict, full of febrile otherworldliness as twilight descends and the neon signs of the city begin an eerie glow.”
