Volume 47, Number 19 · November 30, 2000
Over the Rainbow
By Anthony Grafton
Utopia: The Search for the Ideal Society in the Western World
an exhibition at the New York Public Library, October 14, 2000-January 27, 2001
Utopia: The Search for the Ideal Societyin the Western World
edited by Roland Schaer, Gregory Claeys, Lyman Tower Sargent
New York Public Library/Oxford University Press, 386 pp., $27.50 (paper)
On November 29, 1935, Berenice Abbott photographed Henry Street, on New York's Lower East Side. Two rows of tenements dominate the picture, their façades an indecipherable hieroglyph of messy fire escapes, mismatched cornices, car-wash signs, and posters. In the background, far beyond them, rise three skyscrapers, tall and pale. The vertical city, modern, massive, and stark, overwhelms the melancholy disorder of the low tenement street. Yet traditions cling to the steel frames of these immense buildings. Their crowning pinnacles are garlanded with columns, obelisks, and moldings: em-bodiments of the new, they still claim the aesthetic protection of an an-cient architectural code. And Abbott's mesmerizing black-and-white image, mechanically produced and modern as the movies, also harks back in its composition to an ancient source, the New Testament Book of Revelation: 'And I John saw the holy city, new Jerusalem, coming down from God out of heaven, prepared as a bride adorned for her bridegroom.' When skyscrapers and tenements confronted one another in Abbott's viewfinder, old images provided her striking iconography. The age-old conflict between heavenly and earthly cities, Utopia and Dystopia, still framed the visual drama that she set in the black-and-white New York of the Thirties.
Review, 3207 words
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