ABSTRACT
Abstract art dominated post-war American painting and helped make New York the global capital of art. Likewise, its burgeoning influence contributed to an evolving trend in representations of the Brooklyn Bridge. As Feininger showed, the bridge was an exceptional civic achievement—a teaming roadway and an extraordinary public space—but also a potent work of art. Beginning in the modernist era, and reaching its high point at the middle-century, representations of the span often ignored the foot-traffic that gave life to the bridge and focused instead on the structure: on the towers and the network of cables. Their approach mirrored that of the influential New Critics who believed art, and especially poetry, should be judged in and of itself, without reference to external context. Such artists as Georgia O’Keeffe, Howard Cook, Ellsworth Kelly, and Robert Indiana followed this lead. They depicted the span as a pure shape or an aesthetic ideal. Lifted above the messy business of urban life, their bridge became a perfect, self-contained art object, an American version of Keats’s “well-wrought urn.”
