Life on the East Side

1931

Jerome Myers

Painter, American, 1867 - 1940

Almost two dozen men, women, and children stand in a street market in this horizontal painting. The people all appear to have pale skin, though a few of the women’s faces are tinged with green. The men are bearded and wear coats and the women long skirts or dresses in shades of rust brown, sage green, slate blue, and brick red. Baskets holding green goods along the foreground closest to us are loosely painted so details are indistinct. A screen of two- and three-story buildings on the far side of a town square are painted with golden yellow and honey orange. The outlines of skyscrapers beyond are hazy against a cloud-streaked, blue sky. The artist signed and dated the painting in the lower right corner, “JEROME MYERS 1931.”
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Between 1881 and 1910, more than 1.5 million Jews immigrated to the United States, many settling in the Lower East Side of Manhattan. This scene of an open-air market in the Jewish quarter is one of Jerome Myers’s many sympathetic depictions of the daily activities and special rituals of New York’s immigrant communities at the time. As he wrote in his autobiography: “My love was my witness in recording these earnest, simple lives, these visions of the slums clothed in dignity, never to me mere slums but the habitations of a people who were rich in spirit and effort.”

Myers acknowledged that “daily existence” for East Side immigrants “mingles the old with the new,” but Life on the East Side, with its quaint pushcarts, old-fashioned costumes, and idyllic mood, indicates a resistance to, if not an outright rejection of, modernization in favor of tradition. Indeed, Myers’s market reads as a village-like enclave surrounded on all sides by an ominous and intrusively modern New York City. In the background looms Manhattan’s skyline, an emblem of Machine Age technological progress. In fact, the year Myers painted this scene witnessed the completion of the Empire State Building, which surpassed the Chrysler Building as the world’s tallest skyscraper.

On View

East Building Ground Level, Gallery 106-B

Artwork overview

More About this Artwork

Scholarly Article:  American Paintings, 1900–1945: Life on the East Side, 1931

This nearly square painting shows an industrial area with buildings, storage silos, a smokestack, and railroad tracks. A mound of brown dirt or other material is in shadow in the lower left corner of the painting. Next to the mound, railroad tracks extend diagonally from the lower center of the painting into the distance to our right. The tracks end at a white building with staggered gray rooflines to our right in the distance. A tall terracotta-red smokestack rises high beyond the white building, smoke pouring out of its top and blending into the clouds above. Just beyond the mound of dirt, piles of white material, perhaps in unseen bins, line the railroad track to our left and lead back to a row ten interconnected, coral-orange silos. The horizon comes about halfway up the painting, and it is lined with a row of long white and gray warehouses. The artist signed and dated the work with brown paint in the lower right corner: “Sheeler 31.”

Scholarly Series:  American Paintings, 1900–1945

Artwork history & notes

Provenance

The artist; purchased December 1932 by the Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington; acquired 2015 by the National Gallery of Art.

Associated Names

Exhibition History

1932

  • Thirteenth Exhibition of Contemporary American Oil Paintings, Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, 4 December 1932 - 15 January 1933, no. 120.

1941

  • Jerome Myers Memorial Exhibition, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, 22 April - 19 May 1941, no. 20.

1957

  • Twenty-Fifth Biennial Exhibition of Contemporary American Oil Paintings, Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington; Toledo (Ohio) Museum of Art, 1957, no. 41.

1961

  • The Eight, Philbrook Art Center, Tulsa, 1961, unpublished checklist.

1967

  • Jerome Myers: An Artist in Manhattan, Delaware Art Center, Wilmington; Montclair Art Museum, 1967, no. 23.

1976

  • The American Genius: W.W. Corcoran, Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, 24 January - 4 April 1976, unpublished checklist.

1980

  • Guy Pène du Bois: Artists About Town, Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington; Joslyn Art Museum, Omaha; Block Gallery, Northwestern University, Evanston, 1980-1981, no. 102.

1981

  • Of Time and Place: American Figurative Art from the Corcoran Gallery, Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington; Cincinnati Art Museum; San Diego Museum of Art; University of Kentucky Art Museum, Lexington; Hunter Museum of Art, Chattanooga; Philbrook Art Center, Tulsa; Portland Art Museum, Oregon; Des Moines Art Center; Museum of Fine Arts, St. Petersburg, Florida, 1981-1983, no. 45.

1985

  • Henri's Circle, Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, 20 April - 16 June 1985, unnumbered checklist.

1998

  • The Forty-Fifth Biennial: The Corcoran Collects, 1907-1998, Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, 17 July - 29 September 1998, unnumbered catalogue.

2004

  • Figuratively Speaking: The Human Form in American Art, 1770-1950, Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, 2004-2005, unpublished checklist.

2013

  • American Journeys: Visions of Place, Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, 21 September 2013 - 28 September 2014, unpublished checklist.

Bibliography

n.d.

  • Corcoran Gallery of Art Archives, Special Collections Research Center, George Washington University Libraries, Washington, DC: correspondence between Jerome Myers and C. Powell Minnigerode, 8 November and 7, 8, and 9 December 1932; RG2, Office of the Director records; Series 2, Minnigerode and Williams records, 1908-1968.

1932

  • "Corcoran Buys Six Paintings." The Washington Evening Star (12 December 1932): A2.

  • Mechlin, Leila. "Note of Art and Artists." The Washington Sunday Star (18 December 1932): Magazine section: 12.

1933

  • Wilson, Vylla Poe. "Capital Art and Artists." The Washington Post (1 January 1933): 3.

1936

  • Burroughs, Alan. Limners and Likenesses: Three Centuries of American Painting. New York, 1936: 158, repro. (2nd ed., 1965: 158).

1940

  • Myers, Jerome. Artist in Manhattan. New York, 1940: 221.

1941

  • Rainey, Aida. "Art Capital Grows Here." The Washington Post (19 October 1941): 6:5.

  • "Works of Jerome Myers Are Shown at Corcoran." The Washington Star (14 December 1941): E6.

1942

  • "Art Exhibits." This Week in the Nation's Capital 20, no. 27 (28 June 1942): 6, repro.

1968

  • 50 American Masterpieces: 200 Years of Great Paintings. New York, 1968: unnumbered, repro.

1973

  • Phillips, Dorothy W. A Catalogue of the Collection of American Paintings in the Corcoran Gallery of Art, Vol. 2: Painters born from 1850 to 1910. Washington, 1973: 71-72, repro. 71.

2011

  • Greenhalgh, Adam. "Jerome Myers, Life on the East Side." In Corcoran Gallery of Art: American Paintings to 1945. Edited by Sarah Cash. Washington, 2011: 240-241, 282, repro.

Inscriptions

lower right: Jerome Myers / N. Y. 1931

Wikidata ID

Q46634760

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