Lee Ann Custer

In late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century New York City, “urban voids”—interstitial spaces in the city—were as significant as built forms. While studies of New York during this period tend to highlight its extreme density, period texts reveal efforts to regulate building growth and to preserve natural light and air—precious elements in the gritty urban environment. Modern American painters recorded the lived experience of the residual spaces that these constraints produced—authorless voids that could not be captured by traditional forms of depicting the city, such as maps, aerial views, and architectural renderings of single buildings. Through four case studies of the work of George Bellows, John Sloan, Georgia O’Keeffe, and Aaron Douglas, I argue that these highly contested spaces offered opportunities for artists to deploy innovative approaches to form, subject matter, and style, and to convey the socio-political implications of new spatial conditions in the city. By considering Ashcan, avant-garde, and Harlem Renaissance artists, the project looks comprehensively at American modernism’s response to urban space and documents a countercurrent to the long-held narrative in which early modernist art inevitably culminates in abstraction.