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| author | Pamela Klurfield |
| title | Cracking Open the Sky: How the Modernism of New York City Skyscrapers Paved the Way for a New American Modern Art |
| abstract | Using a personal family history with the Woolworth Building, built in 1913, this dissertation looks at its place within
the growth of skyscrapers in Chicago and New York after the Great Fire in Chicago in 1871, and argues that it was skyscraper, America’s very own art form,
that paved the way for American art to veer away from the representational toward modernism and abstraction. It relates the desire of major companies to
build the tallest building in the world as a form of branding, and in specific, how Frank W. Woolworth amassed a fortune and decided that he wanted to
build the tallest building in the world. It tells of a special time in history when a 750-foot building was unheard of, and communication across the
ocean from America to Europe isolated trends from one another. Through a look at Frank W. Woolworth and architect Cass Gilbert, the paper explains how
for the artist John Marin, the building came to represent the discord in New York, and led him to see the Woolworth Building as having a soul, and to
paint it as an animate object. It analyzes John Marin’s style as being aligned with the futurism being explored in Paris. It reveals the importance of
Marin’s relationship with Alfred Stieglitz who made him a part of his circle of artists at his ‘291’ gallery and led his paintings of the Woolworth Building
to be included in the 1913 Armory Show. Marin’s paintings, representative of a fourth dimension, were an example of early American abstraction and bridged
the divide between the European modern entries and that which was being painted in America. Finally, the paper exhibits other examples of skyscraper imagery
in poetry, literature and photography that show how important the skyscraper was to the development of American modernism. |
| school | The Caspersen School of Graduate Studies, Drew University |
| degree | D.Litt. (2017) |
| advisor | Liana Piehler |
| committee | Laura Winters |
| full text | PKlurfield.pdf |
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