Frederick Brosen explains, “A painting is not just a painting but a window into a lifetime of looking, learning, feeling and developing.”
He began drawing when he was a boy growing up in New York City, even then, fascinated by the architecture of the city and its little pockets of history and intimate neighborhoods. When he was 18, he visited Amsterdam and the Rijksmuseum where he discovered Dutch 17th-century painters. “They invented secular cityscape painting,” he notes. “Their paintings are inclusive and accessible.”
17 Stuyvesant Street, watercolor over graphite on paper, 34¼ x 23". Courtesy the artist and Hirschl & Adler Modern, New York.
Jones Walk, Coney Island, watercolor over graphite on paper, 19 x 12½". Courtesy the artist and Hirschl & Adler Modern, New York.
Brosen rides his bicycle around early morning New York scouting possible views and “quiet moments” for his watercolor paintings. He does sketches and takes photographs from various angles, then returns to his studio. He begins each work with a graphite drawing over which he layers transparent watercolor.
Frederick Brosen: Recent Watercolor Paintings continues at Hirschl & Adler Modern in New York through March 6. It includes 12 watercolors of various parts of Manhattan as well as Coney Island.
West 10th Street, Coney Island, watercolor over graphite on paper, 34¾ x 25". Courtesy the artist and Hirschl & Adler Modern, New York.
The quiet moments of his watercolors invite the viewer to stop and take them in. He includes “a foreground that enables viewers to place themselves in the painting.”
West 74th Street is a view from the bustle of Columbus Avenue to the bucolic Central Park, with one of the towers of The San Remo luxury condominium jutting into the sky, emphasized by the 35-by-23½-inch format. Photorealistic from a distance, the painting reveals its drawing base and brushstrokes when seen up close.
West 74th Street, watercolor over graphite on paper, 35 x 23½". Courtesy the artist and Hirschl & Adler Modern, New York.
Farther downtown, Brosen focuses more intimately on 17 Stuyvesant Street, an apartment building in the East Village built in 1920. The tree-lined street is one of the oldest in the city. Brosen features the time battered façade of the building that now abuts Alumni Hall of New York University, which houses 450 students. The view from the apartment building’s stoop includes the glossy towers of contemporary New York.
Brosen invites the viewer to contemplate who may have lived in the building over the past 100 years. Although we know that Tiger Woods, Rita Hayworth and Mary Tyler Moore lived in The San Remo, the residents of 17 Stuyvesant Street remain a mystery. —
Hirschl & Adler Modern
The Fuller Building • 41 E. 57th Street • New York, NY 10022
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