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  • The New York Nocturne: The City After Dark in Literature, Painting, and Photography
  • William B. Scott
The New York Nocturne: The City After Dark in Literature, Painting, and Photography. By William Chapman Sharpe. Princeton: Princeton University Press. 2008.

Professor of American Studies at Barnard College, William Chapman Sharpe is an art historian more than an historian of culture. Sharpe focuses on the meaning of the changes wrought in urban, high culture by the introduction of artificial lighting in the 1820s. Much as the book's hero, the nineteen-century painter James Whistler, Sharpe is concerned, only in passing, with the impact of high art on the city and people of New York. For anyone interested in the art and writing of modern New York, however, Sharpe provides a rich, encompassing, and informed story. [End Page 152]

Before gas lighting, darkness masked the night-time activities of cities. The night sheltered a wide-range of behavior censored by those who remained behind drawn curtains. The introduction of gas lighting made aspects of cities accessible and visible to everyone. The first chroniclers of this new, partially-lighted city acted as guides into the exotic and dangerous world that lurked in the shadows. By creating a semi-illuminated borderland, gas lighting broke down the radical division between day and night. James Whistler used this not-quite-night to create a new kind of painting, the nocturne, inspired by earlier musical nocturnes. Whistler's abstract, night paintings of London and other cities visualized moods rather than delineated objects. His nocturnes transformed the tawdry, ugliness of London into tantalizing images of light and dark that obscured the day-time banality of modern cities. He also offered a new way to look at cities that set aside sensory perception in favor of aesthetic mood.

Sharpe charts the impact of subsequent advances in lighting that eliminated shadow and darkness and all illusion of an elegant and mysterious modernity. With modern, electrical lighting, the traditionally perceived differences between night and day disappeared. A tenement was a tenement. Darkness no longer hid the city's crass materialism, brutality, and loneliness. By the 1950s, night time in New York, according to its artists, harbored no mysteries. Unaffected by sun or moon, the bland, beastly, and banal prowled the city night and day. Modern lighting made nocturnes, such as Whistler's, unimaginable. For Sharpe, such a well-lighted city destroyed artists' ability to sustain illusion. Sensory perception replaced imagination; facts replaced dreams.

Sharpe argues that, in the early nineteen century the discovery of the darkened city had helped shape the modern imagination. In the twentieth century, the all-illuminating light destroyed the modern imagination, leaving a post-modern, aesthetic confusion. This may well be true, but the lighting of the city also created a new city with infinitely more possibilities for its residents than Whistler's moody, nocturnal world. As important as mood and aesthetics are, they are no substitute for life. Sharpe offers no suggestions on this score, still, for cultural historians of New York, New York Nocturne is a comfortable place to begin.

William B. Scott
Kenyon College
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