In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Technology and Culture 43.2 (2002) 414-416



[Access article in PDF]

Book Review

The Artist and the Bridge, 1700-1920.


The Artist and the Bridge, 1700-1920. By John Sweetman. Aldershot and Burlington, Vt.: Ashgate, 2000. Pp. xiii+208. $50.

John Sweetman's book is a handsomely produced compendium of illustrations and commentary on the bridge in paintings and prints. With some initial images dating from the Renaissance, the book covers art from 1700 [End Page 414] through the 1920s but emphasizes European art from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. It is a valuable reference for those interested in situating bridge imagery in a context of cultural history rather than technological history.

The book's strength is its range, its meticulous attention to detail, and its format: there are 104 black-and-white illustrations and 16 color plates, each accompanied by almost a full page of discussion alluding to the work's historical and art-historical background, aesthetic analyses, and some of the central architectural and engineering features of the bridge being depicted. The images range from the Roman Pont du Gard near Nîmes in southern France to the Iron Bridge at Coalbrookdale to the Brooklyn Bridge, and the varied works include Canaletto's painting of the Rialto Bridge in Venice, Turner's image of Westminster Bridge in The Burning of the Houses of Lords and Commons (1835), and Monet's Railway Bridge at Argenteuil (1873-74). Many of the images are well-known in the world of art, and some are decidedly minor, such as the book's final illustration, Looking through Brooklyn Bridge (1920-22) by British artist Christopher R. W. Nevinson.

In his introduction, Sweetman tells how he is dividing the book according to theme rather than chronology, though the themes tend to get lost among the copious quotations from commentators ranging from Andrea Palladio to Thomas Paine, William Wordsworth to Hart Crane. There are allusions to some central (though somewhat unoriginal) metaphors, such as the bridge as an emblem of life's spiritual quest or journey, and Sweetman is particularly interested in the relation of bridges to nature: "the measuring up to natural barriers by human will, daring, or rashness" (p. 1). He also touches on one of the most important themes reflected in artists' views of bridges: the ways they are seen as either comfortably embedded in nature or as redefining and even disrupting the landscape.

Sweetman lauds the bridges of Rome, Florence, and Paris as being beautiful as well as useful, but this is not a book for people interested in the structural features or aesthetics of bridges themselves. For that the reader may turn to David P. Billington's The Tower and the Bridge (1983), with its emphasis on art in engineering. Nor is this a book that much considers art that reflects the social impact of early iron bridges or nineteenth-century railroad bridges or suspension bridges. For that the reader might better turn to individual studies such as The Great East River Bridge, 1883-1983, an 1983 exhibition catalogue celebrating the centennial of the Brooklyn Bridge, or Manet, Monet, and the Gare Saint-Lazare (1998), with its discussion of artists' views of the Pont de l'Europe.

This is primarily a look at art history rather than technology. For example, the nineteenth-century French Impressionist Gustave Caillebotte produced some of the century's most striking paintings of bridges: views of the forceful iron diagonals of the Pont de l'Europe—the bridge crossing over the Western Region Railway in Paris and located near the Gare Saint-Lazare [End Page 415] —and Sweetman sees On the Pont de l'Europe (1876) as an epitome of rapid travel, iron bridges, and "the force of the modern revolution" (p. 171). But what is particularly striking in this painting is its closely cropped view of the bridge's riveted iron diagonals, which frame the smoke and steam billowing from the trains on the tracks below. The powerful thrusting forms of the bridge's structure are central to this painting—giving technology, not the pedestrians on the walkway, a...

pdf

Share