Traveling exhibit brings the hustle and bustle of Coney Island to San Antonio.
When Joseph Stella’s “Battle of Lights, Coney Island, Mardi Gras” first was exhibited at New York’s Montross Gallery in 1914, the colossal painting caused a sensation.
A kaleidoscopic paean to sensory overload, it was the Italian immigrant artist’s attempt “to convey in a hectic mood the surging crowd and the revolving machines generating for the first time, not anguish and pain, but violent, dangerous pleasures.”
Robin Jaffe Frank encountered Stella’s masterwork when she was a curator at the Yale University Art Gallery.
“I’ve always been fascinated by that painting,” said Frank, now chief curator at the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art in Hartford, Conn. “Who wouldn’t be?”
That fascination sparked “Coney Island: Visions of an American Dreamland, 1861-2008.” Now on view at San Antonio’s McNay Art Museum, the traveling exhibit comprises a dizzying array of objects — more than 140 total — including paintings, photographs, documentary and popular film clips, side-show banners and carousel animals. Though the show celebrates the granddaddy of all amusement parks, some of the works also expose its seamier side.
“It’s such a fascinating show,” said William J. Chiego, director of the McNay. “It covers more than a hundred years, and it really shows that interplay between commercial art and design and painting and the vernacular arts.”
Organized chronologically, “Coney Island” starts with the Civil War era, when access to affordable transportation spurred the transformation of the island into “the People’s Paradise.” It continues through its heyday at the turn of the 20th century when people thronged to Luna Park, Steeplechase and Dreamland — the major amusement parks — and on to its ultimate decline.
“Initially, Coney Island is a place to visualize the future — about America’s ingenuity and innovation, especially in building these extraordinary mechanical amusements,” Frank said. “And later, (it’s) a place to recall the past.”
Artworks range from early depictions of Coney Island by impressionists William Merritt Chase and John Henry Twachtman to modern and contemporary images by Reginald Marsh, Weegee, Walker Evans, George Tooker and Red Grooms.
“What I found in looking at the images is that although I’m from Brooklyn and have a great deal of affection for the real place, most of these artists were viewing Coney Island, in the words of the San Francisco beat poet (Lawrence) Ferlinghetti, as ‘a Coney Island of the mind’ — Coney Island as an idea,” Frank said. “What was that idea? It was a place for artists to kind of have a microcosm of America.”
Many of the works in the exhibit show a mix of ethnic groups and social classes pressed together on the beach or teeming around the attractions. Declaring that “well-bred people are no fun to paint,” Marsh, who came from a wealthy background himself, turned to the human smorgasbord of Coney Island.
“He was fascinated by baroque and Renaissance painting and the human body, and Coney Island was this amazing place where you could see people on the beach, so he could paint bodies,” Chiego said. “He just had this whole cast of models that he could see any day he went there, and then people on the rides in all kinds of crazy positions.”
Deeper into the exhibition, photographs document the masses, including Weegee’s famed image of a sea of people taken from Steeplechase Pier on July 21, 1940.
The battered head of Cy the Cyclops, which once adorned the Spook-A-Rama ticket booth, presides over the final section of the exhibition. It is titled “Requiem for a Dream” after director Darren Aronofsky’s Coney Island-set film about drug addiction from 2000, but the vision presented in the artworks isn’t altogether bleak.
Although Arnold Mesches’ nightmarish monumental paintings “Anomie 1991: Winged Victory” and “Anomie 2001: Coney” present a dreamland gone wrong, Grooms offers more hopeful images. The artist pays homage to Weegee’s black-and-white image of a sea of smiling, waving beachgoers by transforming it into a colorful large-scale painting with “Weegee 1940” spelled out in relief elements. Meanwhile, “The Funny Place,” also by Grooms, presents a cartoonish utopia of people of different ethnicities and sexual orientations basking under the banana-shaped grin of the Steeplechase Funny Face insignia.
“Even if you have never set foot on the beach, you don’t need that to understand this show because it’s about who we are and who we want to be,” Frank said.