Mark Rothko’s solitary 1930s subway platforms

Waiting for the subway to pull into the station can be a collective experience.

But not for the people in Mark Rothko’s Subway Series paintings. These figurative scenes, completed in the 1930s, depict isolated, Giacometti-esque New Yorkers who appear to be trapped in their own individual worlds.

These subway paintings “enabled him to focus on the horizontals and verticals, treating the figures as tall, spindly, stick-like forms,” according to the caption accompanying one of the paintings on the website for the virtual Musée Historique Environment Urbain.

“They are flat, stiff and inexpressive and yet suggestive of an inaccessible inner drama.”

A 2012 biography of Rothko by James E.B. Breslin had this to say: “As in all his subway paintings, Rothko’s interest is not in the trains but the platforms: modern, public, urban spaces where strangers come and go—or wait.”

“His stations are not grimy, dark, hellish underground spaces; nor are they filled with quick-moving, shoving, noisy rush-hour crowds. Rather, they are bare, compressed areas which contain a slow, quiet, and solitary mobility.”

Rothko, born in Russia and raised on the West Coast, moved to New York in the 1920s and soon began his career as a painter. Classified as an abstract expressionist, he spurned the label his entire life.

An earlier post on the most famous painting in the Subway Series.

The “enigmatic emptiness” of a city sidewalk

“Edward Hopper’s haunting realist canvas evokes an enigmatic emptiness that has become the artist’s trademark,” states the caption accompanying this 1924 painting on the website of the Chrysler Museum in Norfolk, Virginia.

“His sparsely populated New York cityscapes, bleak New England views, and lonely interiors share the same stark simplicity.”

“In New York Pavements Hopper used bold cropping, an elevated point of view, strong diagonal lines, and a simple, bleached palette to achieve an odd and detached effect.”

“From a bird’s-eye perspective, the only hint of narrative is the figure emerging from the lower left.”

It’s such an ordinary city scene yet so disquieting. Who is the nun with the baby carriage, and what neighborhood is this?

“Why Not Use the El?”

Painter Reginald Marsh depicts a grungy East Side elevated train and its isolated, Depression-era passengers in carnivalesque color in 1930.

The sign above the sleeping man’s head reads something like: ”The subway is fast . . . but the elevated gets you there quickly. Why not use the ‘L’”? I never thought of the El and the subway as competitors.

Marsh had a thing for the seedy side of New York, like this Times Square theater scene he painted in 1936.