The forgotten painter who captured the contrasting landscapes of 1930 New York City

By the Depression year of 1930, New York City was increasingly becoming a city of highs and lows.

[“Sixth Avenue and Ziegfeld Theater”]

The highs were evident in Gotham’s skyline. Elegant residential towers lined the borders of Central Park and the city’s posher avenues. The Chrysler Building rose above 42nd Street, and the Empire State Building and Rockefeller Center soon followed at different ends of Midtown.

At odds with these gleaming towers were the lows—the many low-rise blocks across Manhattan. Spread out between their new high-rise neighbors and congregated in poorer, more densely packed areas were tenement buildings, factories, and warehouses, some crumbling with age.

[“The Cavalry, Central Park”]

Someone who appears to have noticed this stark contrast in the cityscape was Médard Verburgh. A Belgian painter of sensitive, colorful portraits, still lifes, and landscapes, Verburgh’s work was to be exhibited at the prestigious Newhouse Galleries on East 57th Street in January 1930.

Though Verburgh seems to be an artist forgotten by the contemporary world, he had a presence in the first half of the 20th century. A critic writing in the New York Times described the Newhouse Galleries exhibit as one that “should not be missed by anyone interested in Belgian art—or, for that matter, in art more catholically considered.”

Verburgh, 44 years old at the time, presumably came to the city for the exhibit. He also apparently felt inspired enough by the physical landscape to paint it.

[“On the Rooftops of New York”]

Each of the four works in this post date to 1930, and all capture the city’s contrasts in vibrant colors and rough brushstrokes. The top image, “Sixth Avenue and Ziegfeld Theater,” juxtaposes office towers and smaller commercial and residential holdouts on a busy traffic artery of the then-modern city.

The Ziegfeld Theater, opened in 1929 at the corner of 54th Street, would be the whitish building on the left—though it doesn’t resemble the actual Ziegfeld Theater that occupied this site until it was demolished in 1966.

The second painting, “The Calvary, Central Park,” showcases the enormous apartment towers and office buildings of Central Park South looking like a fortification around the expansive pasture of the park and the equestrians riding inside it.

[“Le Metro Aerien”]

“On the Rooftops of New York,” the third painting, features tenement roof dwellers dancing and making music, a black cat curled up in the corner bearing witness to the sounds and steps. It’s an intimate and personal scene with the impersonal, impenetrable skyline in the background.

The final painting has a French title, “Le Metro Aerien”—or The Aerial Metro in English. Here Verburgh gives us the thickest brushstrokes with images of a brick-red warehouse or factory and an elevated train circling in front of it, and sketches of skyscrapers in the rear.

Exactly what neighborhood the painting is set in isn’t clear, but it doesn’t seem to matter. Verburgh presents another contrast of the old and new New York City—the energy and might of the old in comparison to the fortresslike facelessness of the 1930 skyscraper metropolis.