Weirdly Terrible Art

From 1914 or so, a postcard of “Bird’s eye view of lower New York”

I’m going to sound like a stereotypical philistine looking at modern art, but a kid could do better than that. Maybe. The line-work is really crude and the perspective is off everywhere. But a number of tall buildings are immediately recognizable, along with the Brooklyn, Manhattan, and Williamsburg bridges, and the elevated trains snaking across the edges of Battery Park. Shadows are drawn really inconsistently.

Perhaps the weirdest moment here is that the big ship at the lower left seems to be recognizable: having three funnels closely clustered like that was not common…it sure looks like the SS Paris, which wasn’t even in service in 1914.

Most of the low-resolution pictures used in postcards were based on actual photos, used as models by artists or directly painted over. The Detroit Publishing Company, for example, often issued two versions of the exact same picture: prints of a high-resolution black and white photo, and low-resolution color postcards. 1914 is very early for that to be true here, as the earliest aerial photography of New York seems to have been around 1912.

I wonder if I’m approaching this backwards: maybe the artist was very skilled. Someone who really knew what they were doing could have taken a map and a bunch of photos taken from the ground, and used them as the basis for a perspective image. And the perspective would be irregular based on where the photos were from. As for the possibly anachronistic ship, (a) renderings of ships were available long before the actual ships were launched, (b) the 1914 date may be off a bit, or (c) maybe the artists dreamed up a ship that looked like the Paris.

So: terrible artist mangling an aerial photo, or great artist creating a surprisingly realistic view from scraps? Flip a coin.