These 5 Incredible Paintings Are All Waiting for You in New York City

Informal paintings of the Holy Family were popular in Spain and its colonies during the 17th and 18th centuries. Certain characteristics make this work in the Brooklyn Museum, created in Peru in the late 17th or early 18th century, typical of the Cuzco School. The figures do not have blond hair, unlike conventional Spanish copies, and St. Joseph is portrayed as a youthful, handsome man. The combination of Baroque details and a balanced composition—another peculiarity of Peruvian and Alto Peruvian art—differentiate this type of painting not only from European Baroque but also from that of Mexico, Columbia, Brazil, and Ecuador. In iconographic fashion characteristic of the Cuzco School, the Christ Child carries a basket of carpenter’s tools and St. Joseph bears a triple-branched lily—a symbol of the Trinity and of the bearer’s virtue and chastity. Roses and native lilies adorn what is left of the border of the painting, though some of the section was removed, likely to allow the image to fit into a frame. The gilt brocade (brocadel sobredorado) decoration on the figures’ garments and halos is extremely ornate and was superimposed by the artist on the folds in the drapery using stencils. Other hallmarks include the predominance of the color red and the Incan style sandals worn by the child. These unique variations are the result of sincretismo, the process by which indigenous details were worked into the picture by local artists alongside Spanish elements imported from Europe. (Anna Amari-Parker)

The painter and lithographer George Wesley Bellows was born in Columbus, Ohio. A year younger than Picasso, he attended classes at the New York School of Art under Robert Henri, and he became associated with the Ashcan School, a group of artists that specialized in depicting New York City and its people. Bellows’s short career (he died at the age of 42) did not prevent him from becoming one of the greatest artists of his time. At 26, he was elected an associate member of the National Academy of Design in New York, the same year he painted Pennsylvania Station Excavation, which stands as one of Bellow’s most memorable works. In this painting, one can appreciate Bellows’s fantastic mastery of light as well as the contrast of somber colors with a gorgeous orange and blue sky as he captured the station that was then considered to be the height of modernity. Also typical of his early paintings are his vigorous brushstrokes and the thickness of his paint, which provide a great visual texture to this highly detailed image. But Bellows remains best known for his wonderfully crude and chaotic depictions of urban New York City life. This painting can be found in the Brooklyn Museum. (Julie Jones)

Stuart Davis’s work sprang from a background of historic upheaval and considerable artistic stimulation. His mother was a sculptor, and, as art director at the Philadelphia Press, his father worked with prominent figures from a new artistic movement inspired by the realism of modern American life. Davis was one of the youngest artists to exhibit at the controversial Armory Show of 1913, which introduced Americans to modern art. As a new age of hope, jazz, and swing emerged from the ashes of two world wars, Davis sought to capture the spirit of this incredible sea change. As he does in the title of this work, he used words such as “pad” or “swing” as part of his witty take on the new urban life of 20th-century America. This painting shows him well established in his abstract style, though. strong, contrasting colors and clearly delineated shapes linger on from his artistic past, linked to his great interest in French Cubism and to the commercial art world in which he grew up. Davis is widely regarded as America’s greatest Cubist, developing a uniquely American approach to this style. The dynamism of many of his paintings also reflects his love of jazz music, as one critic observed in 1957: “his art relates to jazz, to movie marquees, to the streamlined decor and brutal colors of gasoline stations, to the glare of neon lights…to the big bright words that are shouted at us from billboards.” Or as the artist himself put it: “I paint the American Scene.” Davis is often heralded as a founder of Pop Art. Pad No. 4 is in the collection of the Brooklyn Museum. (Ann Kay)

The Ocean Park series takes its name from the California beachfront community where Richard Diebenkorn painted from 1966 to 1988. These large, abstract canvases represent the culmination of his career as one of the most noted American artists of the 20th century. Diebenkorn’s return to abstraction from the figurative paintings he produced in the early 1960s was born out of a desire to be unconstrained in the formal development of his canvases. “The abstract paintings,” Diebenkorn explained, “permit an all-over light which wasn’t possible for me in the representational works, which seem somehow dingy by comparison.” Ocean Park No. 27 (in the Brooklyn Museum) exemplifies the artist’s attitude toward painting as a forum for the exploration of the purity of color and shape. The bold swathes of primary color are matched in force by the triangular nexus at the center of the canvas. Their white borders serve to reinforce the formal geometry of the composition, recalling Mondrian’s treatment of similar themes. Yet the geometric design of this work is counterbalanced by an atmospheric quality, achieved by the thin application of paint to the canvas, the evidence of brushwork in the bottom left-hand corner, and the presence of pentimenti—marks of earlier layers of painting that show through at the surface. Despite the painting’s abstract nature, continuities with figurative work are evident; the sense of light and sea air is less typical of Abstract Expressionism than of the work of Turner and Whistler. (Alix Rule)

What set Dutch-born painter Willem de Kooning apart from his contemporaries was his insistence upon maintaining an overtly figurative element to what he produced. The painting Woman in the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s collection, one of a series referred to by the same title that de Kooning painted in the early 1950s, is wholly affecting as an image. Depicting the figure as assuming a frontal pose, the flurry of brushmarks appear to converge upon the woman’s torso, as if this was the perceived center of energy by which her identity, as such, radiated outward. De Kooning depicts her actual face as almost a cartoonlike, vestigial form of caricature, perhaps as if wholly mistrustful of the genre of portraiture’s founding precept of “likeness.” Critics have also found in the series repeated expressions of violence toward women. Other Woman paintings in New York City collections are Woman and Bicycle (1952–53) at the Whitney and Woman I (1950–52) at the Museum of Modern Art. (Craig Staff and Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica)