Francis Criss devoted much attention to one landmark on Manhattan’s industrial landscape: the Burns Brothers Coal Company loading operation at the Twenty-Second Street docks in Manhattan. [1] The site was a distinctly compact and towering assemblage of boldly geometric structures that from a particular vantage could appear to stand in splendid isolation against the sky, a view afforded by the open expanse of the East River beyond. The various constructions at dockside here could be compressed by the eye into a totemic erection of concrete and steel composed of the firm’s giant blue and white cylindrical coal bins and its elevator and crane immediately behind. Visually attached to the pile was a squat old brick warehouse from another era, sitting now like the portico to a towering classical temple.

The Burns Brothers site drew Criss back to it in his imagination repeatedly—perhaps more than any other subject—and not just for the appeal that its geometric classicism held for the Precisionist painter. Criss was disposed to view the built environment on more than its own aesthetic terms. Treading a line in his art between abstraction and representation, and between emotional detachment and psychological connection, Criss, by a process of selection and reduction, shaped the observed industrial landscape into subjective constructs that are his private musings and pointed commentary. In 1933 he first employed the Burns Brothers plant as a symbol of seemingly impossible national aspirations in Depression times, in his Surrealist painting, Pie in the Sky (University of Arizona Museum of Art). Six years later he essayed it again in a trio of closely related, highly reductive variants based on a single compositional template. His point is not so obvious as it was in the earlier

painting—the phrase “pie in the sky” is literally present there in the cloud forms. But in their stasis, silence, and emptiness the three subsequent compositions—the aptly titled Melancholy Interlude (1939; private collection), and two canvases titled simply New York Waterfront (1939; Vassar College Museum of Art and c. 1940; Detroit Institute of Arts)—are equally expressive and unnerving. They suggest a city or a nation on pause, a collective holding of the breath, perhaps, as the country suffered from yet another wave of economic collapse in 1939 and was made to ponder the coming of another ruinous war in Europe. Five years later the series required an exultant end note, however, this painting, New York Waterfront, painted in 1944–45, when victory in Europe seemed imaginable and American industry now ran full throttle to serve that end. [2]

Criss developed his New York Waterfront series from drawings made on graph paper, so as to get the exact relative proportions of the bins and elevator, to analyze the intricate geometry of the loading crane, and to fully understand both a coal elevator’s form and its function. [3] These graph paper drawings were also aids to scaling up the composition for transfer to canvas. And they were necessary, of course, to editing an image to abstraction. We are told that Criss used other mechanical devices as well—many of his own making—to find ways to ensure fidelity to his subjects and consistency across multiple canvases: visiting his studio sometime in the early 1940s, writer Grace Pagano, there to interview Criss about his Melancholy Interlude from the New York Waterfront series, noted the giant-sized projectors and homemade mechanical devices about the place that Criss found “necessary to his profession.”[4] He had been working increasingly as a commercial illustrator by this time, and such were the tools of the illustrator’s trade, but it is easy to see how the mechanics of duplication might have come into play in his painting practice, particularly with the Waterfront series, where the internal dimensions of the four vignettes are the same even as the overall size of the canvases changes.

Did Criss also employ photography? Specifically, did he know the nearly identical photograph of the same Burns Brothers plant made by Berenice Abbott around 1934? [5] Abbott’s example might have helped Criss recognize the vantage on his subject that would produce the strongest silhouette—emphatic in Abbott’s photograph thanks to the overexposed sky—and the clearest juxtaposition of the elements of old and new New York that made for a compelling implied narrative. He could have known her proposal for the Federal Art Project of the Works Progress Administration, which employed Criss too—Abbott had embarked on an expansive survey documenting Changing New York, the odd juxtapositions of new and old in the urban landscape, wanting to show, as she did in her Burns Brothers Factory, “the skyscraper in relation to the less colossal edifices which preceded it . . . the past jostling the present." [6] She exhibited prints from time to time as her work progressed, even before a final selection of images was published in 1939, and Criss might have encountered the image on view—it did not appear in the published survey, however. Her Burns Brothers Factory (fig. 3) is one of the more obscure prints from the extensive series, in fact. Yet the similarity of their compositions, Abbott’s and Criss’s, is overtly close and not easily

dismissed as purely coincidental. The two artists moved in the same orbit: both were members of the leftist American Artists Congress and both taught at the New School for Social Research. In the search for affinities with his painter contemporaries, Criss has eluded categorization—his art is too subjective to group with the formalists associated with the Charles Demuth and Charles Sheeler Precisionist camp, and too abstract to fall easily into the category of painter recorders of the American Scene. But formally and conceptually Criss seems closely aligned with Abbott. Her expressed ideals for her photographs amply describe the two artists’ rhyming pictures of the Burns Brothers coal plant— and they convey the essence of Criss’s art:

"My photographs are to be documentary as well as artistic. . . This means that they will have elements of formal organization and style; they will use the devices of abstract art if these devices best fit the given subject; they will aim at realism, but not at the cost of sacrificing all esthetic factors. They will tell facts . . . but these facts will be set forth as organic parts of the whole

picture, as living and functioning details of the entire complex social scene." [7]

In the five years between his melancholic musings on an industrial site rendered motionless and this spirited reprise of the subject from the same basic formal template, Criss, deciding that the Burns Brothers coal operations and the industrial landscape surrounding it clearly required elaboration, now filled his canvas with clarifying details and smoke-belching life. In this time, in war time, the mysterious stripped down abstract form in Criss’s earlier paintings acquired necessary accretions—smoke stacks and steel lattice and beams of the crane under load—showing that the beauty of the structure is fully realized in its function.

— Patricia Junker

[1] The specific site is identified in an article that Criss collaborated on for Esquire magazine; see “Esquire’s Art Institute,” Esquire 24, no. 2 (August 1945): 70.

[2] The work was one of three of unspecified subjects commissioned by Theodore L. Shaw, owner of Today’s Art Gallery in Boston, in October 1944. It was completed in March 1945. See Shaw to Criss, March 31, 1945; and Criss to Shaw, April 15, 1945, Francis Criss papers, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution. As to the new painting’s title, Criss wrote to Shaw, “You may call it New York Waterfront.”

[3] The drawings are the focus of the Esquire article, which employs them to explain to readers the artist’s process of abstracting from reality; “Esquire’s Art Institute,” 70–71.

[4] Grace Pagano, “Francis Criss,” in Catalogue of the Encyclopaedia Britannica Collection of Contemporary American Painting (Chicago: Encyclopaedia Britannica, 1945), no. 26.

[5] A late print in the collection of the Amon Carter Museum was misidentified by Abbott as a Burns Brothers plant in Jersey City, but Abbott had photographed other Burns Brothers sites in Manhattan for her Changing New York project, and Jersey City would not have fit into her all-consuming New York work. The Esquire magazine article, which Criss would have had a hand in preparing, identifies the Twenty-Second Street location of the plant without any equivocation. I am grateful to Abbott scholar Bonnie Yochelson for sharing her insights with me about the actual location, and to Jon Frembling, archivist, Amon Carter Museum, for sharing with me the acquisition record for the museum’s print. I am especially indebted to Katherine Criss, the artist’s daughter, for offering her experiences of her father’s practice (he used photographs on occasion for his commercial work, she confirmed, employing Louis Jacobs) and her knowledge of the rich artistic milieu around her family’s brownstone on Ninth Street in Greenwich Village; conversations with the author September 2024.

[6] “Photographic Record of New York City Submitted to Art Project, Works Division, Emergency Relief Bureau by Berenice Abbott,” 1935, quoted in Bonnie Yochelson, “Berenice Abbott: A ‘Fantastic Passion’ for New York,” in Yochelson, Berenice Abbott: Changing New York (New York: New Press for the Museum of the City of New York, 1997), p. 21.

[7] Abbott, “Notes on Research,” undated memorandum, quoted in Yochelson, p. 25.