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…

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