City Scenes
Street-level glimpses of urban life: traffic, passers-by, markets, night crowds and chance encounters.
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City scenes look at urban life from close range: vendors, traffic, passers-by and the chance meetings a dense city produces. Where the cityscape takes in the skyline, these stay in the street. The long handscroll Along the River During the Qingming Festival, attributed to Zhang Zeduan and made in the early 12th century, already follows boatmen, shopkeepers and travellers through a busy Song capital.
Modern painters sought the pace of the metropolis. George Bellows packed a Lower East Side street with bodies and washing in Cliff Dwellers (1913), and Ernst Ludwig Kirchner's Berlin street pictures of 1913–15 show sharp-angled figures under an uneasy glare. Photography suited the fleeting moment: Eugène Atget recorded Paris shopfronts and courtyards before they vanished, and Brassaï found the city's bars and lamplit corners after dark in Paris by Night (1932). Romare Bearden's collage The Block (1971) assembles a Harlem street window by window.
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