The fourth of six children born to a coal miner and part-time farmer in the northeastern Ohio village of Malvern, Clyde J. Singer (1908-1999) showed artistic promise at an early age.  By 1928, he was eking out a meager living as an apprentice sign painter in nearby Canton.  Three years later, he began a two-year stint at the Columbus Art School before returning to Malvern to launch his art career.  Singer’s big break came the following year, when he won a highly competitive scholarship award to study at the Art Students League in New York City.  He moved to New York that fall, renting a windowless room on East 35th Street for $2.50 a week and taking courses over the succeeding two years from eight different instructors including such luminaries as Thomas Hart Benton, Kenneth Hayes Miller and John Steuart Curry.  Although he much preferred Curry, Singer credited the critical and demanding Miller as leaving “the greatest impression.”* 

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     Both energetic and prolific, Singer participated in an astonishing eighty-two exhibitions in fifty-six cities during an eighteen-month period from 1935-36.  In 1938, the year in which he painted On 14th Street, he won the coveted First Julius Hallgarten Prize awarded by the National Academy of Design for the best painting in its annual exhibition among artists under the age of thirty-five (Barn Dance).  It was one of many prizes and awards the artist would garner over a career spanning eight decades. 

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     Unlike most of his contemporaries in the American Scene movement, Singer straddled the divide between the urban realism championed by the successors to the Ash Can school and the so-called Regionalists who focused on life in the heartland.  Though he returned to Ohio to pursue his career, he made regular pilgrimages to New York, roaming the streets of the city in search of subject matter.  “Go out into the street,” Reginald Marsh once stated in describing his own approach to painting, “stare at the people.  Stare, stare, keep on staring.”**  Singer adopted the same strategy. “I find that every place I go is a painting,” he once remarked. *** 

 

      On 14th Street is among Singer’s most evocative and appealing New York City street scenes.  Miller’s influence is apparent in the immediacy of the foreground figures and the meticulous planning of the entire composition (see, e.g., Fig. 1).  Singer places himself in the very vortex of the busy intersection of Broadway and East 14th Street, at the southern edge of Union Square. The paths of the three figures in the foreground, each separately engrossed in thought, intersect seamlessly, their momentary presence dutifully recorded by the seemingly invisible artist in their midst, while a parade of pedestrians travel in both directions on the far side of the street. The horizontal bands of colorful signage that dominate the upper third of the composition play off against the curvilinear forms of the figures beneath them. "Although his canvasses are filled with figures, there is never a suggestion of overcrowding or confusion," wrote one observer in 1938. "He has achieved the difficult accomplishment of presenting a full canvass with a simplicity and richness of design marked by fineness of detail and an unerring sense of balance."****

 

    The location of the scene is indicated by the juxtaposition of the street marker in the upper right and the blue sign across the upper left directing shoppers to the entrance of the commercial building around the corner on Broadway.***** A photograph of the same corner taken by Reginald Marsh in the same year (Fig. 3) attests to the general accuracy of Singer’s depiction.  Marsh painted the same street corner in 1932, rendering the live models in the Hudson Bay Fur Company second-floor window from a ground-level vantage point (Fig. 4).

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     While the artist would have us believe that the figures he portrays are random passersby, this notion is dispelled by the existence of the lovingly rendered bust-length portrait of the central figure reproduced here as Figure 2.  The painting, entitled Marion and dated 1938, depicts the artist’s girlfriend in the same outfit and identically coiffed.******  

 

     By 1940, Singer had taken a position as Assistant Director of The Butler Institute of American Art in Youngstown, Ohio, a position he maintained for much of the rest of his life.  While he continued to be prolific (completing an estimated 3,000 works over his long career), his later work rarely achieved the energy or brilliance of his earlier efforts, of which On 14th Street is a prime example.

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*Rothschild, Lincoln, To Keep Art Alive: The Effort of Kenneth Hayes Miller, American Painter (1876-1952) (The Art Alliance Press, 1974), p. 61. 

**Doss, Erika, "'Go Out Into the Street, Stare at the People': Reginald Marsh and Surveillance Styles in Interwar American Art," in Haskell, Barbara, ed., Swing Time: Reginald Marsh and Thirties New York (New-York Historical Society, 2012), p. 111.

***Albacete, M. J., Clyde Singer's America (exhibition catalogue), Canton Museum of Art and Butler Institute of American Art (The Kent State University Press, 2008), p. 8.

****Westfall, Tipton M.,“Exhibit Provides Varied Survey of Artist’s Work,” The Evening Independent (Masillon, OH), September 12, 1938 (critique on solo show of twenty of the artist's most recent oils, including On 14th Street, at the Masillon Museum).

*****Singer's early years as a sign painter are reflected in the meticulous rendering of signage in many of his works, particularly On 14th Street.

******Although Marion's last name is not recorded, she reportedly worked for the New York City art supply concern, Grumbacher.