Miklos Suba

According to Grace Glueck (recently departed the Times because...why again, exactly?), Miklos Suba was a minor Precisionist whose specialty was Brooklyn cityscapes rendered fairly scrupulously. He wasn't a fantasist by any means. So what could have been happening in this picture, which will be shown at James Graham & Sons next month? Did buildings like this exist in 1929? Was the artist clairvoyant? These purplish towers could be the monster glass vanity projects lumbering into present-day Brooklyn.

- tom moody 2-16-2007 9:43 pm

hard to say for sure, but. a) this work is more of a cartoon sketch than than the other more representative fully painted examples i found. b) could be a sketch/cartoon of new (at the time) pre-skinned construction. nice work though esp for bklnites.
- bill 2-16-2007 9:58 pm


from wikipedia:

"...The traditional styles were under attack by progressive theorists since the mid-nineteenth century, primarily for attaching ornament unrelated to a modern structure's underlying construction. Their criticism gained substantial cultural credibility after the disaster of WW I, widely seen as a failure of the imperial leadership of Europe. The classical revival styles were particularly reviled by many as the architectural symbol of a now-discredited aristocratic system. Boldly abandoning ornament altogether, Mies made a dramatic debut with his stunning competition proposal for the faceted all-glass Friedrichstrasse skyscraper in 1921, followed by a curved version in 1922. He continued with a series of brilliant pioneering projects, culminating in his two European mastreworks: the temporary German Pavilion for the Barcelona exposition in 1929 .."
- anonymous (guest) 2-16-2007 11:26 pm


Thanks, I guess I was responding more to the funky CAD-curved and angled shapes of these, which aren't Mies-ian. (And I doubt even Mies' glass towers were common parlance at this time in NY.) As Bill said it's a cartoon sketch, but it still feels prescient to me.
- tom moody 2-16-2007 11:53 pm


That same Wikipedia article on Mies notes that New York's Seagram building was built in 1958.
- tom moody 2-17-2007 7:23 pm


suba's work mostly revolved around bkln. that drawing could be read in a saul steinberg kind of way with bkln in the fore and manhattan in the back ground. lower manhattan during a deco high rise building blitz. and they do look like precursors those 70's reflecto building (as seen off central expressway in dallas and elsewhere) and a whole lot of other stuff you see these days and didnt see back then as finished bldgs. whew.
- bill 2-17-2007 9:18 pm





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