ANTHONY BAUS
(b. 1981)

Bleecker Street

Pen and sepia ink, sepia and grey wash on paper
22 ⅛ x 26 ⅝ inches (56.2 x 67.9 cm)
 

Anthony Baus is an alumnus and former instructor of the Grand Central Atelier in Long Island City, New York. His unique artistic vision, which mines the world of antiquity as source material for contemporary issues, is expressed through an astonishing graphic facility derived from intense study of Italian Baroque drawing and painting.

His references from the ancient world are never literal; rather they are meditative and original. His impressive technique does not reflect the mind of a copyist. The Old Master-style that style Baus has embraced is his preferred language of expression, but his content is entirely personal. Baus has described it as “romantically inspired narratives created on scaffolding of ancient architecture, richly imbued with symbolism and mystery.”

The present drawing is one of a series of works that reimagine views of American cities. Baus uses the historicizing architecture of these cities as setting for narrative scenes that play out in the foreground with a cast of characters dressed in a mix of contemporary and historical styles. Much like his drawing of Chicago (Fig. 1), this drawing contains elements of ambiguity, as a group of figures works to either load or unload ornate architectural sculptures into or out of a delivery truck. Here the massive blocks of intricately decorated stone appear much less transportable, and are being admired by a variety of onlookers, including a skirted woman on an electric unicycle. Two additional unicycles—looking much like ancient millstones—rest against a pair of precariously placed architectural elements that lean against one another and are half hidden by a cloth. In the foreground, a child peers down an open manhole cover place just behind the man in a puffer jacket who stoops down to examine the detailed ornamentation. And is that man at the left holding his own bag or relieving the woman on the bicycle, incongruously wearing high-heeled shoes and wearing stylish sunglasses, of hers?

What might seem a topographically accurate view is in fact a wild amalgam of the sites and structures around Bleecker Street and Broadway in Manhattan. Sitting quietly at the center right is the 3 ½ story James Roosevelt House at 58 Bleecker, “normally” at the corner of Bleecker and Crosby Streets (a block away from Broadway), here adorned by the artist with a striped awning and ornamented outside by two New York iconic symbols, a mailbox and “bishops-crook” lamppost, neither of which are in fact present at the site. The building at the left beyond the trees is the Romanesque Revival Bleecker Tower at 644 Broadway (formerly Manhattan Savings Institution Building) of 1891, while the taller building beyond it seen from the side with its projecting cornice is the Bayard-Condict Building, the only work by Louis Sullivan in New York. But Baus has made this architectural gem the star and perhaps the subject of the drawing—turning it to face us and placing it in a new plaza which the artist has created Robert Moses-style at the right side of the composition. Now we can see the angels with their outstretched arms on the parapet supporting the cornice and the lion heads projecting below the top row of windows, all part of the exuberant terra-cotta decoration of the façade. So that you do not miss the ornate entrance to the building, Baus has placed it atop a stairway at the extreme right of the composition, thereby creating three distinct views at three distances of the 1899 landmark skyscraper. But closer inspection reveals that the large lunette-shaped slab in the foreground actually corresponds to that over the building entrance and the huge square slabs to the right are those that normally project from the top of the building. Are we witnessing the construction or destruction of the building? Or does the scene unfold out of time? The momentous activity is observed or ignored with a nonchalance worthy of Brueghel, as delivery trucks, cars, and vans complete the decoration of the scene, and pigeons peck their way in the foreground or find architectural prominences a worthy place to rest.

Baus’s drawings can be savored as intricate compositions of great beauty and finesse. They are also complex and sophisticated amalgams of the modern world and times past reflecting the artist’s love of architecture and his keen eye for the natural activity of street life, rendered through an extraordinary understanding of both perspective and anatomy.