Life on the East Side

Artist: Jerome Myers (American, 1867–1940)

Original Dimensions: 30" x 40"

Location: National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C.

About Artwork:  (1931) "Between 1881 and 1910, more than 1.5 million Jews immigrated to the United States, many settling in the Lower East Side of Manhattan. This scene of an open-air market in the Jewish quarter is one of Jerome Myers’s many sympathetic depictions of the daily activities and special rituals of New York’s immigrant communities at the time. As he wrote in his autobiography: “My love was my witness in recording these earnest, simple lives, these visions of the slums clothed in dignity, never to me mere slums but the habitations of a people who were rich in spirit and effort.”

Myers acknowledged that “daily existence” for East Side immigrants “mingles the old with the new,” but Life on the East Side, with its quaint pushcarts, old-fashioned costumes, and idyllic mood, indicates a resistance to, if not an outright rejection of, modernization in favor of tradition. Indeed, Myers’s market reads as a village-like enclave surrounded on all sides by an ominous and intrusively modern New York City. In the background looms Manhattan’s skyline, an emblem of Machine Age technological progress. In fact, the year Myers painted this scene witnessed the completion of the Empire State Building, which surpassed the Chrysler Building as the world’s tallest skyscraper." - (National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C.)