American Art and Pennsylvania Impressionists Featuring the Collection of Charles and Virginia Bowden

Note

Although her life was short-lived as she died at the age of forty, Susette Keast started her career at merely 16, when she graduated from the Philadelphia School of Design for Women (now Moore College of Art & Design). At just nineteen, while studying at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, she received the prestigious Cresson European Fellowship,allowing her to embark on a year-long trip to Europe similarly to Daniel Garber before her. Upon her return, she married Philadelphia architect W.R. Morton Keast, and the two lived in a townhouse on Rittenhouse Square, where her home studio was designed to resemble the palace of a Chinese Emperor "and a thinking room from the residence of a noble of old Japan." With her husband, Keast travelled extensively, and especially to the Far East, including China, Korea and Japan, as well as Italy, Portugal, Canada and New England.

The present work depicts a famous view of the Steel and the Steeplechase Piers, two of Atlantic City's historic sites and each home to an amusement park, placed parallel to each other right on the city's iconic boardwalk. In the distance first, through the presence of a Ferris-wheel in the top right corner, one can spot the oldest of the two piers, the legendary Steel Pier - a 1,000-foot-long amusement park built on iron pilings, hence its name. When it first opened to the public in 1898, the complex was presented as a large theater, but was eventually expanded to include attractions (the most famous of which involved diving horses), rides, beauty pageants, as well as exhibits, earning its nickname as the "Showplace of the Nation," and setting in stone a certain vision of American folklore. Just ahead of the Steel Pier, and here materialized by the imposing building overlooking the crowded beach, is the Steeplechase Pier, a twin amusement park housed in the former Auditorium Pier, and created in 1908 by George C. Tilyou - a financier who modeled it after the other successful amusement park he owned in Coney Island, New York. Rival to its neighbor, the Steeplechase Pier would rapidly become known as the Funny Place, inviting its customers to enter the premises through the mouth of a clown (the alternate entrance scared female customers by blasting hot air under their skirts). Tilyou's Steeplechase Pier also served as a billboard and was easily visible to the crowds of strolling passersby, day and night. At the time Susette Keast painted this work, from 1926 on, advertisement magnate R.C. Maxwell displayed a well-known commercial for Chesterfield Cigarettes on the Pier's billboard. The huge sign, visible from the Boardwalk and miles of beachfront, was flanked by two floral motifs made of 13,000 bulbs each, using 465,000 watts of electricity and requiring extensive machinery to run.

Although it depicts a local scene, Steel Pier in Atlantic City, speaks for Keast's foreign influences. Specifically, it showcases her interest in oriental art as revealed by the bird's eye composition, which revolves on a very high horizon line and an eschewed, almost flattened perspective. The color palette, made of localized bold hues all homogenized by a predominant layer of pearly white, also is reminiscent of Japanese prints, and their unified color scheme. Finally, some of the details in the foreground, namely the woman dressed in an orange kimono-like attire, and the flattened parasol seen from behind (thus looking like the Japanese solar disc emblem itself), are explicit visual signs which show Keast's ongoing fascination with the Far East. The artist was aware of it when she confessed: "I suppose my painting may reflect an Oriental influence in color and design, because I do sincerely admire it." Steeplechase and Steel Piers, Atlantic City thus becomes a formidable example of Keast's oeuvre, as it blends the artist's domestic education with her international aspirations, and offers a unique vision of a quintessentially American town and activity "with more of the quality of decoration than adherence to the hues of actuality."