QuARTined: Dispatches From a Land of Forced Reacquaintance

By: Adam Hanft

EPISODE ONE

Our brains are built to be conclusion machines. To eliminate cognitive load, we are hard-wired to race from stimulus to Act Four/Scene Five with an absolute minimum of conscious effort.

So we listen, but we don’t

We look, but we don’t. It’s a perceptual laziness that can victimize even art.

Coronavirus cabining has created all measure of social experiments and personal re-imaginings. The one I want to devote this and subsequent columns to, is the way it has lifted the veil, broken the mechanism of my neural conclusion machine, and brought me the pleasure of a forced reacquaintance with art that we have owned and under-appreciated for a long time.

I don’t recall where we bought this expressive vernacular painting—dated 1917 (a year before the Spanish flu) and signed “DeVito”—but I am instantly reminded of what drew me to it in the first place. It’s a portrait of a mother and her two children on a boat, not particularly dressed up for the occasion. They convey a complex and expressive optimism, a plaintive cheerfulness perhaps reflecting underlying awkwardness, frustration, and impatience.

In my imaginative reconstruction, this is an immigrant family—cued by the wardrobe, the name of the painter, and the facial architecture. Italian, most likely. Possibly a family on its way to America, I originally thought. That’s a ludicrous thesis, however, as this is clearly not one of those teeming steerage vessels that brought immigrants to America, and certainly no one on that grueling journey would have had time for this moment of family documentation.

So, here’s my current narrative: the family is on a ferry, one of the hundreds that cheerfully chugged through New York City waters in those years. According to the New York City archives there were dozens of ferryboats connecting the boroughs in the year of the painting. I emailed Brian J. Cudahy, author of “Here and Back: The History of Ferryboats in New York Harbor” to see if he could confirm my theory from any visual cues in the image. I’ll write an addendum to this column if he responds.

Like subways, ferries have always been democratic modes of transportation, used by those going to work to build Manhattan. By the bright young things celebrated in Edna St. Vincent Millay’s poem Recuerdo with these iconic lines: “We were very tired, we were very merry/We had gone back and forth all night on the ferry.” She also observed: “It was bare and bright, and smelled like a stable”—which could actually account for the girl’s pained expression. Something electric happens when you look at DeVito’s painting while listening to Millay’s voice read the poem.

Am I convincing you yet? It’s not unreasonable to imagine this family escaping their crowded tenement neighborhood for some fresh air. The unseen father would’ve been cradling his new toy, a Kodak camera, finding an unpopulated space to take a photograph—from which this painting seems to have been executed.

In the catalog for an exhibition titled “Kodak and the Rise of Amateur Photography,” the Met Museum notes that “Within a few years of the Kodak’s introduction [in 1888] snapshot photography became a national craze.” It also notes that “the great majority of early snapshots were made for personal reasons: to commemorate important events … to document travels and seaside holidays ... to record parties, picnics, or simple family get-togethers; to capture the appearance of children.

Many paintings were created from photographs—and also from postcards—during this period. But images were expensive in those days, unlike our era of digital profligacy. You had to mail the camera to Kodak, and they sent your pictures back. Mr. DeVito was also dealing with restless kids, so he did not have many perfect images to choose from, and lacking studio skills he probably had to work with what was photographically available.

So the faces captured were the faces documented. That accounts for the less-than-Kodak moment; the imperfections of miens, expressions, body language, and positions. The girl on the right is frowning and looks decidedly unhappy—that olfactory stable situation—in contrast to the sunny bow in her hair. She is also barefoot, which is unlikely behavior on a public ferry, and could lead one to speculate that this is a family boat—a backstory which would blow up my entire thesis, but also seems wildly inconsistent with the lower-middle-class vibrations of the scene. I will have none of it.

The smaller child, a boy dressed in blue held almost forcefully still by his mother, seems less miserable. He looks just like his sister. Mom has the faintest hint of smile, she is humoring the photographer, but her tolerance for moment is running out—she has cooking and laundry to do. This one-day trip to give her husband a chance to experiment with his new Kodak… which he never should have bought anyway; they had better things to do with the money… is wearing on her by the minute. But her hair looks like it might have been marcelled, so she is not all about immigrant sacrifice.