Lenore Tawney’s Dark River

The East River flows through The Artists of Coenties Slip. This collection exhibition, currently on view at MoMA, looks at a brief period when a group of artists lived and worked on Coenties Slip, far downtown by the waterfront in Manhattan. One of the 12 original slips dug out of the eastern shore in the 17th century for ships and canal boats bringing supplies in and out of the city, Coenties Slip was once part waterway and part street. By the time the artists arrived in the 1950s, the slip was filled in (too many drunk people falling in at night), and the huge prows of ships looming over the street were long gone. But the East River still ran past the commercial maritime lofts of the artists, who hung binoculars on nails next to their windows to watch as barges and tugboats slid past, a reminder of the industry and itinerant nature of this place. Much of the work of the artists of Coenties Slip reflects the river’s close presence and its eddying tide of history.

Mildred Constantine, MoMA’s trailblazing design curator, acquired Dark River just a year after it was made. When she later included it in Beyond Craft: The Art of Fabric, co-authored with Jack Lenor Larsen, they called it, “the undisputed masterpiece of Tawney’s major black-and-white period.” But, in part because of its scale, the work never went on view. Tawney reached out several times imploring Constantine to exhibit it; the Museum ended up acquiring a related work, Little River (1968), that could fit within the height of MoMA’s standard galleries. And though Dark River has been lent out to a few shows over the ensuing decades, it mostly stayed in storage.

Until now. At MoMA, Dark River currently spans several floors, hanging in the Bauhaus staircase; Little River and Tawney’s sketchbook are on view in The Artists of Coenties Slip, where you can also watch Tawney working in her maritime loft in the early 1960s, in some of the only extant footage from this period, shot by the documentary filmmaker Maryette Charlton. This spring, another stunning Tawney work made at Coenties Slip, Vespers, will appear in the exhibition Woven Histories.

It’s exhilarating to finally celebrate Tawney’s innovative expression of her environment, and in the company of artists like Martin, who was also moved by the place where she was working, and whose work from this lesser-known chapter in American art shares striking formal affinities. (Martin even titled one of her paintings Dark River.) Decades later, Tawney recalled her brief time at Coenties Slip—reminiscing not about her own artistic breakthroughs, or those of her now-famous slipmates, but about the visceral memories of ordinary days in this unique community by the water. “So much is recalled by the smell of the river,” she wrote in her journal in 1978, “Coenties Slip…tugs, the ferry, Battery Park in the rain, in the snow,” and a cold Easter Sunday riding the boat with Martin to the Statue of Liberty.⁵