Bonfire

Glenn Coleman's dramatic lithograph depicts the intersection of a poor urban neighborhood where a crowd gathers around a blazing bonfire at night. A motley group of street urchins, several dramatically silhouetted against the blaze, energetically feed it with wooden boards, a skeletal barrel, and other combustible objects. At left, beneath the elevated railway, an omnibus passes perilously close to the flames. To the right, several boys shield their heads from the fiery heat, while a woman plays a trumpet, adding to the tumult of the boisterous scene. In addition to the young and old bystanders watching from the curb, residents peer out from windows in the nearby old tenement building, from which shutters hang askew.

Such spontaneous neighborhood spectacles occasionally occurred in the poorer quarters of New York City, the artist's adopted home, particularly on Election Day. Hence Bonfire may be the print of which impressions originally were exhibited under the titles Election Night and Election Night Bonfire in exhibitions of Coleman's works at the Whitney Studio Galleries and its successor, the Whitney Museum of American Art, in 1928 and 1932 respectively. As a portrait of the sometimes chaotic populism undergirding the American political system, Coleman's image recalls the much earlier print County Election (TF 1999.133) by George Caleb Bingham.

As a painter, Coleman in the mid-1920s turned away from scenes of life in New York's working-class enclaves and began portraying the city with a focus on its triumphant modern architecture. At the same time, he made his first lithographs from earlier drawings in which, as a new arrival from the Midwest, he had explored the vibrant social life of urban neighborhoods. Coleman shared his fascination with the constant spectacle of New York street life at night with other American printmakers of the first decades of the twentieth century, such as Kyra Markham, whose Bleeker Street Fire Hydrant (TF 1995.43) features a similar cast of frenzied youth and adult onlookers, and Fritz Eichenberg in his City Lights (TF 1996.17).

Ville et campagne: les artistes américains, 1870–1920 (The City and the Country: American Perspectives, 1870–1920), Musée d'Art Américain Giverny, France (organizer). Venue: Musée d'Art Américain Giverny, France, April 1–July 15, 1999. [exh. cat.]

On Process: The American Print, Technique Examined, Terra Museum of American Art, Chicago, Illinois (organizer). Venue: Terra Museum of American Art, Chicago, Illinois, January 13–March 2, 2001.

Terra Collection-in-Residence, Ashmolean Museum of Art & Archaeology, Oxford, United Kingdom, September 15, 2022–September 30, 2026.

Lithographs of New York by Glenn O. Coleman and Paintings in Gouache by Ernest Fiene. (exh. brochure, Whitney Studio Galleries). New York: Whitney Studio Galleries, 1928. [First documentation of this print; brochure includes checklist.]