Subway Station

Subway Station (地下鉄停車場) is a 1924 oil on canvas by Shimizu Toshi, painted in New York shortly before his departure for France in the same year. The subject — a New York subway platform with waiting passengers, electric lights, tile work, and the dark mouth of the tunnel — places the work in the small but important tradition of subway paintings by Ashcan-affiliated artists, of which George Tooker's much later Subway (1950) is the most famous example. Shimizu's treatment, twenty-six years earlier, is more documentary than allegorical: the figures are observed in the relaxed postures of ordinary commuters, the tonal palette is restrained to greys, browns, and tile-blues, and the spatial recession of the platform is constructed with academic precision absorbed from the Art Students League curriculum. The painting is now in the Miyagi Museum of Art and it is in the public domain. It is one of his most often reproduced New York paintings and is sometimes used to illustrate the rare instances in which the Ashcan tradition was extended into representations of the underground transit infrastructure that had transformed New York between 1904 and 1925.