Photo By Gail

This painting captures the professional milieu of Richard Rodgers, the composer who co-wrote, with Oscar Hammerstein, a string of blockbuster Broadway musicals, including Oklahoma!, South Pacific, and The Sound of Music. Howard Kanovitz based New Yorkers I (1965) on a newspaper photograph. He explained, “I was impressed by a certain quality of low definition which suggested an isolation of the figures from their environment.” The resulting painting suggests that the creative class pictured here in their jackets and ties embody New York as surely as the cityscape in the background.

Photographed in The Whitney Museum in NYC.