Photo By Gail

Skyscrapers loom over older buildings, planes fly overhead, and people crowd the sidewalks in this dramatic bird’s-eye view of Manhattan’s Wall Street. Bertram Hartman’s meaning may not be quite so straightforward, however. He painted Trinity Church And Wall Street in 1929, the year of a great stock market crash that devastated the nation’s economy. By showing the gothic series of Trinity Church overshadowed by skyscrapers, Hartman may have intended his viewers to contemplate the relationship between spiritual and material needs in modern life.

Photographed in the Brooklyn Museum.