Analysis Of Dusk On Lower Broadway By Jonas Lie

Jonas Lie is a Norwegian born American artist known for his paintings of various landscape scenes, such as View of the Seine and Morning on the River. Dusk on Lower Broadway is an oil canvas painting of a similar breed, currently displayed in the Cornell Fine Arts Museum at Rollins College. It depicts a cold city street, utilizes a simple, yet pleasing, range of primary colors, and represents the charming way that busy cities drown out details and people. In this painting, Lie creates the familiar set of a cold and wet New York City street. Along the middle and upper divisions of the painting, tall vertical lines create buildings that line the streets (see fig. 1) drawing the viewers eyes from fore to background to show that the buildings stretch as far as the eye can see. Next, the smoke rising from certain structures all the way down the street demonstrates the industrial feeling that accompanies one’s perception of cities. On the …show more content…
The simplicity he uses adds a level of charm and nostalgia to his paintings. In Dusk on Lower Broadway, Lie uses a simple array of mostly primary colors. Primary colors are used to contrast the important elements of the painting; the buildings begin as red, but blend into blue to show the contrast of distance from the foreground to the background. Additional contrast is found from the buildings to the pale yellow of the sky. However, Lie uses a few non-primary colors for the few details he includes in the piece. For instance, grey is used for clouds and smoke to add atmosphere and weather, purple is briefly used to show the blending of foreground into background, and dark colors are used to show the people on the street. By making these elements different from the general color scheme of the buildings and sky, it emphasizes the important points in the painting, which are not the