Arnold Ronnebeck, born Nassau, Germany - Untitled - 1932 - T-Shirt

This 1932 untitled work looks straight up a narrow canyon of skyscrapers, reducing a city street to stacked planes, converging lines and stepped rooftops.

Visual Elements & Composition

Charcoal black takes up nearly half the image, with pale grey, off-white paper and mid grey filling the rest. The composition is tall and vertical. Converging perspective lines pull the eye upward past setback office towers toward a tower with a pyramidal crown. Repeated window grids give the buildings their rhythm. Faint lettering in the image reads "À mon grand ami Eugène de Savitch" and "23 May 1922," a dedication that anchors the sheet in a specific friendship and date.

Meaning & Symbolism

Arnold Ronnebeck, born in Nassau, Germany, worked in the Precisionist mode, stripping urban and western landscapes down to their essential geometry. He had studied with Aristide Maillol in Paris and was a close associate of Alfred Stieglitz and Marsden Hartley, and he helped carry European modernism into the United States. Produced at the height of the Great Depression, works like this one expressed stability, order and progress, and they asked viewers to find dignity in structure. The original lithograph is held in the Smithsonian American Art Museum collection.

On the Tee

A tall, vertical composition suits a chest print, where the canyon of towers rises from the centre of the shirt and the converging lines draw the eye up toward the collar. The strong contrast of charcoal and off-white reads clearly at a distance and up close alike. Wearing this design means carrying an image of structure and quiet order, the same discipline Ronnebeck brought to the city street he drew in 1932.