While Jerome Witkin is justly celebrated for his emblematic narrative paintings, his urban landscapes - which often provide these paintings with a seamy authenticity - are less well-known. Yet they are also, in terms of what one might call “genre-specific” imagery, unsurpassed. For those who are familiar with Witkin’s oeuvre, the no-exit zones that often provide it with a frame of reference seem like pendants to a staggeringly comprehensive horrow-show: of Holocaust Jewry, power-crazed evangelists, and, most recently, victims of an attack that seems as arbitrary as it was barbaric. (His visualization of 9/11 is, in my opinion, the most unflinching we have.) It’s as if Turner had decided, in his spare time, to document the Napoleonic Wars.Yet Witkin’s cityscapes are as foreboding as the images by which we have come to know him best. And while singling out one image from such a shattering body of work might put its collective majesty in a bottle, it is, for purposes of context, worth risking.If any Witkin image has popular currency, it is of a young Jewish man sitting in a boxcar whose destination is so painfully obvious that seeing him, in an arrested moment, has an enduring impact. For now, the young man is safe – if we can call it that. But we know that, when a Nazi guard comes to get him, his life will be worth less than the clothes he wears, the fillings that might be extracted, the hair that has already, alas, been cut. In much of his work, Witkin’s violence is unsparing. In this seemingly innocuous image, the horror from which we are not spared in other paintings is subtly graduated. We know what is likely to happen and we are forced to bear witness to something we do not want to see, but, because we know, we must.They make no bones about the conditions of American cities; they are brutally specific while suggesting a wider world; and, as they describe and enumerate, they indict and accuse; they inform and clarify; they show what we were as well as what we have become. At its most profound, visual art “plays back” what we think we know while exposing what is underneath it. Appearances may survive, but a savage scrutiny will bend, and sometimes break, them.It is Witkin’s capacity to both reflect and transform that is his greatest gift. For those of us who look for America in its facades and factories, Witkin’s apocalyptic vision is not reassuring. The old gods have been toppled, but not replaced. Day is night (as Cole Porter seemed to know before any of us) and night is day. And what will we do with all of the relics of a time and place that is caving in so fast, it is much easier to go someplace else and start afresh? These someplace else’s are where a great many of us live and must attempt to either resurrect, accept as they are, or try to abandon with all due rites and ceremonies (provided they be short and sweet.) In the meanwhile, however, the places we have neither abandoned nor resurrected stake their claim on our imaginations. And Jerome Witkin doesn’t mind, like an impolite dinner-guest, telling us a story that will roil our guts, stick in our heads, and make us want to keep moving.

Witkin’s upbringing – around which swirled the battles royal of his parents, as well as a sibling rivalry that is now a matter of record – was steeped in working-class imagery. In the Brooklyn of the post-WWII era, men and women walked, in the morning light, toward an oversized chimney that made punier structures seem punier still. In all likelihood, this chimney was belching the smoke that was regarded, in the days that preceded (or, rather, precluded) an environmental consciousness, as prosperity itself. The billows that enveloped the Monongahela Valley cradled its workers, satisfied its overlords, and drew fresh faces from hill and valley. The Cuyahoga River, which would eventually catch fire, supported the raw ambitions of an America that was on the move – no matter what it trampled in the process. And the teeming superstructures that pulled us skyward kept a lot of people going and made rich men – who would build more – so rich they could get away from them. As long as America was fed and clothed, it did not question the source of its daily bread, the mean-looking finery that flew off the racks as if there was no tomorrow, or the silting-up of its streams and rivers. There were always more of them, and they were always obliging.Witkin’s father was a glazier, who provided a Brooklyn hotel with a decorative ceiling that would, nearly seventy years later, collapse as a fire gutted the building and ended an era had started, with a bang, during Prohibition. His mother was an educated woman who took him and his brother on outings that gave them a whiff of the outside world while misleading them about its possibilities. Children of working-class parents straddle two different worlds that grow, as the children look away from their stoops and backyards, more confusing. Young Jerome became an artist before most kids break in their first baseball mitts. His brother, Joel-Peter, was similarly precocious, though with a camera and not the drawing utensils with which Jerome began to test his hands and eyes. They would not, however, become aware of it until they became more or less established in their prospective fields, they had, each in their separate ways, become immediate outsiders – which can fuel artistic impulses as easily as it can degrade them. While living in Brooklyn, Witkin must have noticed the social inequalities between his Jewish and Italian neighbors, who lived side-by-side not from amiable instincts, but because Brooklyn real estate was predicated – to a somewhat lesser extent than it was across the East River – on cramming as many people in oddly sized lots as it could. Greenpoint, Jerome and Joel-Peter’s birthplace, was comparatively humane; its residential quotient aspired no farther than a second story. (From its rooftops, the idle and adventurous looked toward Manhattan with a sense of wonder. All that – whatever that was – might someday be theirs. When I lived in the neighborhood, old-timers would brag about having never crossed the East River. “Not even on a train?” I would ask. “Nope. Everything we needed was right here.” Thus proving that isolation is sometimes a matter of choice. And, in my view, not a very good one.)Greenpoint’s businesses were small and often family-oriented. Like Thomas Wolfe, Jerome Witkin must have watched his father bent over a long table, punching out patterns, tossing shards into a noisy bucket, and greeting customers. Children imbibe habits and influences without being conscious of them. Yet as Witkin watched, he must have been fascinated by the serenely focused attention of a man he knew as his father, but who became, through a kind of transformative osmosis, a master builder. In the hands of a talented craftsman, a tentative design assumes real-life proportions – and all because so many special ingredients can be chosen and manipulated according to a process that can be learned by doing. The sons of lawyers often go into jurisprudence, but do not always like it. Craftsmen’s children have a special feeling for the work their fathers and mothers do and embrace it quite naturally. (Those who defect seem to do it violently. Son not only abjures father, he wants to hurt the old man in the process – as if the old man cared so little for the son that he would want him to do what he, the old man, had done. It is the American Dream gone awry, a patricide played out symbolically, a kick in the groin by designer-footwear.) Jerome Witkin appears to have been comfortable with his father’s profession, took from it what he wanted, and discarded the rest. He might trot it out self-referentially, but we don’t have to be in on the joke.While Joel-Peter stayed in New York City, Jerome fled to Syracuse, where he has been teaching for nearly thirty years. It is a rather odd place for a man of his interests and background. Yet it is steeped in the working-class remnants which must seem, to a man for whom lost worlds are daily fodder, almost companionable. Syracuse’s punched-out windows and unfortified brick walls are historical echo-chambers where the voices of the past – which parallel those of the European Jewry for whom he has so eloquently spoken – animate the gloom. Witkin wanders easily among worn-out things; the spoors that have been half-erased, but are visible to the probing eye; the hand-lettering that is momentarily illuminated as it fades into oblivion. He seems to revel in the broken backs of old buildings as cold air flows into their spinal columns; comes shrieking out of a chimney-flue; loses itself in a cul-de-sac, where it finally surrenders. Like a latter-day Charles Burchfield, he channels lives that have lost hope and spirit; in his cityscapes, they lean away from a window-sash, wait outside of a crowded vestibule, pause before an open door. If Jerome Witkin is not haunted in his own right, he understands why – and he willingly participates. In doing so, he invites us in. Assorted Images Syracuse Landscape may well be Witkin's best. Its wealth of textural and linear "choruses" emphasizes a bad situation with a deadly aim. Yet its desolation is punctuated by an astonishing litany of visual references, which raises its aesthetic profile as it clinches a possibly futile argument regarding dead civilizations versus living ones. Amidst snowbanks that are no more reassuring than the gravel underneath them, these buildings represent pennies earned and saved; hard working people who dreamed of better things; big ideas reduced - as only America can reduce them – to shrinking rent-rolls and factory jobs gone overseas. If any body of work stands in defiant opposition to the sanitizing influences of Cape Cod-style impressionism, it is the searing imagery of a post-industrial America that is, now, barely standing. *Utica: Street Scene Witkin’s Syracuse is Every City, but it is also a specific place. Fortunately, Witkin’s sense of the universal straddling the specific (or vice-versa) is a quality that is also found in the work of Antonio Lopez-Garcia, who doesn’t start so much with Canaletto, who was the first to regard the city as an artistic domain that was as worthy of representation as gods and goddesses (or doges and prelates.) Witkin’s eye seems to be more at home with the delicate traceries and literal-minded mimesis in Flemish paintings. In these, we glimpse sturdy right angles, brickwork that will last the day, and the occasional pedestrian, who isn’t in a hurry. Van Eyck painted at least one of these and managed, by pulling us away from it, to tease us with urban life in the 15th-century. Canaletto provided us with a panoramic mentality that is familiarly inclusive. His pedestrians, whose finery is flecked with beautiful highlights, are there for scale. Canaletto wants us to see St. Mark’s Square. And why not? It was, in that mercantile city’s heyday, one of the crown jewels of Europe. As tidal demons – which could be visualized as the sea-creatures that frolic on the margins of old maps – wash it away, it seems heartbreakingly palpable. Now we see it and soon we won’t – except through the majesty of a single vision. Witkin is not interested in the picturesque per se. Nor is he banking on a clientele that might shower him with commissions for architectural porn-sites – which appear to be more popular in Europe than they are in the U. S. Hubert Robert, whom the French called “Robert des Ruines”, specialized in such things. Turner made his name with watercolors of Gothic sites that were considered, in their middle-aged decrepitude, picturesque (as they still are.) Finally, American artists began to show us the marvels of its mechanistic inventions: skyscrapers that soared past what was seen, fifty years before them, as possible. Great squares around which teams of horses brought curiosity-seekers. Waterfronts, where big ships rested as they were stoked with fuel and loaded up with goods that would cross an ocean. And, finally, the dismaying glances of the aforementioned Charles Burchfield, Reginald Marsh, and, to a somewhat lesser extent, Edward Hopper. It is from the latter’s unflinching gaze that Witkin derives the close-mouthed ferocity of his vision. He shows us a place that may or may not be like any other. It has the frozen dignity time and usage impose on things that were built in haste for entirely unsentimental purposes. And yet he endows them with a strength of character that is as inevitable as it was unintended. He has no problem with contemporary adaptations. (Your garden-variety impressionist would dash in his or her automobiles. Witkin gives them the prominence they richly, and somewhat ironically, deserve.) This painting is not, as so many of his others are, elegiac. It is, rather, an isolated moment that represents numerous life-cycles. The painting suggests, however, that these life-cycles are slowing down. In fifty years, this place, these buildings – and, most certainly, these automobiles – will not be here. What will supplant them? Witkin poses the question slyly and moves on. *Delavan Center Witkin is first and foremost a realist, though his realism is proprietary. He wants to re-define what the term and practice mean. For him, realism starts with abstraction. And, in this painting, it starts with a few blocks and circles, which he masterfully characterizes. As with Hopper (as well as Lopez-Garcia) there is always a specific gravity in Witkin’s forms, by which he distinguishes himself from other artists who might care for a subject’s historical resonance or its envelope of light. Witkin ignores none of these things. Yet he is not content with a single-aspect presentation. Like Bill Murphy, whose etchings often suggest a teeming underworld of past associations, Witkin is able to create an isolated moment from which one might contemplate the “everything” inside of, and radiating from, something finite. In this painting, Witkin proposes that we not only study what is in front of us, but consider that it might be connected to a larger context – say, an industrial revolution that toppled rural America, While Witkin’s glance is steady enough, it is also a little horrified. We all have visions of a pristine America, such as we can see in Hudson River School paintings. Witkin manages – possibly without knowing it – to contain all of these histories, and, like some sort of spiritual switchboard, connect them all. In his hands, every little thing, having been sacred to somebody at one time, becomes part of a common heritage, which is often under assault.There is no cityscape painter like Jerome Witkin – even if Witkin is not automatically linked to paintings that “merely” describe. In Witkin’s hands, the places where we live, that we abandon, and, sometimes, yearn for, are, like his paintings of Holocaust victims, tormented things. They are haunted by our broken dreams and unresolved aspirations. There is cruelty in them, and some measure of hope. And there is the not-so-simple pleasure of taking in their breathtaking complexity, which can be caught at a glance, but can lose their special symmetries if we hurry by them. Conventional landscapes offer up a pleasant vision, a potential vacation-spot, a place where our better selves may somewhow thrive. Witkin’s vision is harsh, it is fair, and it is caught between what we, as a collective organism, want to be and must, in a hopefully repentant mood, accept.____ Brett Busang, Art Correspondent for Open Letters Monthly, has contributed articles, reviews, and profiles to such publications as New York Press, The Bloomsbury Review, Footnotes, Loch Raven Review and numerous others. He is also a painter whose work has been widely, if haphazardly, collected.____Captioned images are Courtesy of Jack Rutberg Fine Arts, Los AngelesJack Rutberg Fine Arts, Inc.357 N. La Brea AvenueLos Angeles, CA 90036-2517 www.jackrutbergfinearts.comFax: 1 323 938-0577    Tel:  1 323 938-5222Gallery Hours:Tuesday-Friday 10:00am-6:00pmSaturday 10:00am-5pm