This exhibition of prints, drawings, and books aims to assert the crucial role of the repeatable image in developing the Western concept of the city. It explores the city as a multifaceted subject in European art, and charts the rise of urban views as a collectible commodity paralleling the growth of cities in size and complexity since the middle ages--a process specifically relevant to our own urban age. These images document such important moments as the massive Baroque-era rebuilding of Rome, and the eighteenth-century heyday of the Grand Tour, dictating specific viewpoints and privileging a recommended order for experiencing a city’s points of interest. The marketing of these views in bound form and the practice of captioning and sequencing city views introduced a book-like reading of the city that was entirely new in Western history. The exhibition also shows transformations to other famous cities--literal changes, such as those made to Paris by Napoleon III and Baron Haussmann, and Manhattan as seen in the Changing New York photographs of Berenice Abbott in the 1930s--but also shifts in artistic viewpoint toward the city, such as Whistler’s groundbreaking views of Venice that favor the atmospheric over the topographical.

This exhibition is supported by a grant from the New York Council for the Humanities.