Cityscape / Industrial
HANS WEINGAERTNER (1896–1970)
Small Eclipse, 1938
Oil on wood panel, 17 1/2 x 19 1/2 in.
Signed and dated (at lower right): H. Weingaertner / 1938
EXHIBITED: Hudson River Museum, Yonkers, New York, and James A. Michener Art Museum, Doylestown, Pennsylvania, February–September 2019, The Color of the Moon: Lunar Painting in American Art, pp. 185 no. 60 illus. in color, 196
EX COLL.: the artist; to Norman Locker, Newark, New Jersey, in 1957; private collection, until 2008
The subject of this small, intense picture is a lunar eclipse. These natural events, both solar and lunar, have induced wonder since the beginning of recorded history. Indeed, the need to understand and explain heavenly phenomena—light and dark, and the movements of the sun, moon, and stars—generated the fraternal twins of religion and science. According to Webster’s Ninth New Collegiate Dictionary, an eclipse is “the total or partial obscuring of one celestial body by another.” In the case of a solar eclipse, the shadow of the moon crosses the earth’s surface and blocks the light from the sun. In a lunar eclipse, “the moon near the full phase passes ... through ... the earth’s shadow.” There were two lunar eclipses visible in the New York metropolitan area in 1938, one on May 14, and a second on November 7. The New York Times described the latter event at length:
A full moon rose from the sky at 4:43 o’clock yesterday afternoon in the form of a tiny crescent of orange, with its remainder hidden behind a transparent copper-colored veil that soon spread to cover the entire face of the moon.
Unlike a total eclipse of the sun, the totally eclipsed moon does not become covered with a black shadow, but is seen though a copper-colored haze, due to the bending of light by the atmosphere in such a way as to allow the red rays of the spectrum to get though. Watchers on earth got their first glimpse of the copper-tinted moon at 5:35 and had clear views of it from then on, as it kept gradually emerging from its veil. As the after glow of daylight disappeared and darkness set in the color effect kept increasing in intensity.... Some lunar eclipses are of short duration, while others may last as long as 1 hour and 40 minutes in totality. The eclipse yesterday came close to maximum totality, lasting 1 hour and 22 minutes (New York Times, November 8, 1938).
There is little wonder that Weingaertner, with his background in theater lighting, would have been fascinated by the mechanism and effects of a lunar eclipse. Weingaertner visited the topic of lunar eclipses at least two more times, in Eclipse Over the Old Bakery (1939) and, later on, in Eclipse of the Moon (Two Lights) (1965), both of which were exhibited in 1993.
In Small Eclipse Weingaertner captures the moon at a point near or just after totality: a slender sliver of yellow is visible on the viewer’s left. Weingaertner’s textural effects here are spectacular, with paint thickly applied to the canvas to indicate the quality of light and the directions of the rays. The modest urban landscape that serves as a backdrop for the celestial light show is made magical by the event in the heavens. Weingaertner commonly used the vernacular architecture of the Lyndhurst streetscape as a vehicle for his investigations of form, color, and subject matter. The artist retained this until 1957 when it was acquired by Norman Locker. Locker was, at that time, a young Newark artist who participated in a group exhibit in 1957 and was likely a student of Weingaertner.
