From torch of joy to patron saint of the parking lot: a brief art history of the lamppost

Last late summer, an activist campaign was launched, with the slogan: ‘We claim the night’. The action, visible in the media, bus shelters and during a much-discussed demonstration, was a response to the murder of 17-year-old Lisa from Abcoude, a call to undo the insecurity of the night. Women should be safe, even at night.

The fear of the night has existed for a long time. The night was always unsafe, not just for women. Fairy tales taught children that they were not allowed to go into the dark, because there were wolves, monsters and highwaymen. In The BFG by Roald Dahl, Sofie is kidnapped in the middle of the night to Giant Country. In The dog, the wolf and the moon by James Norbury, the night is the setting for an exciting journey full of despair and loss. For example, children’s books teach children that the night represents a magical world that is not theirs. They have to stay inside, sleep.

That message used to be there for adults too. For centuries, city gates were closed at night and there was a ‘covre-feu’, or curfew, curfew: lights had to be turned off, doors locked – locally until the 18^e century. To further restrict people, authorities sometimes rolled out hundreds of chains in the streets at night, Jane Brox writes in the book Brilliantabout the history of enlightenment.

At the same time, options for street lighting with oil lamps became available. In 1669, painter and inventor Jan van der Heijden, the Dutch Leonardo da Vinci, had convinced the Amsterdam city council ‘to provide the entire city with lights on dark nights’. But was that an improvement? Darker cities were considered safer because there were fewer people on the streets. Discussion flared up. Because if there was scum in cities where there were bars that remained open, enforcers wanted to be able to see that.

Authorities in Vienna in 1688 threatened to cut off the right hands of miscreants who damaged street lamps. There was a lot at stake: lighting meant a world of difference at a time when it could be dark inside on gray days, even during the day.

Nightmare

The discussion started in the 19^e century a new charge. Romantic and Gothic literature sang about the night at a time when gas and electric lighting chased away the night. Some cities were given arc lighting: a kind of stadium lights that illuminated everything so brightly that the night seemed to have been driven away.

A nightmare, wrote novelist Robert Louis Stevenson at the end of 19^e century. Dimming was better, it was decided, and since then public lighting has provided a shadow world: not driving away the night, but making it clear. It matched the desire for mystery of Romanticism. You could hang flower boxes on the new, more modest light poles, which was nice.

That enlightenment created in those 19^e century a new term: nightlife. You no longer had to go to sleep after sunset, you could stay up and go out. In those days of colonialism, artificial lighting meant a colonization of the night.

It was grandiose and art celebrated that victory. In Europe, impressionists started painting modern city life. Le Moulin de la Galette by Auguste Renoir from 1876 shows a party outside, with beautifully dressed people between outdoor lamps, so that the sunset does not have to spoil the fun. In 1897, Camille Pisarro painted the boulevard of Montmartre as a magical evening spot, with lampposts reflecting in the wet pavement – ​​the Impressionists were enchanted by the enchantment of that illuminated city.

Such doubles of light inspired more painters. In Van Gogh’s Starry night over the Rhone the stars connect with lit lights below, on the shore. Jan Sluijters showed how artificial light could make the new nightlife vibrant in his vibrant paintings of dancing people. The night was conquered but, just like now, not for everyone. Working people had to get up early, the rich went out. And: only in the city. The countryside remained dark, as did poorer countries. The rise of artificial light also meant the rise of inequality.

Saints portrait

But oh how beautiful the technology was. Giacomo Balla, one of the Italian Futurists who sang the praises of industrial progress, painted a kind of saintly portrait of a street lamp around 1909-11: the glow as a halo. Presumably he responded to the pamphlet Uccidiamo il Chiaro di Luna! by Tommaso Marinetti aka: let’s kill the moonlight. Hundreds of new electric moons would easily chase away that one old one, Marinetti said. Indeed, in Balla’s painting the moon is a pale crescent behind all that powerful electricity.

The romantic moonlight was failing and opinions were divided about that. Renoir’s festive Le Moulin de la Galette was for many years in the collection of Gustave Caillebotte, another person who painted city life, but during the day. In his Rue de Paris From 1877, the lamppost is a strict line that bisects the cityscape. It is a symbol of an increasingly functionalist world, a different image than the adulation by his colleagues.

Not everyone was a futurist and that feeling that something was being lost grew. In the first half of the 20^e century, city painters were sometimes melancholy. The nightlife at the American Edward Hopper is said to consist of lonely souls at a bar. Are Night in the Park from 1921 shows a man in the park in the light of a lamppost and if you do a little search for art ‘in the style of Hopper’, you will find plenty of lampposts. This is how the 19 changed^e-century electric torch of joy in a cliché for loneliness. In epigonist circles, the lamppost became the technological kitsch version of the boy with the tear.

Sometimes, because urban lighting fitted in with serious socially critical art. After the stock market crash of 1929, attention grew for thinkers such as sociologist Max Weber, philosopher Georg Simmel and cultural philosopher Walter Benjamin with their ideas about massification, individualization, disenchantment and alienation in the modern city. Simmel’s essay became influential Die Großstädte und das Geistesleben from 1903 about the city that overstimulates the senses, causing people to shut down. As a result, the city dweller was less capable of relationships with fellow human beings, only of relationships with money.

Such gloomy ideas were reflected in surrealism and magical realism. Artists painted ominous or cold cityscapes, with loneliness and tranquility. Delvaux painted street lamps as an invasion of foreign elements. Town square by Carel Willink from 1958 shows deserted streets and also a series of lampposts: to illuminate a human life that has disappeared, probably chased away.

Fairytale characters

In the meantime, modernization continued, also in art. From the 1960s onwards, artists started making neon art, light artworks, indoors or outdoors with buildings as pedestals.

Sometimes they turned light poles themselves into fairytale characters. For example, since 2018, a light pole designed by Aaron Stephan that branches out like a tree and breaks away from the linearity, something Cor Kraat already did in Rotterdam in 1978 with a wavy lamppost, has stood in Portland since 2018, and can still be admired on Karel Doormanlaan, near the ice cream parlor.

Such a touch of surrealism in everyday life is especially appropriate in unnoticed places, such as in Capelle aan den IJssel. There, on the edge of the Fascinatio residential area, two lampposts have magically changed into mercury, merging into an equally silvery, wavy curb. Fascinatio is inspired by a picture book of the same name and, as is known, the night in children’s books is one of magic. Lonely corner This is the name of this work of art by Stanislaw Lewkowicz, a title that resembles that of a magical realist painting.

Zoom in

Enchantment can sometimes return to the street, but that is not easy. In recent years, light art has often found itself in a straitjacket: used for tourist spectacle, as a pioneer for smart lighting, or subject to impossible requirements. Steve McQueen experienced this during his Vondelpark project in 2012, where he had the street lighting wrapped in a blue filter for a special effect – Blues before Sunrise was stopped prematurely due to road safety.

That straightjacket is not there on the drawing sheet or canvas. Bo Emmens, for example, is an artist with a special fascination for the lamppost and its ugly side. According to him, these are things that are always there. Which even get in the way and are therefore photoshopped out of photos of famous buildings. In his cityscapes he puts the functional scenery for urban life in the foreground: traffic signs, trash cans, lampposts. They grayly cross panoramas in ways that most of us no longer notice, like invisible butlers.

Emmens shows that our desire for efficiency produces a gray ugliness. Emmens paints the lampposts during the day, when their nighttime function is over and they stand unemployed, clumsy, next to new construction or a parking lot at a sports field just outside Barendrecht.

And so the lamppost changed guises in art: from an electric torch of joy via literally beautiful art to portraits of the clumsy patron saints of a parking lot. They stand by, helpless and powerless, because they are not a solution to insecurity, to evil that cannot endure the light of day.

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