Within the extraordinary body of work Henry Orlik produced in New York, Fighting Skyscrapers is one of his most dramatic, imposing and thought-provoking paintings. Orlik lived in New York from 1980 to 1985, became familiar with the city and was acutely aware of the iconography of the imposing skyline and how the Twin Towers, the world’s tallest buildings at the time, dominated the scene as a symbol of global trade and the power of the USA. He painted Fighting Skyscrapers twenty years before the awful events of 9/11 in 2001 in which the Twin Towers were destroyed in a horrific terrorist attack. For the modern viewer, his image seems farsighted, a terrible forecast of things to come and bestows Orlik with ‘the terrible gift of foresight’.[1]

When Orlik arrived in New York in 1980 as an ‘outsider’, he was pursuing a well-worn path of individuals looking to the city for new freedoms or fortunes. New York was the commercial capital of the world; possibilities and ambitions awaited – to be fulfilled, or perhaps as often, dashed. As an artist, Orlik responded keenly to the architecture of the city, not purely for its formal opportunities but also, and most critically, to portray something of the life of its inhabitants and what the city represented as melting pots of humanity and places of, often, competing ideologies. In Fighting Skyscrapers, we have this strikingly presented in the anthropomorphising of the symbolic heart of the city.

As an image, Fighting Skyscrapers deserves a place in the canon of iconic 20th century paintings of New York. Across generations artists from outside and within have responded to the city, whether lamenting the loss of neighbourhoods under the march of development as in George Bellows’ The Lone Tenement (1909), or celebrating the excitement and energy of the city seen in the American Impressionist Childe Hassam’s flag-bedecked depictions of Fifth Avenue (1917), both in the National Gallery of Art, Washington. Diego Riviera’s Frozen Assets (1931-2, Museum of Modern Art, New York) depicts dispossessed workers, critiquing the city’s inequalities especially resonant during the Great Depression. Piet Mondrian, in one of his last works, Broadway Boogie Woogie (1942-3, Museum of Modern Art, New York), brought his interpretation of the city through his unique process of grids and limited colours – its rhythmic pulses evoking the jazz scene he encountered there. At the same time, Edward Hopper’s iconic Nighthawks (1942, Art Institute of Chicago), captures a sense of the isolation that can be had within a city. In 1964, Andy Warhol, collaborating with John Palmer, made an 8-hour film, Empire (Museum of Modern Art, New York), focussing starkly and solely on the Empire State Building, evoking a sense of consistency yet detachment. From the 1980s, Robert Moskowitz depicted the Twin Towers in a series of works exploring their formal potential (Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1996). With Fighting Skyscrapers, Orlik makes his own distinct and important contribution.

In tune with Surrealism’s ideology - blending reality with dreams, visions and unlocking the unconscious mind – Orlik questions the structures of the physical world. In doing so, the painting is elevated far beyond a traditional representation and provides a powerful image rich in interpretation.

Orlik’s interest in quantum physics led him to explore metaphysical dimensions which combine physics, philosophy and psychology with theories of the origins and nature of consciousness and the relationship of all systems of the cosmos (living quantum systems) including human society. Orlik created a unique technique of minute brushstrokes which overlay his paintings to suggest the fundamental energy and matter which makes up the universe acting on every scale from a single to a complex compound entity. These ‘excitation’ brushstrokes enliven his paintings making them fizz with energy, expressing both malignant, angry forces and enchanting, light-filled dreamscapes. Here his excitation brushstrokes are strong and forceful – they do not ‘blend’ with the background and are not in harmony with the subjects painted beneath. In other paintings, the excitations merge and flow with the background enhancing the beauty of the subject. Here they are implemented as dominant, dark, firm strokes, large and imposing. They have an intensity and fury which feels menacing, and this exacerbates the intensity of the disturbance in the painting suggesting a concentration of high energy. Danah Zohar, a quantum scientist whose writings influenced Orlik, described how the quantum system works. As she puts it, the quantum world represents a ‘chain of evolving consciousness’ where things ‘emerge as fluctuations (excitations) in the vacuum, grow towards renewed coherence, and return to the vacuums as ‘enriched’ fluctuations.’ (The Quantum Self). Here, however, it seems like the excitations are in a state of constant flux, fizzing and buzzing and bouncing against each other. They are ominous, angry and sinister with no apparent resolution.

The two skyscrapers tower into the sky, looming over the rooftops of the much lower buildings beneath them. A horizontal band of stylised cloud sits in front of them, creating a band across the middle of the painting. The clouds are lyrical, beautifully shaped but their dark outline feels oppressive, and they seem like malevolent forces hovering by the towers. They also serve to shield the view of the tops of the skyscrapers from the world below.

The title of the work denotes conflict – what exactly it is that is being played out Orlik does not make specific. The two buildings are actors on a stage and a vehicle for Orlik to explore and evoke ideas. He depicts each tower differently: the one on the left has horizontal stripes of alternate light and dark reds, while the one on the right is coloured grey and interspersed with darker vertical stripes. Out of the top of the red and white tower billow nine long tendril-like emanations which are like a bird, snakes or sea-creatures or stylised flames. At the peak of the right tower, sits a beast; it is covered by a heavy grey cloth (like a military great coat) from which emerge two curling tusks and a head or mane of long, black hair from the front and a hairy short tail from the lower back. There is a suggestion of a long body beneath the cloth and the cloth hangs down in folds which are like the ‘tendrils’ that emerge from the opposing tower. This dark creature appears mammalian and hairy, whilst the ‘creature’ at the top of the other tower appears bird-like, reptilian or even sub-aqueous. Revealingly, they are from different taxonomic classes.

Orlik emphasises the difference between the two towers in the difference of their colours and the difference in the ‘creatures’ on them. However, they are, in fact, structurally similar: they both rise high above the clouds and the far smaller buildings below and they are the same shape and size. Orlik shows them as two opposing forces rather than as a unit of two similar buildings. The two towers, in Orlik’s singular vision, thus, come to represent two opposing ideologies which cannot be reconciled, but fight, unable to and unwilling to acknowledge their similarities to each other.

To some extent, the hard-fought elections between Ronald Reagan and Jimmy Carter in 1980 and 1984, may have suggested the painting to Orlik - with the red tower referencing the Republicans and the blue/grey the Democrats, as Orlik was in the States during that time. It seems likely, however, that the towers, more broadly invoke a representation of all opposing ideologies, such as the Soviets and the Nazis whose totalitarianism had a severe impact on the lives of his maternal and paternal families. The towers represent the antagonism between two ways of being and they ignore the drive for coherence which at the quantum level - Orlik’s pervading philosophy – unites us all. Orlik believes that our quantum selves have a ‘commitment to the whole world of nature and material reality’ in the recognitions that we are ‘all, basically, stuff of the same substance. And the same can be said of spiritual values such as love, truth and beauty.’ [2]

In this state, the beasts at the top of the tower control the tower. They are not recognisable as coherent forms and one is covered with a cloth, hiding its true nature - they are both faceless entities. They fight each other and dominate those in the buildings below who either do not understand or have become complicit in the ‘fight’. In Zohar’s quantum world, ‘the ground state of human consciousness’ is ‘coherent’ but ‘uninteresting’ without the potentiality of fluctuations (excitations) of mind which ‘lead to the birth of particles and their relationships’ and which give ‘birth to thoughts.’ These thoughts are the ‘interesting’, ‘creative aspect of consciousness’, but to become themselves, they must split off ‘from the coherent ground state’. Therefore, in this case, the particles (the individual souls – the thoughts of the individual) will have to split off from the whole to achieve change and stop the ‘fight’. As Jung famously wrote: ‘If things go wrong in the world, this is because something is wrong with the individual, because something is wrong with me. Therefore, if I am sensible, I shall put myself right first.’

Orlik manifests his fighting world in the world of commerce (as referenced by the skyscrapers). By doing so, he acknowledges the materialistic world of commerce and the city, and the facelessness and lack of individuality often associated with such a world, highlighting how mankind has become alienated from nature in the form of high-rises which detach and rise above the natural world. The worker becomes just a part of the bigger picture (a cog in the machine). This insinuates further ideas which have been explored by philosophers of past and present about the city as both magnificent structure showing man’s incredible ability to build and the ‘ever-encroaching ugliness and anonymity of the brutal, the plastic and the boring in our material surroundings’ which ‘isolates us not only from other cultures and generations, who can find little of us in our artefacts but also from each other, now in daily, simple ways.’[3] Like writers, artists and thinkers before him and today, Orlik questions the paradox of ‘progress’ and at what cost comes the relentless pursuit of wealth and power.

Such themes and explorations presented in the manner of Fighting Skyscrapers, which so emphatically displays Orlik’s technical ability, united with a genuine Surrealist vision, makes for a profound and compelling work. Moreover, the events that transpired twenty years later frame the painting in an even more poignant and prophetic context. Post-9/11, it is a highly emotive and suggestive work, an image for our time, and leads to speculation as to the oracular vision of the artist.

[1] Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, The Phenomenon of Man, Collins, 1955, p. 252

[2] Danah Zohar, The Quantum Self, Bloomsbury Publishing, 1990, p. 145

[3] Danah Zohar, Bloomsbury Publishing, The Quantum Self, 1990, p, 195