WEST CORNWALL, Conn—Fifty years after their completion, selections from the late-artist Woldemar Neufeld’s ambitious Bicentennial project, “Bridges Across the Housatonic,” are on display in West Cornwall.
The exhibit is on view in the gallery at the Houstonic River Commission and Cornwall Conservation Trust offices at 7 Railroad Street in West Cornwall.
The exhibition showcases original Neufeld watercolor and ink paintings and sketches, including several that have never been exhibited before. Included in the exhibit are Neufeld’s original reference photos taken in the 1970s and a modern-day look at historic bridge locations along the 41-mile Wild & Scenic stretch of the Housatonic River in Northwest Connecticut.
The Housatonic Valley Association (HVA) owns this collection and co-sponsors the exhibition with the Housatonic River Commission (HRC) and the Cornwall Conservation Trust (CCT).
Woldemar Neufeld (1909-2002) established his reputation in the mid-20th century as a block print maker, sculptor and painter in oils and watercolors. A trained draftsman as well as painter, his subjects included scenes from Waterloo, Ontario, where his family arrived as Ukrainian immigrants in the early 1920s; the architecture of lower Manhattan, and the villages and rural landscapes of Connecticut’s Housatonic River valley, where he made his home.
Some of his body of work has been collected by institutions as varied as The Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Library of Congress, the New Britain Museum of American Art and Sloan Kettering Hospital.
In 1974, to celebrate America’s 200th birthday, Neufeld set out to capture every bridge that he and his wife could locate that crossed the 149-mile Housatonic River, from its source in the Berkshires to Long Island Sound. They ultimately located 65 automobile bridges and two pedestrian bridges, which he rendered in watercolor and ink paintings and sketches over a three-year period, often more than once and as both smaller color sketches and full-sized paintings. They are a snapshot of human/nature interactions, as farmers, fishermen and recreators go about their daily lives along the river. Fifty years later, this art is a time capsule, helping to pull decades of infrastructure and environmental change into focus.
HVA owns the greater part of the Neufeld’s Housatonic Bridges collection, a gift from the artist and his son, Laurence, who also donated Neufeld’s research notes on each bridge, location photographs and snapshots of nearly every painting in the series.
This exhibition is the first public showing of this artwork since 2004.
“Neufeld was a realistic and sensitive portrayer of the connections between the built environment and the natural world,” said Tim Abbott, HVA’s executive director. “He understood that even mundane structures with a functional purpose like highway bridges had a form and elegance that not only help convey us over the river but become part of how we experience the landscape.”
The display in West Cornwall features 10 bridges along the federally designated Wild & Scenic stretch of the Housatonic River, only some of which still exist today as they appear in their paintings. There have been notable changes in some of the locations that Neufeld depicted, with others seemingly untouched by the passage of time.
HRC and HVA were instrumental in the 2023 designation of 41 miles of the Housatonic River in Northwest Connecticut as Wild & Scenic by National Park Service’s Wild & Scenic Rivers Program. Today, HVA, HRC and CCT work together to maintain the scenic and historical aspects of the river, along with the water quality, vegetation, wildlife and recreational value that helped the river receive its designation.