[3] The American collector John Quinn acquired Brooklyn Bridge and several other works by Gleizes that had been on view at Montross Gallery, either during the exhibition or subsequently.

In this first painting of the series, juxtaposed arabesques and distinctive diagonals interconnect dynamically, suggesting the bridge's complex architectonic engineering.

From 1914 to the end of the New York period, however nonrepresentational, works by the artist continued to be shaped by his personal experience, by the conviction that art was a social function, susceptible to theoretical formulation, and imbued with optimism.

"[9] Three years later, the transformation toward pure effusion would manifest itself in the Brooklyn Bridge and continue further still in subsequent works produced by the artist in New York.

The three Brooklyn Bridge paintings are a prime example of Gleizes's experimentation with the plastic translation of one of his most treasured themes: the city which draws life from the river.

[3] The Brooklyn Bridge was a key component of the New York landscape for the Ashcan School, though it hadn't held for them the fascination that it did for the generation of modern artists that arrived or returned from Europe during the First World War.

[12] (Stella and Walter Arensberg accompanied Duchamp to a plumbing supply store in 1917 to purchase the infamous urinal, soon to be entitled Fountain and signed "R.Mutt").

From 1915, Gleizes drew inspiration from the music of jazz, from the skyscrapers of New York, from neon signs, from the hustle and bustle of busy Manhattan streets and avenues such as Broadway, and from the Brooklyn Bridge; expressing the various sensations and vast drama of modern city life in an unprecedented series of works.

In Paris, from 1911 to 1912, Stella had been in contact with the Cubists and Italian Futurists, who admired contemporary concepts of the future, including motion, speed and technological triumphs of humanity over nature.

When he return to New York he moved to Brooklyn and there found in the Bridge the perfect vehicle for his Futurist vision, though he was also interested in the structural experiments of the Cubists and the dynamic color of the Fauves.

In his last book, Painting and on Man become Painter, written in 1948, Gleizes warns against the trend of non-representation becoming an end unto itself, insisting on the importance, instead, of esemplastic qualities.

[18] Toward the end of 1913 Gleizes defended the need for a representational subject matter in 'Opinion' published by Ricciotto Canudo in Monjoie!, but it was for reasons that were entirely plastic and non-representational at the same time: We are agreed that anecdote counts for nothing in a painted work.

Through a certain coefficient of imitation we will verify the legitimacy of the things we have discovered, the picture will not be reduced to the merely pleasurable arabesque of an oriental carpet, and we will obtain an infinite variety which would otherwise be impossible.

There is a concrete act that has to be realized, a reality to be produced - of the same order as that which everyone is prepared to recognize in music, at the lowest level of the esemplastic scale, and in architecture, at the highest.