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| SPRING SYMPOSIUM 2007
Pittsburgh resonates in many different ways with people, but for Trust members who attended the Pittsburgh Symposium, Pittsburgh: Decorative Arts and Architecture from George Washington to Fallingwater, April 19–22, it resoundingly resonates as an excellent and focused art and architecture city. Dick McIntosh, former head of the Frick Museum and now in New York writing a history of Knoedler & Co., opened our Friday morning lectures by noting that the heavy industry fortunes in coal and steel led to art collecting that started in 1820. By the 1870s, Pittsburgh was the largest producer of steel in the world and, the art world was coming to them in bulk. Pittsburgh collectors would buy in quantity, some showing particular interest in Swiss and Germanic landscapes and animal scenes.
Maison Goupil in Paris, for example, shipped to the Pittsburgh market. In 1891 Knoedler opened a gallery in Pittsburgh. But, by 1907 financial panic rained down on the gilded age, and the values for the desired paintings and prints of Pittsburgh collectors did not hold up. Some collections were sold for charitable endeavors, but other more serious collections were added to museums. Jason Bush, Curator of Decorative Arts at the Carnegie Museum of Art, reminded us that the Carnegie Institute includes the art museum, the library and the natural history museum. Preparing for our visit to the Carnegie, Jason showed slides of important pieces not to miss and mentioned some new acquisitions including a KPM (the Royal Porcelain Factory of Berlin) set of china purchased several weeks before. It is beautiful in tan and periwinkle blue on white and was displayed at the world fairs in France and Philadelphia. The newest purchase is a Graff Chair, the elastic chair.
Barbara Jones, Curator of the Westmoreland Museum of American Art, brought into clear view the painting of southwestern Pennsylvania as defined by the Scalp Level School. Much like the Barbizon School in France, the Scalp Level area attracted artists escaping dense urban areas. Sixty-eight miles from Pittsburgh, this area is a pristine, natural wilderness with some scattered farming villages. The area was popularized by George Hetzel, 1826–1899, from Düsseldorf. His paintings, very dark contrasting with light, were characteristic of Düsseldorf, and rarely included people. William Coventry Wall was another Scalp Level artist and he, too, rarely included people in his works. These paintings were a celebration of the rural scene, not in the neo-classical sense with nymphs, but with an honest appreciation of nature and the work of the farmer, particularly in contrast with the gritty city of steel and fire.
Harley Trice has worked for years on the exhibit “Made in Pennsylvania: A Folk Art Tradition,” being held this summer at the Westmoreland Museum of Art in Greensburg, PA. His focus has been on samplers. He noted that before they began research for this exhibit, all the major sampler books from 1929 to present had only identified four Pittsburgh area samplers. But, new discoveries show that these schoolgirl works started in 1786 with a boarding school in Fayette County (bigger than Allegheny County at that time) run by Mary Pride, an English woman from Philadelphia. In 1800 Pittsburgh had approximately 2000 people, and Jemima Dumars was teaching pictorial or fancy needlework.
The opening shots of the movie, “The Wedding Planner” show a Pittsburgh sampler that was identified on Antiques Roadshow and will be in the Westmoreland exhibit. Others include the Star School samplers featuring a cluster of seven stars above the houses, the Tidball School of samplers characterized by hummingbirds and the school of Harriett Price of Mt. Pleasant, PA. These are exciting new discoveries, and we thank Harley for sharing them with us. Anne Madarasz, Chief Curator at the Senator John Heinz History Center in Pittsburgh, is highly focused on the glass of the area. She informed Trust members that 90% of the runway lights around the world are made in Pittsburgh. The mainstays of the early business that started in 1797 were window glass, flasks and bottles filled up at local taverns and taken away in the pocket. Later, the Bakewell Glass company’s cut and engraved work was the first to provide glass to the U.S. Presidents. Anne took Trust members through the extensive and varied glass exhibit at the History Center showing the progression of techniques and styles. Flint glass houses came in the 1820s, along with the pressing technique giving us small pieces like drawer knobs. By the 1840s Pittsburgh was the pressed glass capital of the nation. Madarasz called Pittsburgh “the great everyday glassware producer.” Fuel for these glass furnaces was first timber from the abundant forests, then coal, and finally in the 1880s natural gas was used.
By 1918, cheap labor from abroad and paper cups began to change the American market and the glass business in Pittsburgh. The aluminum story was told by Sarah Nichols, just retired curator of decorative arts at the Carnegie, which has the broadest collection of aluminum objects in the world. Aluminum is pervasive in earth but needs lots of processing, and in the beginning the processing was very expensive. The French were the first to do this in the first half of the 19th century. By 1850, the French made aluminum in quantity and exhibited it in the Paris Exposition of 1855. Because at that time it was a very expensive metal, the aristocrats of Europe bought aluminum rings set with precious stones, tiaras by René Lalique, classical sculpture by Christofle. As it became cheaper to produce, Napoleon III began to use it for military purposes because of its light weight. ALCOA was founded in the late l9th century when aluminum was so cheap to produce that it became very commercial. But its uses were small. It was known as “a solution without a problem.” In Pittsburgh 25,000 aluminum combs were produced daily. In Scotland, the McDonald sisters made frames and other arts and crafts items with aluminum. At Clayton, the Frick house Trust members visited, we saw curtains with applied leather designs held on with decorative aluminum grommets. In 1933, a contest for the best aluminum seating was held in Paris. Marcel Breuer of the Bauhaus won first place for his lawn chair. But, by that time Alcoa was already producing aluminum lawn chairs. The Modernist movement embraced aluminum in the 1930s. The idea of streamline, the trailer boom and the more informal life style welcomed a light, shiny metal that didn’t need polishing. After WWII, the Alcoa monopoly was busted, Reynolds and Kaiser companies came to be, and with them an expansion of household objects. The Alcoa headquarters building, c. 1953, with its aluminum façade, was just across the street from our host hotel for the Pittsburgh Symposium. But after WWII, plastic took over.
Our last lecturer for the symposium was Phil Zimmerman, who is in the process of doing a furniture study for Old Economy Village, the 19th century Harmonist Society compound of Economy, PA, near Sewickley. It is an extraordinary, intact small village of 17 buildings all filled with furnishings. Phil’s fascinating study will be out in book form upon completion. The Harmonist story starts with George Rapp leading a group of people from southeastern Germany to the U.S. in 1804. Settling in a town they called Harmony, in Pennsylvania, they waited for the Second Coming. Due to the lack of water transportation for their new town, the group moved on and started another, New Harmony, IN.
In 1824, they returned to Pennsylvania and settled the successful town of Economy, PA, by the Ohio River. Even though this was essentially a communist society, one of the brick buildings had a wine cellar, and their museum (admission 10 cents) had paintings by Charles Willson Peale and others. Most curious of the structures was the grotto in the large ornamental garden on the river side of the village. The façade of the grotto was large, rough stones, but inside it was decorated with Adamesque designs and colors—very delicate and beautiful. Our guide suggested this was a symbol for the Harmonists’ belief that all humans were rough and jaded on the outside but gentle and beautiful on the inside. This gentle and beautiful side must have had something to do with the silk textiles they made that won gold medals at fairs in New York City and Boston. Turning our attention to the furniture objects of the village, Phil reports that no personal inventories exist, records are slim, and craftsmen listings are vague. But he notes that Harmonists were highly organized and efficient, and their ethic was to reuse rather than to discard. He has immersed himself in the furniture and the countless stored trunks of Old Economy Village.
And, Harmonist consistencies are beginning to show themselves in column turnings, door panels, trunk tops, cast iron hinges, a foot form common to the village, numbers on parts of feast hall tables, to name a few. The process is daunting but the findings are so exciting. Trust members walked through the village with Phil on Sunday afternoon as he pointed out these craftsman ways peculiar to the Harmonists. We were thrilled with this preview of the important work being done at Old Economy Village. The Decorative Arts Trust wishes to thank the extremely knowledgeable, hospitable and welcoming friends in Pittsburgh, Ligonier and Sewickley who helped to create this very special symposium.
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