Industrial Art

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Today is the day before my main raft trip. My original plan was to spend as much time as possible doing nothing. Unfortunately, the road has other plans. Two days ago I had to skip a number of sites due to how late I finished at Rickett's Glen the previous day. One of those was the Westmoreland Museum of American Art, which I really wanted to see. Looking at the map, I could reach the museum in less than an hour, and would only need a few hours to see it, so I decided it was worth the risk. First, I stopped for another great breakfast at the Falls Market, and bought a rafting T-shirt to commemorate my trip.

The Westmoreland is located in the city of Greensburg near Pittsburgh. Like many cities in southwest Pennsylvania, it grew rich on mining coal for the area's steel mills. Downtown shows both the city’s wealth and decline, with a collection of glorious Victorian buildings from the early 1900s surrounding a huge elaborate courthouse. The museum occupies a neoclassical edifice built in the 1950s.

The Westmoreland Art Museum, like many regional museums, has a permanent collection of varying quality. Like the best small museums, it specializes in one area, American Art. The art is grouped thematically. The undeniable highlights, which are well worth the visit, focus on art from Pennsylvania.

One area holds a unique exhibit called "Valley of Industry". In the early 1900s, steel mills absolutely covered this part of Pennsylvania. Local artists found them to be absolutely irresistible subject matter. The mills gave off huge plumes of smoke during the day, and columns of fire at night. They also took quite a toll on the surrounding environment, both the land and their workforce. All of these subjects found their way into paintings.

Unfortunately, these artists appeared a few decades too early. The rest of the country wanted idyllic country scenes or impressionist fantasy, not a gritty industrial reality. Their art was collected almost exclusively in the region. Much of it was ultimately donated to the Westmorland, and now appears in this show. The works themselves range from impressionist landscapes of mills at night (such as Steel Mills at Night by Aaron Harry Gorson) to photos of environmental devastation to heroic portraits of mill workers. They form an invaluable window on American history not available anywhere else.

The other highlight are Pennsylvania artists from the Hudson River School. Artists from New York get all the credit (hence the name) but Pennsylvanians also worked in the style. Many focused on local landscapes. I recognized several of the subjects from my trips through the state. Silver Thread Falls by James Brade Sword featured the namesake waterfall I had seen four days ago, looking remarkably close to how it appeared in real life!

While the permanent collection is good for a regional museum, it’s certainly not worthy of the Westmoreland’s fearsome reputation as one of the best small museums in the northeast. That reputation comes from its temporary shows. It regularly hosts traveling shows with the type of quality and depth normally found at museums of much larger size. The one I saw was a good one, Modern Masters.

The Smithsonian Institution owns a huge amount of American art. When the main museum hosting it underwent renovations several years ago, curators split the collection into multiple themed shows and sent them on tour. Modern Masters covers what many consider the first American art movement of international influence, abstract expressionism. Instead of a parade of greatest hits, the show attempts to show the history of the movement in context: how it arose, the main themes, and its place in art history. The variety of work was amazing, especially for a show at a small regional museum.

Abstract expressionism, for better and worse, got its impetus from artists fleeing Hitler. As Nazism grew, advanced artists fled Europe, first from Germany and later from many other countries. Many settled in New York, the center of American art teaching and already home to many expats. Their ideas merged with native experiments to create the new movement.

Abstract Expressionism, at its core, was an attempt to use abstract means to express emotional ideas. Unlike some art movements, this one did not have a unified set of ideas but rather common themes used by groups of artists. Art historians, and this show, divide the movements into two main themes, Action and Color Field Painting.

Action Painting, for many people identified with Jackson Pollock, grew out of Surrealism. It took that movement’s focus on the unconscious and applied it to abstract gestures. Pollock threw his paint randomly across the canvas. A major impetus came from Hans Hofmann, a German art teacher who moved to New York in the 1930s and influenced a generation of artists. The show has samples of his paintings, along with heavyweights like Franz Kline and Phillip Guston and lesser known artists (disappointingly, they didn’t have anything by Pollock)

Color Field Painting attempts to create emotion through large areas of monochrome color. It grew out of geometric abstraction and the color theories of Wassily Kadinsky. The key innovator, according to this show, was Joseph Albers, another German art teacher who fled to the US in the 1930s. He painted a long and influential series, the Homage to the Square. These paintings featured squares of one color on backgrounds of another; they explored how color combinations affect the viewer. The section has a number of artists he influenced, such as Ad Reinhardt. As the movement evolved, some artists used abstract color to represent landscapes, such as Richard Diebenkorn. Surprisingly, the show has no work at all by the theme’s best known artist, Mark Rothko.

Abstract Expressionism held a place in American culture that is hard to imagine today. Many people identified them as a symbol of American artistic achievement in general, and even as proof of the superiority of the US political system. The artists and their paintings were covered in popular magazines. The Cold War had something to do with this, as these paintings were as different as one could imagine from the Socialist Realism promoted in the Soviet Union. Some critics went so far as to write books postulating that from then all advanced art would be abstract. As we now know, this didn’t happen. The movement’s ideas ultimately reached their limit, as most do, and artists moved on to other things (such as pop art)

After the Westmoreland, I had another long mountainous drive to Deep Creek Lake, Maryland. Along the way I ended up on another famous early roadway, the National Road. This road was the first highway built by the US Government after independence, and was originally a wagon road supported by tolls. It connected Baltimore to the new territories beyond the Appalachian Mountains. In the 1920s, it became part of US 40 and was extended all the way to San Francisco.

The builders of the National Road knew little more about highway design than those responsible for US 30, so it shares many of the same characteristics. It too runs ramrod straight for long stretches, curving only when needed to get over mountain passes. One of the most notorious passes, which I had to drive, was Chestnut Ridge. The highway climbs the side of a valley at 10%!g(MISSING)rade, crests the ridge next to a large old hotel with great views, and then drops just as steeply down the other side. A National Geographic writer once wrote about crossing this pass in the early days of auto travel, when radiators and engines routinely exploded. A sign at the base says it all: "Warning: Dangerous Mountain, Seek Alternate Routes".

After a few hours, I finally reached Deep Creek Lake. It was created for power generation in the 1930s, and is the largest body of fresh water in Maryland. Over the years it has become a huge tourist area and water recreation paradise. Tourist facilities cover the shores, but they have yet to completely overwhelm the natural scenery. One of these is the most honest store I've ever seen: Tourist Trap T-Shirts. I ignored it all and headed to my base for the next few days, Haley Farm.

Haley Farm is an actual farm that also serves as a Bed and Breakfast. It accomplishes the rare feat of feeling both rustic and luxurious. The walls are covered with artwork. The entrance is only five minutes from a major road, but it’s so well hidden by trees that visitors barely notice. The owners love to socialize. Since they had rafted the Upper Yough before, this was is what we talked about.

After spending the rest of the day trying to relax, I needed dinner. With the raft trip looming, this meal needed to be substantial. On advice from my hosts, I went to the Pine Lodge Steakhouse. This upscale restaurant sits right on the lake in a complex of shops. They serve huge portions of meat at prices to match. I had a rack of ribs with a side of fries. The waiter brought a stack of handy wipes along with the ribs, and I needed them. With the rafting the next day I had to stay sober, so I washed it all down with fruit juice. Soon after getting back, I passed out cold. I have a long and dangerous, but also thrilling, day tomorrow.

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Comments

[D MJ Binkley]

Art and Museums
Glad to hear you had a good time exploring.

[Roosta]

Art Museums
Thanks for the comments. The Abstract Expressionism show was amazing. No blog pictures, sadly, due to copyright restrictions.