In the essay “On Various Minor Painters” excerpted in Edward Hirsch’s Writers on Art, Willa Cather wrote “…buying pictures and getting people to look at them has been exemplified in at least three cities in the United States: New York, Chicago, and Pittsburgh. As a result, those three cities contain nearly all the important collections in the United States.” However, she did say that “Pittsburgh is not a city of culture […] but one thing Carnegie did; he bought pictures and got people to look at them.” From impressionists to Pittsburgh has a rich art history tied both to collection of historical pieces and fostering contemporary artists’ careers.
Explore Pittsburgh’s Rich Art History with These 3 Artists
Pittsburgh has a rich art history tied both to collecting historical pieces and fostering contemporary artists’ careers. But if you know one piece of Pittsburgh’s art history, you know Andy Warhol. Though Warhol made an indelible mark on Here are a few of the under-discussed parts of Pittsburgh’s art history that have connected it to the wider art market, beyond only Warhol.
Keith Haring Comes of Age in Pittsburgh
Though Keith Haring was born in eastern Pennsylvania, a recent biography of the iconic street artist by Brad Gooch sheds light on the time he spent in Pittsburgh. He had his very first art show in the cafeteria of the Downtown headquarters of Fisher Scientific (now a Duquesne University building), lived briefly at the Mattress Factory, and then showed work in what is now the Pittsburgh Center for Arts and Media. Haring was attending the Ivy School of Professional Art, a two-year art school in the Perry South neighborhood.
Though Haring’s time in Pittsburgh was brief, if you’ve ever taken a class at the Center for Arts and Media, you’ve walked in his footsteps. For him, it was a steppingstone to finding himself, Safely away from the suburban life of Kutztown. Gooch describes Haring’s time in Pittsburgh as an idyllic meandering of the mind and heart, where Haring found his footing as an artist and was able to move into a new echelon.
Mary Cassatt, A Pittsburgh Girl in a Boys’ Club
Born in Allegheny—what we now call the North Side—Mary Cassatt was a respected American Impressionist painter, one of the few in a male-dominated art movement. Her work focused on the intimate lives of women, in both public and private. She often painted women at the opera, but gave the same dignity and flair to women with their children in their homes. Her family disapproved of her studying art at the Pennsylvania College of the Arts as a young woman, but she stuck with it, though she didn’t complete her degree. It proved to be worth it, because major museums acquired her work during her lifetime and art collectors in New York and Chicago flocked towards her for her portraits and commissions.
She had a close relationship with the famed painter and sculptor Edgar Degas, though their intimacy by all accounts remained platonic. Cassatt spent much of her life in France, but we can still see her paintings in her hometown, on view in the Scaife Galleries at the Carnegie Museum of Art.
Her friendship with Louisine Waldron Havemeyer, wife of Domino Sugar baron H.O. Havemeyer, helped form one of the most important collections of paintings assembled by an American. Cassat’s access to the great Impressionist painters of the day, combined with Louisine’s funds and curiosity, put together works by Degas, Manet, Courbet, Monet, Cezanne, and Cassat herself. They shared space with paintings by Ingres, Rembrandt, Cranach, Hals, Botticelli, and more. Much of the collection was bequeathed to New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, forming an important backbone to its collection of European paintings.
Pittsburgh-Born Raymond Saunders Saw All Colors in Black
Many years after Mary Cassatt studied at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, Raymond Saunders attended the same school on a scholarship. Saunders, born in Pittsburgh, had his first show in the city at the age of 19, while studying at the Carnegie Institute. He went on to live and work in Oakland, California, where he gained notoriety in the Bay Area’s art scene.
Saunders pushed back against the idea of being a “black artist,” and played with the associations people have with the label by making paintings predominantly in black. The blacks he uses are multilayered, often playing off other elements in his work. Saunders is still living, at ninety-one years young, and his work is in museums and galleries all around the world.
Story by Emma Riva
Image of Mary Cassatt Bacchante (1872)
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