John Kane is a unique figure in Pittsburgh history — a self-taught painter who became an art-world sensation at age 67.
Yet Kane was also very much of his time: a Scottish immigrant laborer who came to Braddock at age 19, in 1880, to join his family, he worked in coal mines, steel mills, and as a house painter, and spent much of his life at low pay and in substandard housing.
A new Heinz History Center exhibit brings both Kanes together. “Pittsburgh’s John Kane: The Life & Art of An American Workman,” which opened Saturday, includes 37 of Kane’s passionately rendered portraits and landscapes. It’s the largest show of his work in decades, and experts said it’s the first exhibit ever to place his art in the context of his at-once larger-than-life and quite down-to-earth biography.
“This is a very emblematic experience, but a very unique perspective that we can offer, because the paintings and his words survive to tell that story,” said the History Center’s Anne Madarasz, the show’s lead curator.
Some of the works are paintings Kane exhibited in the ’20s and ’30s at the Carnegie International, when he broke through to recognition at what was then the country’s most important show of contemporary art. As the first self-taught 20th-century artist to win acclaim during his lifetime, he’d be sought out by major collectors, and today his work is in the collections of museums including the Carnegie Museum of Art, the Smithsonian’s Hirschhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The show also includes paintings that haven’t been viewed publicly in years.
The exhibit also includes personal artifacts like Kane’s beloved tin whistle, and a recreation of his studio. The show was conceived as complement to “American Workman,” the authoritative new biography of Kane by Maxwell King and Louise Lippincott. One interactive exhibit lets visitors walk between the four foreground, middle-ground, and background layers of an enlarged version of Kane’s final painting, “Crossing the Junction,” a rendering of the old Bloomfield Bridge and the valley below, crisscrossed by active steam-train lines.
Kane’s rise to fame, in the 1920s, seems meteoric, but his life was difficult. In Scotland, he was a child laborer in shale mines and his schooling ended at age 10. In the U.S., just as Pittsburgh was becoming the country’s major industrial center, he was a brawny, hard-drinking workingman and amateur boxer. But at age 31, a railyard accident severed his left leg at the knee, and from then on his labors were limited largely to painting boxcars and houses. His rocky home life included the death of an infant son, and leaving his wife and two daughters for long periods — partly to find work, but also because of his drinking. (The exhibit includes his admission records to Mayview psychiatric hospital, where he was once involuntarily committed.)
“Pittsburgh’s John Kane” explores the influence on Kane of his Scottish heritage and Catholic faith. It also reveals how deeply Kane’s laboring life informed his artwork. Lippincott, the show’s guest curator, said his motto could have been “Draw like a street paver, paint like a steelworker.” Kane, who helped lay the Belgian block on Fifth Avenue leading from Uptown to Oakland, forever drew in similar patterned grids, Lippincott said. And as shown in a display featuring a replica boxcar like the ones Kane painted for a time, the layering of pigment he learned at that task stuck with him permanently as well.
Lippincott, who studied Kane’s work extensively for “American Workman,” also notes how his paintings, often viewed as nostalgic, in fact were often subtle expressions of social and economic inequality. For instance, his painting “Across The Strip” depicts the Strip District as seen from his low-rent studio at 17th Street and Liberty Avenue, looking toward the Allegheny River. The Strip was then one of the city’s worst slums, and the shadowy tenements in the foreground form a wall, seemingly barring the viewer from any access to the sun-dappled H.J. Heinz Company plant, and the greenery of Troy Hill, beyond.
“This is a very important statement about what it was like to be a workman in Pittsburgh,” said Lippincott at a press preview for the exhibit. “The slum neighborhood and the city beautiful were distinctly different worlds.”
Other works on display include Kane’s only known surviving pastel, from the early 20th century — well before he began to paint in earnest — and both of his paintings known to have been rejected from the Carnegie International before he was first accepted. (One is a self-portrait, the other a copy of a commercial image of Christ praying at Gethsemane.)
There’s even his painting of three small children on a doorstep that in 1931 caused a minor scandal after a jealous rival painter bought it and bathed half the image in turpentine to reveal that Kane had painted over a photo. (Ultimately, few others cared.)
The paintings were gathered from 27 different owners, including the History Center itself, the Carnegie Museum of Art, and numerous private collectors.
Other treasures unearthed by Lippincott and the History Center include 80 photos shot by Kane himself as studies for his paintings, and a mural-sized reproduction of the only known photo of Kane on one of his laboring jobs, from early ’20s, posing in his overalls with the crew that built the predecessor to what’s now known as the Greenfield Bridge.
The exhibit remains open through Jan. 8. More information is here.
