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Revisiting ‘Dream Street’ and famed photographer’s vision of Pittsburgh
This is WESA Arts, a weekly newsletter by Bill O’Driscoll providing in-depth reporting about the Pittsburgh area art scene. Sign up here to get it every Wednesday afternoon.
Legendary photographer W. Eugene Smith called his signature project, simply, “Pittsburgh.” As in “Pittsburgh is a failure” and “the infinite mistake of Pittsburgh.”
What got him so down? In the 1950s, author Stefan Lorant needed photos for a new book celebrating Pittsburgh’s bicentennial. Smith was a mercurial, New York City-based former World War II combat photographer who had just quit Life magazine. Lorant hired him to spend three weeks here and produce 100 prints.
Lorant got his prints — many known to generations of Pittsburghers from that coffee-table doorstop titled “Pittsburgh: An American City” — but Smith barely knew when to stop.
During his initial stay, in 1955, he became obsessed with the city and documenting it. He roamed from coal mines and steel mills to dusty city sidewalks, pristine public plazas and the steps of the Duquesne Club. He visited multiple times more through 1957, bent on producing a grand, symphonic and likely unprecedented work of photographic art.
Smith never managed it, at least to his own satisfaction. Ultimately, he shot 22,000 exposures. He included a few hundred of them in a 38-page essay published in a photography magazine in 1959, but hated how it turned out.
Smith died in 1978; his work here got a fuller airing with the 2001 publication of “Dream Street: W. Eugene Smith’s Pittsburgh Project,” a 180-page selection of 175 black-and-white photos and accompanying text edited by Sam Stephenson (with help from folks at the Carnegie Museum of Art and the Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh, the latter of which holds the rights to many of Smith’s Pittsburgh images).
The book went out of print, but Stephenson and the University Chicago Press have produced a new edition. And on Nov. 17, Riverstone Books will host Stephenson in a virtual conversation with award-winning poet Ross Gay, who wrote the forward to the new edition.
It’s a marvelous collection. Others had memorably photographed the city at mid-century, of course, from Johnstown native Luke Swank, in the 1930s and ’40s, to Charles “Teenie” Harris, who documented the Black community here for half of the 20th century. And under the guidance of Roy Stryker, shooters for the Pittsburgh Photographic Library — including talents like Clyde Hare and Esther Bubley — made thousands of images of the city and its people just a few years before Smith arrived.
But Smith’s project is surely the most extensive collection of photos of Pittsburgh conceived in such a brief time period by a single artist. Especially when that artist had relieved himself of obligation to any sort of deadline, or to anything but his vision. Stephenson calls it “the most ambitious project of a major photographer’s career.”
On one page of “Dream Street,” the grand, Ionic-columned interior of Downtown’s old Mellon National Bank, shot from above, is juxtaposed with a separate, street-level image of men standing alongside a message soaped onto a labor union’s storefront window, “No work until further notice.” A police officer in clown makeup at a Shriners parade greets a group of Black children on the Sixth Street Bridge. Steelworkers jovially drink beer and play cards at a picnic. The mills’ fires glow in smoky, artificial twilight. And always, the city’s gruffly photogenic landscape, its steep slopes and river valleys interrupted by the sometimes bold, sometimes desperate assertions of human habitation and industry.
As Smith puts it, “We are so lucky today to have this portrait of America’s primary industrial city at its zenith,” before suburbanization — let alone deindustrialization — fully took hold.
Stephenson originally assembled “Dream Street” while working at Duke University’s Center for Documentary Studies; more recently, he published the 2017 biography “Gene Smith’s Sink” and learned much more about the famed photographer, including how influenced he was by pioneering avant-garde filmmaker Stan Brakhage, who had his own long-standing association with Pittsburgh. The two were friends, and Stephenson thinks the “cinematic quality to what Smith was trying to achieve in Pittsburgh was partly down to Brakhage.
Stephenson, who now lives in College Station, Texas, was a 2019 Guggenheim Fellow in nonfiction writing to support a rather different project, on the cultural impact of alt-rock band Jane’s Addiction. He also ghostwrote singer-songwriter Lucinda Williams’ new memoir, “The Secrets I Told You.”
But W. Eugene Smith, and Pittsburgh, remain abiding interests.
The Pittsburgh project was “a failure in Smith’s eyes but not in our eyes,” said Stephenson. “I think he was kind of caught in a bind of his own making” in that there was no way to finish it as he wished. He adds, “I think Smith was really going after poetry instead of journalism.”
More information on Stephenson’s online talk is here.
679 Paintings. Sculptures. A Sword. The Met Moved Them All.
The museum’s European galleries open today after a $150 million renovation that will allow art to be seen through a new lens.
36 Hours in Acadiana, Louisiana
10:30 a.m.
Time travel to a historic village
When the British forcibly removed the Acadians from parts of Canada in the mid-18th century, an event known as Le Grand Dérangement, the French-speaking Acadians started making their way down the Mississippi River, creating settlements in South Louisiana. Vermilionville was the name given to Lafayette when it was established in the 1820s as one of those settlements. Today, Vermilionville, a 23-acre, open-air living history museum along the banks of the Vermilion River, tells the story of that migration and how the Acadians’ mingling with Creole, Spanish and Native American traditions created the unique culture of today’s Acadiana. Visitors can embark on a guided boat tour of the grounds, be entertained by costumed actors and historical reenactments, or join Cajun dance lessons and jams. The on-site restaurant, La Cuisine de Maman, also hosts an all-you-can-eat Sunday brunch. Adult admission, $10; handicap-accessible.
Stuff to do: Pocahontas Reframed, Divas on Stage Drag Brunch, Richmond Moon Market, Art Deco Society’s Tweed Ride and more
The 7th Annual Pocahontas Reframed Film Festival
The largest Native American film festival on the East Coast is back, and it’s right here in Richmond. Read our preview here. Runs Friday through Sunday, Nov. 19. Tickets range from $20 weekend passes to $100 VIP passes. Tickets and more information are available: www.pocahontasreframed.com.
Peni Candra Rini, Au Fromage, and Curt Sydnor at Gallery5
Renowned Javanese singer, composer and faculty member at the Indonesian Institute of the Arts, Peni Candra Rini returns for another loud set at Gallery5, and will be performing new and traditional music with members of Rumput, Gamelan Raga Kusuma, and Curt Sydnor. She’s joined by Richmond newest and hottest swing band, Au Fromage, and composer Sydnor, who received a grant last year from the Virginia Commission for the Arts. Tickets $12, $15 at the door. Doors are at 7 p.m., music at 8 p.m.
click to enlarge
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Peter McElhinney
- Peni Candra Rini
Dark Entries ft. Unknown Pleasures (live tribute to Joy Division) at Fallout RVA
Come rock out to the cool, dark sounds of the great late ‘70s English band, Joy Division, as performed by tribute group Unknown Pleasures. DJ Ben Speed will be spinning goth/wave/synth/new beat/EBM before and after the band. The band goes on at 10 p.m. Cost: $10. Entry is 18 and over. Runs from 9 a.m. to 2 a.m. 117 N. 18th St.
Divas on Stage – Drag Brunch at Capital Ale House’s Richmond Music Hall
Start your day our right with a drag brunch downtown. “Screamy, dreamy host” Chicki Parm takes the stage with Melanin Monroe, Venetian, and Veronica May Monroe. Ages 18 and up. Tickets range from $20 to $80. Doors at 11 a.m.
Richmond Moon Market 10th anniversary at Stone Brewing
It’s the big 10th anniversary celebration of this curated craft and wellness market that brings together artists, vendors, healers, fortune tellers, vintage gear, crystals, plants and flowers, custom skincare, craft persons, you name it. There will be live music, food and workshops running from noon to 5 p.m. Noon to 5 p.m. 4300 Williamsburg Ave. Go here for more.
https://www.rvamoonmarket.com/
Art Deco Society of Virginia’s Tweed Ride
Tally-ho! Get decked out in your finest tweed gear and join the ever stylish Art Deco Society of Virginia for a jaunty ride through the streets of Richmond while celebrating your favorite textile. They’ll start with a registration and hydration period beginning at 11 a.m. at Penny Lane Pub, which is where the ride will start and end. Bring your favorite “two-wheel steed.” The ride will stop for photo ops and vintage clothes before returning to Penny Lane for a snack. Free and open to the public. Rain cancels.
Redd Volkaert and Dogwood Brothers, Ramona and the Holy Smokes and Brand Franklin at Get Tight Lounge
A rare chance to see Merle Haggard’s former guitar player, Redd Volkaert, who now lives on a farm in Galax, Virginia, show off his stellar Telecaster picking. This show is free and starts at 1 p.m. All ages. Read our preview here.
Newburyport ArtWalk returns next month
NEWBURYPORT — Newburyport’s robust art scene is being celebrated with a special Newburyport “Holiday” ArtWalk on Saturday, Dec. 2 from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. featuring paintings, photography, sculptures and
Art Hounds: The past and present of Native art
Artist and photographer Theresa Drift of Cook, Minn., and theatermaker Payton Counts of Net Lake, Minn., both saw the “Native American Art: Past and Present” gallery show at the Northwoods Friends of the Arts in Cook.
It’s a mixture of contemporary and historical pieces by local artists, including paintings, metalwork, birchbark baskets, beadwork and quilting. The show also includes a few pieces from Grand Portage artist George Morrison, a well-known mid-century painter.
Counts appreciated the range of the show, which is presented in one room. “I thought it was nice to see a mixture of contemporary as well as older pieces of work, kind of this like partnership of art connecting to the community.”
“It definitely shows the changing culture and [that] it’s not a static thing,” agrees Drift. “It’s constantly evolving and growing.”
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The exhibit runs through Sat., Nov. 25. The gallery is open 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. Thursday and Friday and 9 a.m. to 1 p.m. Saturdays.
Art teacher and illustrator Heather Zemien of Brooklyn Park, Minn., has been following Off Leash Theater Productions for the past year, ever since she saw their original “Off-Kilter Cabaret.”
She’s looking forward to seeing the second annual production this weekend. The cabaret features seven artists living and making art with a range of mental and physical abilities.
The performance includes dance, comedy, puppetry, musical composition, spoken word and storytelling. The show is emceed by storyteller Amy Salloway, whose work Zemien has followed since seeing her on stage last year.
The show strikes a special chord for Zemien, whose late partner was in a wheelchair. She says she’s excited to see and support this all-inclusive show.
“Off Kilter Cabaret” will be performed at the Cowles Center for the Performing Arts in Minneapolis Fri., Nov 17 and Sat. Nov 18 at 7:30 p.m. and Sun., Nov 19 at 2 p.m.
The building is fully accessible. All three shows have American Sign Language and audio descriptions available. Masks are required.
Please note: the accompanying music in the radio piece is “Interlude 4” from A.J. Isaacson-Zvidzwa’s composition “Angels Sang to Me.” Isaacson-Zvidzwa is one of the seven artists featured in this weekend’s “Off Kilter Cabaret.”
Young Dance in “Organic Knitting” at the 2022 Off-Kilter Cabaret
Courtesy of Off-Leash Area
Philip Muehe, managing director of the Rochester Repertory Theatre, suggests a romantic comedy musical in Lanesboro, Minn., for your entertainment this holiday season. The Commonweal Theatre Company in Lanesboro is staging the musical “She Loves Me” through Dec. 23.
The show features cheerful, catchy numbers about two shopkeepers who get on each others’ last nerve. Secretly, though, they’ve become pen pals through a lonely hearts group.
When they finally find out that the person with whom they’ve fallen in love over letters is, in reality, the person right across the shop, heartwarming hilarity ensues.
If that plot sounds familiar, the Commonweal put on an adaptation of the play “Parfumerie” on which the musical “She Loves Me” is based back in 2011.
The story was the inspiration for several movies, including the 1998 romcom “You’ve Got Mail” with Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan.
Taiwanese sculpture to remain at Princes Dock
Eleng Luluan’s popular sculpture, which was installed at Princes Dock as part of this year’s Liverpool Biennial festival, will now remain.
France returns a bust to Libya
Sotheby’s $306m The Now and Contemporary sales wrap up a mediocre New York auction season
The Now and Contemporary evening sales, Sotheby’s dual auctions dedicated to adjacent eras of post-war art, brought in a combined hammer total of $261.5m ($305.7m with fees) on Wednesday (15 November), within the aggregate low estimate range of $245.7m-$349.8m (calculated without fees).
Although the two sales each performed well enough to tiptoe into their respective presale target zones, they generated only modest excitement along the way—a fitting conclusion to an autumn auction season that proved the market remains relatively soft and selective.
Counting the lone lot withdrawn from either sale—Mark Bradford’s 2006 canvas Tina (est $2.5-$3.5m)—the two auctions delivered a muscular sell-through rate of 93.8%. (The figure rises to 95.3% if the withdrawal is omitted.) Yet most of those sales were effectively minted in advance: of the 65 lots originally meant to be offered across both sales, 45 (69.2% by volume) were guaranteed a minimum price by Sotheby’s (including the withdrawn Bradford), and 36 (55.3%) were backed by third parties.
The house’s willingness to offload so much risk onto external financiers reaffirms the unease of the moment. Still, both sales produced at least a bit of heat and a few milestones amid the uncertainties.
Shift (1996-97) by Jenny Saville Courtesy Sotheby’s
The Now
In total, the opening segment of Sotheby’s double-header brought $46.7m ($55.2m with fees), within the original $43.7m-$60.6m expectation. (Omitting the withdrawn Bradford lot reduces the estimate range to $41.2m-$57.1m.) Of the 19 lots originally scheduled to be offered, 13 were guaranteed by the house, and 10 by third-party financiers.
The premium-inclusive sale total was 50% higher than the equivalent figure in the May 2023 edition of The Now, according to a house spokesperson. (It should be noted, however, that Sotheby’s withdrew the star lot of the spring sale, Yoshitomo Nara’s 1998 painting Haze Days, which had been estimated to sell for at least $12m.)
Wednesday evening’s iteration of The Now, centred on art created within the past 20 years, got off to a promising start by setting three consecutive artist records under the hammer. First, Brazilian abstractionist Marina Perez Simão’s untitled 2022 painting went to an online buyer on a final bid of $350,000 ($422,000 with fees), roughly triple its $120,000 high estimate and Simão’s previous auction record of $115,594 (with fees). The painting carried a financial guarantee from both Sotheby’s and a third party.
Next, six bidders pushed the Iraqi artist Mohammed Sami’s The Praying Room (2021) to a hammer price of $750,000 ($952,500 with fees), more than quadrupling the work’s $150,000 high expectation and breaking the auction ceiling set for the artist just last month at Sotheby’s London. Finally, in his auction debut, New York-based British artist Oscar yi Hou’s Mlle. Chris à central park 103rd, en automne (2019) fetched $75,000 ($95,250 with fees) against a $30,000 to $40,000 estimate.
Yet the sale’s expected star lots met more measured bidding. Many anticipated the gargantuan, fleshy Shift (1996-97), a landmark painting by the Young British Artist Jenny Saville, would shatter her own record for the most valuable work by a living woman artist at auction. Instead, it sold for $9.2m ($10.9m with fees), just over the low threshold of its $9m-$12m estimate, after less than two minutes of bidding.
A similar process played out for Kerry James Marshall’s 1992 pool scene (1992). Although it too was expected to sell for up to $12m, the bidding plateaued at its $9m low estimate, reaching $10.3m with fees.
The Saville and the Marshall were both consigned by the flamboyant Chinese entrepreneur Liu Yiqian and his wife, Wang Wei, the co-founders of Shanghai’s Long Museum. Hopes were high that the two works would perform strongly enough to at least somewhat offset the lacklustre results of an auction of 39 pieces from the couple’s holdings at Sotheby’s Hong Kong on 5 October.
That sale made HK$544.5m with fees ($69.5m), well below its presale target range of HK$745m-HK$1bn ($95.9m-$135.5m)—and neither the Saville nor the Marshall did enough to completely close that earlier gap. (A third work in The Now owned by Liu and Wang, Marlene Dumas’s Love Your Neighbour, hammered $500,000 beneath its low estimate of $5.5m, reaching $5.9m with fees.)
Walkers With the Dawn and Morning (2008) by Julie Mehretu Courtesy Sotheby’s
More successful was Julie Mehretu’s monumental Walkers With the Dawn and Morning (2008), which hammered at $9.5m ($10.7m with fees), near the upper limit of its $7m-$10m estimate. The result established a new high mark for an African-born artist at auction.
Other highlights of The Now sale included Teeter towards me (2019), by 30-year-old Jadé Fadojutimi. The painting fetched more than $1.4m ($1.8m with fees), double the midrange of its estimate, thanks to activity from seven different bidders. Jonas Wood’s Interior with Fireplace (2012) also stoked heated competition, with four would-be buyers battling for eight minutes until one prevailed with a bid of $3.5m ($4.3m with fees), comfortably above its $3m high expectation.
After Sotheby’s auctioneer Phyllis Kao brought down the gavel to sell The Now’s final lot, a George Condo that went for $1.5m ($1.8m with fees), the auction house gave her a commemorative white glove in honour of finding buyers for all 18 lots ultimately offered in her first evening auction. (The withdrawn Bradford painting was excused from the calculus.)
Joan Mitchell’s Sunflowers (1990-91) Courtesy Sotheby’s
The Contemporary
The second event at Sotheby’s on Wednesday, the Contemporary evening sale, felt nearly as constrained as The Now, only played out across more lots with higher price expectations (and auctioneer Oliver Barker manning the rostrum). In all, the Contemporary generated a hammer total of $214.7m ($250.5m with fees), modestly within its estimate range of $202m-$289.2m (without fees).
No lots were withdrawn from the sale, and 43 of the 46 that were offered found buyers—good for a sell-through rate of 93.5%. Sotheby’s guaranteed a minimum price for 32 of the works in the Contemporary (including an Ellsworth Kelly painting that ultimately passed at $1.7m); the house also offloaded a substantial proportion of its risk by drafting in third-party guarantors for 26 lots (56.5% by volume).
The opening lot of the auction again started strong. Junker 1 (2009-10) by Amy Sillman set a new record for the artist at auction, fetching $775,000 ($984,250 with fees). The first of the 16 works in the sale from the collection of Chara Schreyer, the late California art collector, it sold for nearly double its $400,000 low estimate. The following lot, an untitled hanging sculpture by Lee Bontecou from 1983, soared to $1.3m ($1.6m with fees) against a $600,000-$800,000 expectation.
Together, the 16 Schreyer works made $43.4m ($52.4m with fees), about one-fifth of the overall total for the Contemporary auction. The collection also contributed one of the more pulse-pounding competitions of the night, as Frank Stella’s Honduras Lottery Co. (1962) elevated above its $15m high target to make $16m ($18.7m with fees). The sale represents the artist’s second-highest price at auction to date.
The best one can say about the auction’s intended star lots, in contrast, was that they performed adequately. The most valuable work of the night, Jean-Michel Basquiat’s celebrated 1982 Self Portrait as a Heel (Part Two), sold for $39m ($42m with fees), a step below its $40m low target, after less than three minutes of bidding.
Jean-Michel Basquiat, Self Portrait as a Heel (Part Two) (1982).
Courtesy of Sotheby’s
The runner-up from a price perspective, Gerhard Richter’s crimson-dominated Abstraktes Bild (1997) hammered at $27.5m ($31.9m with fees), inside its $25m-$35m estimate range (albeit toward the lower end). Sunflowers (est $20m-$30m), a 1990-91 diptych by Joan Mitchell, narrowly missed breaking the artist’s nascent auction record of $29.2m (with fees), minted one week earlier in Christie’s 20th century evening sale in New York. Sunflowers went for $24m ($27.9m with fees) to a bidder in the room; the result made the painting by far the top lot from the group of works consigned to Sotheby’s this season by New York dealer John Cheim.
On the other side of the ledger, the only other two lots that failed to sell (aside from the earlier-mentioned Ellsworth Kelly) were relatively low-value: a 1990 Ed Ruscha word painting from the Schreyer collection that passed at $1.9m, and a columnar white 1962 Anne Truitt sculpture that passed at $320,000.
A different white Minimalist construction, Sol LeWitt’s Hanging Structure 24 D (1991), closed out the Contemporary sale by making $470,000 ($596,900), just above its $450,000 high target. The crowd and Sotheby’s staff hailed the final descent of Barker’s gavel with the usual round of applause. It felt more like an expression of relief than a celebration. But at the end of such a middling autumn auction cycle, it is fair to wonder how long even that sense of relief will last.
