By Stuart Mitchner

On drives from Indiana to New York City before the Interstate, my parents took U.S. 40 east, which brought us into the hilly outskirts of Pittsburgh at night. It was the most vivid moment of the trip: the red-orange glow of steel mills against the dark sky, the smoke-hazed aura around the glow, the balmy summer air, the excitement of seeing that vision lighting up the sky. The moment was marked by the metallic scent of industry, like the aroma of pure power, which is what I seemed to be breathing again in “Iron and Coal, Petroleum and Steel: Industrial Art from the Steidle Collection” at the James A. Michener Art Museum. 

Of all the shows I’ve seen since the Paton|Smith|Della Penna-Fernberger Galleries opened in November 2009, this exhibit makes the most impressive use of the space, thanks in part to curator Kirsten Jensen’s decision to surround the art with walls of a deep dark blue. No wonder I felt so responsive: the effect is like seeing these works at night, the walls bringing out the dominant fireburst-in-darkness visual experience that recalled the Pittsburgh moment on the drive to New York. As it happens, the city of jazz is only a few steps away in the Pfundt Gallery, where the photographs of Herman Leonard bring the mid-20th-century night club ambience of Manhattan to Doylestown.

The Necessity of Art

Another effective curatorial touch is the placement of Rockwell Kent’s Power… for the Wheels of Progress (1945) at the show’s entrance. The images that lie ahead of you, however inventive and pictorial and impressionistic, are essentially representative. They suggest visions. Kent’s creation of coal-driven Power is a vision. Painted in 1945 for the Coal Institute, the giant beaming a path through the night with a magic lantern of coal harks back to the Art Deco style of the architectural and sculptural imagery embellishing Rockefeller Center. As suggested by the human-scale replica of the Promethean figure pictured in the cab of the engine it dwarfs, Kent’s giant is a glorified embodiment of workers like those in the coal mines and steel mills of “Industrial Art.”

The image would have caught the eye of readers browsing magazines like The Saturday Evening Post, where it appeared as part of an ad campaign celebrating the coal industry. A post-war convergence of art and politics is implicit in Kent, an avowed Communist who said that “to be a true American a man must have the will to right our social wrongs” while calling for the unionization of artists on the model of the United Mine Workers: “Coal is to be sure a first necessity. Yet it is hardly realized what a necessity art is.”

Blasting from Heaven

Like the industrial glow I saw in the Pittsburgh sky, the works in an exhibit that covers both the active and passive meanings of “work” intrigued and intimidated me. As happened on that trip in my late teens, what I saw defied imagination. What could be said? I found a guide in the poetry of U.S. Poet Laureate Philip Levine (1933-2015), who lived and worked in industry, manning a punch press at Chevrolet Gear and Axle and a jackhammer at Detroit Transmission. In “Coming Close,” after describing “shift after shift/hauling off the metal trays of stock,/bowing first, knees bent for a purchase,/then lifting with a gasp, the first word/of tenderness between the two of you,” he concludes, “You must feed her,/as they say in the language of the place./Make no mistake, the place has a language.”

Word-pictures are certain to fall short of the originals in “Industrial Art,” so, in line with the idea that the place has a language, it may be wiser to stand back and let the title say it. My reaction to George Pearse Ennis’s Blowing Steel was typical. That crazed almost cartoonish emission of firey orange and pale blue spouting from the mouth of an oven as from the mouth of some fairytale ogre was steel? Gazing into Pierre Birckner’s Beehive Coke Ovens at Night, where the rich dark blue of the sky (picked up by the blue of the gallery walls) makes stunning contrast with the snowclad hills and the deep deep black of the sinister central structure, it’s possible to imagine an elaborate Blakean vision of the satanic mills over the simple fact of a real scene being painted by a long-lived artist (1878-1977) who chose to make that blue as blue can be, the black as black. For firey effects, you have Alfred H. Bennet’s Cinder Dump and Howard L. Warner’s Big Steel, among numerous others. There’s a German Expressionist quality to the faces in Henry Varnam Poor’s Miners on a Lift; the sheer storybook wonder of Molly Wheeler Wood Pitz’s magnificent Lime Kiln at Night; and the spirit of Monet haunting George Sotter’s Untitled (Steel Mills in Blast). But, in the end, I come back to Philip Levine, who experienced such sites and scenes first-hand and can give us lines like “the 8 o’clock whistles blasting from heaven,” or “the lights of Bessemer” that “glowed/as though a new sun rose there,/but it was midnight and another shift/tooled the rolling mills.”

Smoke as Poetry

Of all the components that hold you as you go from work to work, smoke is the most suggestive. It’s a bit strange to be admiring all this hazy visual poetry that is in reality  polluting and quite possibly destroying the planet. Levine writes, “Why is the air filled with smoke? Simple. We had work./Work was something that thrived on fire, that without/fire couldn’t catch its breath or hang on for life.”

Only a poet who’s been there could come up with the notion of work hanging on “for life.” Levine’s smoke is a world unto itself, where “the city was vanishing before noon” and “the light came from nowhere and went nowhere,” where the stories children tell of their parents are like “objects turned one way and then another/to catch the light, the light overflowing with smoke.”

Smoke and Jazz

It seems Philip Levine is stealing the show. What can you do when a poet who lived the subject turns up in the middle of an art exhibit about steel and coal?—not to mention one about jazz. Although he was remembered in the New York Times after his death on Valentine’s Day 2015 as “A Poet of Grit, Sweat and Labor,” a “Whitman of the industrial heartland,” Levine also loved, lived, and wrote about jazz, recording poetry with a Fresno combo the year before he died. Anyone with knowledge of the night club life has to be aware that smoke is as essential to jazz as it is to “Industrial Art.” You can almost see the haze drifting from the smokestacks, trains, and blast furnaces of the big gallery into the nearby, smaller, more night-club-intimate one featuring the jazz photography of Herman Leonard (1923-2010), who has a weakness for the imagery of “light overflowing with smoke.” In what may be his most famous work, he pictures 25-year-old Dexter Gordon, his tenor sax in his lap and a cigarette in his hand that has just produced a prodigious quantity of smoke (think Moby Dick at full spout, or a factory going full blast). Though the iconic shot of Gordon is not among those on view at the Michener, saxophonist James Moody and trumpeter Fats Navarro come bearing their own stylish smoke signals, the Moody Mood man smiling through the delicate haze while Navarro, eyes squeezed shut, is playing so hard, blowing steel, as it were, that the smoke seems to be rising from the valves of  his instrument.

There are two contrasting shots of Charlie Parker, one pensive and Buddha-like with the Metronome All-Stars, one beaming delightedly with “the other half of his heartbeat,” Dizzy Gillespie. “Call It Music,” Levine’s poem about Parker “going out forever on the breath of genius” shows the poet in both environments, industry and jazz, working at 19 “on the loading docks at Railway Express/coming day by day into the damaged body/of a man” while “Some days I catch a rhythm, almost a song/in my own breath,” the radio playing ‘Bird Flight,’ Parker in his California tragic voice fifty years ago, his faltering ‘Lover Man’ just before he crashed into chaos.”

Billie Holiday appears with a backdrop of vinous shapes that suggest smoke while Bud Powell is shown smiling, not playing just sitting, with a sheaf of music on the piano. He’s also just sitting in Levine’s “On 52nd Street”: “Down sat Bud, raised his hands,/the Deuces silenced, the lights/ lowered, and breath gathered/for the coming storm. Then nothing,/not a single note….The night’s/still there, just where it was, just/where it’ll always be without/its music. You’re still there too/holding your breath. Bud walked out.”

To the City of Night

So you go from that Pittsburgh moment, across Pennsylvania and through New Jersey to the Big Apple, where the music is waiting back in the day, at Birdland and Basin Street East, at the Royal Roost and the Open Door, The Five Spot and the Village Vanguard, and the Jazz Gallery. The Michener itself becomes a jazz venue of sorts at 3 p.m. on Sunday, September 20, when singer Beverly Owens and pianist Diane Goldsmith present “The Art  of Sarah Vaughan.” “Herman Leonard: Jazz Portraits” will run through October 11.

An event related to “Iron and Coal, Petroleum and Steel: Industrial Art from the Steidle Collection,” which ends October 25, is a guest lecture by Julianne Snider, the assistant director of the Earth and Mineral Sciences Museum & Art Gallery at Penn State, permanent home of the Collection, at 1 p.m. September 29.

A newly opened show is “Veils of Color: Juxtaposityions and Recent Work by Elizabeth Osborne,” which runs through November 15.