Pittsburgh’s Carnegie Art Museum Offers Showstoppers and Discreet Gems Alike

Andrew Carnegie’s vision of a great, idiosyncratic museum lives and thrives.

L ast week I had a strikingly, surprisingly good visit at the Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh. I’ll write a profile of the museum, a distinguished yet unorthodox place, and review its great Joan Brown retrospective next week but, first, God bless Andrew Carnegie. Carnegie (1835–1919) started life as a poor weaver’s son in Scotland, immigrated to Pittsburgh as a teen and rose from bobbin boy making $2 a week to America’s richest man and the world’s most prolific philanthropist. As an industrialist, he’s best known as a steel magnate, but he also made a fortune in railroads and oil.

I’m writing from Pittsburgh at the tail end of my swing from Lancaster in Pennsylvania to Toledo, Ohio, and points in between. Here, Carnegie’s supersize philanthropy is everywhere, though I’ll focus on his and Pittsburgh’s dynamic art museum.

Carnegie made what today would be billions, and he gave billions, especially in Pittsburgh but nationally and in the U.K. His 1889 essay “The Gospel of Wealth” argued that the rich have a moral, even ethical duty not to bequeath what they’ve earned to heirs but to give for the benefit of the public, while they live. In the United States, Carnegie’s most visible cause was the construction of 3,000 public libraries. In Pittsburgh, at least as far as I’m concerned, it’s the city’s first-class museum system.

The Carnegie museums have evolved since 1895, when Carnegie established what he called a palace of culture. Still run by a single board of trustees, the old, broad museum is now an art museum, science center, natural-history museum, and the new Andy Warhol Museum. Each has its own identity, programming, director, staff, and volunteer support group. I visited all four this week.

Later in life, secure in his colossal wealth, Carnegie was a full-time philanthropist with a scholarly bent. He was deeply involved in the philosophical development of his museums, the university named for him, and his various peace initiatives. He had definite, well-considered views on American imperialism, which he deplored, the primacy of self-improvement, and the continuum of earthly life with room for both dinosaurs and artists.

I hate the term “art-washing,” said to be practiced by the rich to atone for their wealth, always presumed to be sordidly acquired. The slur is in vogue today, as it once was in the days of the Gilded Age robber barons and, later, fat cats during the Depression. It’s tossed by little, envy-addled minds. They resent wealth they don’t have and, as far as I can tell, they’re the least generous people anywhere.

Good for Carnegie, I say, and we need more like him. He revolutionized chunks of the economy, made a bundle, and gave it to good causes that endure today. Milton Hershey, whose chocolate museum I profiled last week, did the same. Was Carnegie ruthless? By Gilded Age standards, he wasn’t. Was he a compelling, wise altruist? Of course he was, and in truly human concerns including culture, education, and medicine. Unlike today’s gazillionaires, he didn’t fund either nonprofits that are really political fronts or dumb, fad causes like changing the weather, of all fool’s errands.

That’s my opening rant for this trip, with one or two more to come, but now the art museum. Carnegie established the museum in 1895 from scratch. He didn’t collect art as did his friends and museum founders Henry Clay Frick and Andrew Mellon. Carnegie wanted to make Pittsburgh “as famous for art as it is now for steel,” which is commendable enough, but he was also focused on living artists. He hoped the museum would collect “the Old Masters of tomorrow,” a tall order for directors and curators.

Carnegie’s wish fixes the museum in the world of living artists. The pre-1900 collection isn’t big. The place has a modern vibe. Carnegie made a ton as an industrialist but also as an investor in companies run by others. He wanted the museum, in effect, to invest in living artists who, one day, would be as revered and seem as relevant as Rembrandt, Giotto, and Poussin.

Architecturally, the museum system, the Carnegie Library, and Carnegie’s music hall — Carnegie’s palace of culture — occupied the original 1895 Beaux Arts pile designed by Longfellow, Alden & Harlow, a firm with roots in Boston but mostly working in Pittsburgh. A giant expansion, opening in 1907, added a three-story grand staircase with a 4,000-square-foot mural, The Crowning of Labor, painted by John White. It’s a vague history of Pittsburgh centered on the steel industry and the value of hard work, merit, and self-improvement in cultivating opportunity and accumulating wealth. The 1907 expansion also added a Classical Revival sculpture hall and the Hall of Architecture, which still displays an impressive collection of plaster casts and bronze copies of works such as the Venus de Milo.

A 1974 addition designed by Edward Larrabee Barnes is a granite-and-glass block behind the old building. As deferential as it purported to be, placed as it is behind the original Beaux Arts palace, it’s where the action is. Visitors enter there, and the permanent collection and special exhibitions are there. The grand staircase and the sculpture hall are marginalized.

I hate the humongous Christopher Wool word painting at the entrance to the Barnes wing. By humongous I mean 277 by 180 inches. He’s a bloodless, boring artist, and the thing, painted in 1991, is ugly. There’s a nice wall tapestry by El Anatsui that the museum just acquired. It’s fine, made from colored aluminum bottle caps, so it’s a tip of the hat to Pittsburgh’s history, but every big museum seems to have one. Running along the staircase of the Barnes wing is a buoyant Sol LeWitt wall mural. Another cryptic, boring word thing, this one by Lawrence Weiner from 1986, runs along the walls of a long corridor.

I explored them all, mostly while searching for an elevator. “It’s a Long Way to Tipperary,” I hummed. I found defibrillators, fire extinguishers, and empty hand sanitizers aplenty before, finally, an elevator. That’s not the museum’s fault. It’s modern museum design. Architects make visitors walk — not quite to Tipperary but far — before we get meat and potatoes rather than appetizers.

Two out of four ain’t bad. Anatsui’s and LeWitt’s work is always a pleasure. I’d ditch the other two. They’re ponderous, even foreboding, and arouse in the visitor a sense that the art in the main galleries will be over his head or, worse, that he’ll get a sermon. At the Carnegie, the permanent collection delivers nothing of the kind. It’s extraordinary and beautifully presented.

I loved seeing the art but also divining the strategy behind the museum’s acquisitions. Many big civic museums such as the Met and the MFA in Boston have avoided contemporary art. But not the Carnegie. Yes, it’s a big — and consequential — civic museum but in its DNA is contemporary art because of the Carnegie International. First a yearly event starting in 1896 at the art museum, the art fair exhibited what the museum — mostly its director — considered the best paintings by living artists, almost all American and European. It was Carnegie’s idea.

The fair was America’s answer to the Biennale in Venice, but it did two other, specific things. First, it delivered to Pittsburgh a ready-made supply of acquisitions. Though the Carnegie International has evolved, eventually broadening to include sculpture, and some years it doesn’t happen at all, it’s now held more or less every three years. Many of the best things in the art museum first arrived in Pittsburgh for the show.

Second, the earliest purchases from the Carnegie International set an approach to acquisitions that, as I visited the galleries, I saw unfold and deepen. Three early purchases set the tone. Winslow Homer’s The Wreck, from 1896, is the art museum’s first acquisition, and it came from the first International. It’s a big, major Homer but idiosyncratic. By the mid 1890s, Homer wasn’t doing much with the human figure. He was painting seascapes, mostly views of riled ocean waves along Maine’s coast crashing against implacable rocks. It’s an eternal battle.

The Wreck, though, is more like Homer’s fisher-family scenes set in Cullercoats, England, from the early 1880s, or his high-drama rescue scenes from the mid ’80s. It’s more of a human-interest story, with the sea only a tiny sliver at the picture’s far right margin. Does this make The Wreck a conservative Homer, one that looks back and not forward, to a modern, essentialist Homer? Yes and no. The Wreck’s figures are crisp and literal, as if they’re done in Homer’s illustration style. The scene, though, looks like World War I trenches. His diagonals are bold and gutsy. It’s a very good picture but, for Homer, an anomaly.

The museum bought Whistler’s Arrangement in Black: Portrait of Señor Pablo de Sarasate from the first International, and it’s also by a marquee artist and also idiosyncratic. First of all, it’s a very black painting, with the full-length figure of the violinist subject emerging as if by stealth from the background. Second, Sarasate (1844–1908) was famous as a composer and musician, and let’s not forget Carnegie’s love for music and support for concert halls. Whistler painted the portrait in 1884 but never sold it. Was it too dark, too moody, as ethereal as any Whistler portrait but too dramatic? Again, it’s particular — not peculiar — and stands apart from Whistler’s signature portraits while still, itself, a great thing.

By the way, the Whistler looks sublime in an electric-teal-painted Art for Art’s Sake gallery that’s filled with American Art Nouveau painting and decorative arts. In gallery after gallery, I saw one pitch-perfect arrangement after another.

A third defining purchase was both inspired and parochial. Camille Pissarro (1830–1903) was the oldest Impressionist but still an experimenter. The Great Bridge, Rouen, from 1896. was displayed in the 1898 International and purchased in 1900. Pissarro’s late, big paintings of bridges, factories, trains, and cargo ships in Rouen aren’t pretty landscapes or scenes of leisure life in Paris, but they’re real, if gritty. I’d been to Pittsburgh only once before, shame on me, and I’ve never been to a city so compact and with so many bridges. Pissarro’s Rouen picture is a case of art at the Carnegie that speaks to Pittsburgh.

One masterpiece I think I’d love wasn’t on view. It’s a Neapolitan presepio, or manger scene, from between 1770 and 1830 and up only during the Christmas season. It’s 123 figures and accessories covering 250 square feet and painstakingly crafted. Yes, the thing’s religious, but the figures are dressed as everyday Neapolitans would. It’s a luxury work of art and a showstopper. The museum bought it in 1956. How inspired! How surprising!

Over and over, I saw art by establishment artists such as Bonnard, Frederic Church, Mondrian, Gérôme, Klimt, and Monet done at the end of their careers when they felt freest or at the beginning when the seeds of genius were just sprouting. The art’s sometimes out there, but there’s no doubt the curators and directors making choices had a good — and adventurous — eye. The industries that made Carnegie so rich — steel, oil, bridges, and railroads — are the stuff of buccaneers.

I saw a lot of visceral, even operatic work. Joan Mitchell’s Sans neige, from 1969, and great things by Sigmar Polke, Anselm Kiefer, and Gerhard Richter look as if they spent time in a steel furnace, in a good way. They looked forged, as though they were once molten. Marc Newson’s Lockheed Lounge is another reference to Pittsburgh’s industrial heritage, this time aluminum. It’s a chaise longue, the kind of seating in which Jacques-Louis David placed Madame Recamier in his portrait from 1800. Aluminum’s a staple in construction, power lines, planes, and trains for its strength, resistance to corrosion, and light weight. Newson uses it to create a sexy, curvy, fluid form. It’s displayed in a brilliant decorative-arts gallery focusing on chairs.

The Carnegie isn’t all quirks. It’s got a Rothko painting, Yellow, Blue, and Orange, from 1955, that many museum directors would sell their mothers to get, a signature Giacometti Walking Man, and a cinematic Monet water-lilies painting. These are icons and star attractions. That said, there’s a handful of jaw-dropping, out-of-the-box galleries. One features the Chariot of Aurora, the stunning, 18-by-25-foot gilded-lacquer relief that decorated the grand salon of the SS Normandie, the most deluxe of French ocean liners. It’s the zenith of French Art Deco style. It came to the Carnegie as a gift in the mid ’90s, generated more pieces from the Normandie, and, grouped together, created the finest Art Deco gallery in America. It’s fabulous elegance.

Nearby is another unexpected feast. It’s a large gallery filled with substantial Pre-Raphaelite paintings by Edward Burne-Jones —The Nativity and The King and the Shepherd, both 81 by 124 inches, both from a church in Torquay in Cornwall, England, and both bought by Andrew Lloyd Weber when the church needed money for a new roof. Weber owned them for a while but found that, as his collection of Victorian drawings grew, he needed more space for display. The two Burne-Jones pictures, huge as they are, were candidates for deaccession around the time that Lloyd Weber visited Pittsburgh to receive an award. He’d been there before for the world premiere of Jesus Christ Superstar and liked the city for its spirit and its resemblance to big British industrial cities like Liverpool. He loved the museum, and before long a sale was made.

They’re in a large gallery along with a Sargent portrait, Henry Ossawa Tanner’s Christ at the Home of Mary and Martha, from 1905, sculptures by St. Gaudens, Dagnan-Bouveret’s big, Symbolist Christ and the Disciples at Emmaus, from 1896, and Edwin Austin Abbey’s Penance of Eleanor, Duchess of Gloucester, from 1900. None of these have anything to do with Pittsburgh as a steel capital or city of bridges, and for each artist they’re high-end but representative. Taken together, and displayed against buff rust walls, they deliver us to another dimension. It’s a shock to see so much religious, patriotic, and history art in one place and treated with such reverence.

I didn’t expect to see “rarely seen work from the darker recesses of the collection,” as the wall panel calls the art in the Night Poetry gallery. Some of the works there are nocturnes, and I love nocturnes, but most are simply dark paintings, dark in palette, subject, and mood. A Francis Bacon painting from 1952 is about hallucinations and one of the few works by Bacon that I find truly moving and mysterious. The title of the gallery comes from a cryptic, dark painting by Raymond Jennings Saunders from 1962. He’s from Pittsburgh.

Shock? Surprise? New Dimensions? Poetry? Isn’t that what we want in art? The Carnegie certainly delivers. Big-city museums can be staid, something this art museum definitely isn’t.

The museum’s budget is about $20 million. The four museums share the income from the system’s $700 million, which means that plenty of annual giving fundraising needs to happen. Allegheny County, in which Pittsburgh is the big city, levies a 1 percent sales tax to support key cultural institutions and property-tax relief. This gives the museums some extra income. The trustees control all four museums, which isn’t a bad thing. Since their jurisdiction is diffuse, individual trustees tend not to meddle in minutiae. They focus on big issues. That empowers the directors and curators to use their best judgment.

Eric Crosby has been the director of the art museum for the past five years. He was the curator of contemporary art at the Carnegie Museum before his appointment. My spies tell me his director search was competitive, with Crosby, though an insider, the best-liked choice. He seems to be a big success. He organized the Carnegie International a few years ago. Since it’s an epic exhibition that’s all-consuming, involving hundreds of artists and objects, it keeps the entire institution fresh and sharp.

Next week I’ll write about the museum’s very good retrospective of the work of Joan Brown (1938–1990), the grande dame of San Francisco Funk Art. Brown was a magical artist who needs a new look. Her show’s another surprise. One of her paintings is in the collection, but she’s not well known at all outside San Francisco. The Carnegie’s show, done with San Francisco MoMA, will change this.