By the time Alexander won this assignment he was an accomplished and internationally admired artist, sought after as a portraitist. An orphan, his artistic life had begun in the Illustrations Department of Harper’s Brothers, publishers of Harper’s, and turned into an American dream. With only this brief experience, and a bit of saved money, he set out for artistic training on a European tour, joined up with continental artists, and remained throughout his life intensely active and successful in painting’s institutional world, becoming an ardent missionary for and defender of American painting. Friend of modernists as varied as Auguste Rodin, Stéphane Mallarmé, Oscar Wilde, and Henry James, considered a great American painter like Edwin Abbey, John Singer Sargent, and James Whistler, from 1909 until his death in 1915 he presided over the U.S. National Academy of Design. As an artist, Alexander came to favor Beaux-Arts, art for art’s sake and the ornamental; fluid lines and soft colors, yet sober; naturalism, but idealized. Rarely did he abandon realism in his depictions.
Born in Allegheny City in 1856, later absorbed into Pittsburgh, a sense of local patriotism likely moved Alexander when engaged in the Apotheosis murals. His own American rags-to-respectability and financial security paralleled that of steel-built Pittsburgh and the nation as a whole, each a fulfillment of the promise of America, it’s manifest destiny, built on grit and faith, at least in the telling of works of art like this. Industrial progress and economic growth is the civil religion Alexander lauds in his imperial-sized painting cycle. By the time he received the Carnegie commission he had painted some official monumental art, such as panels for the Congressional Library in Washington, DC, and had been invited to paint a series celebrating Pennsylvania history for the State Capitol in Harrisburg.
Some monomaniacal drive leads an artist to attempt, much less execute, a work consisting of tens of gigantic paintings. (The original commission conceived of 69 individual works.) The grandiose scale of the physical effort, not to mention the work itself, mirrors the life of the sponsoring institution’s founder and funder, Andrew Carnegie, who made his vast wealth as a canny and ruthless industrialist. Carnegie first laid out his doctrine of social Darwinism and redemptive philanthropy in an 1889 article entitled simply and aptly, “Wealth,” later published in 1900 as part of his book The Gospel of Wealth. Cultural centers such as the Carnegie Institute were to serve as the temples of the new social gospel that sought to improve the lives and souls of the laboring masses. Behind Carnegie and Alexander stands the all-consuming drive toward power, control, reputation and empire critiqued in Melville’s contemporary tragic anti-hero Ahab.
In an update on an age-old motíf, Alexander’s self-exposing and gift-bearing angels comprise the (male) hero’s true gift, his reward for performing well, like a man, for leading heroically. Labor entails one of the main themes of Alexander’s Apotheosis murals—he called the whole cycle “The Crowning of Labor”—and a noticeable gender division distinguishes the masculine exertions that built the city from the heavenly compensation of feminine charms bestowed on the male hero(s). The lower level of murals portray the city’s working classes, a theme that was rare at the time, their lives and labor romanticized for art patrons’ consumption, though Alexander’s depiction of “the laboring male body as physically vigorous and autonomous” obscured “the extent to which mechanization had degraded the role of the skilled worker to that of machine operator.” Here panels named “Fire” and “Toil,” the foundation of Pittsburgh and of Alexander’s paintings, evoke materialism as emerging from hellish conditions. The top level, unfinished when Alexander died, was to show the masses closing in on their goal: culture and the arts, achieved by means of the wealth produced by industry. In between, smoke rises from all the industry, forming into clouds on which flit the jarringly erotic angels as well as the knight in black armor floating heavenward. The knight, personification of Pittsburgh, makes Andrew Carnegie, a robber-baron of the utmost wealth, a self-made public intellectual and quasi-celebrity, into the protector and patron of the people he believed himself to be. Sarah Moore reads the depiction of Carnegie—“aloof and sanguine”—as a reflection of his “practice of absentee corporate capitalism” that featured “[i]ncreased mechanization, a transfer of workplace control from skilled workers to management, and a hiring boom for unskilled and semi-skilled labor” and “a rigid hierarchical line of control.”
Page 2 of 3 | Previous page | Next page