ROMANCE



grand illusion (Things to Come: OUTLINES, 1941–1947, part iii)

co-curated by Brittany Reilly

Jasmine Gregory, Sophie Kovel, Fernand Léger, Brianna Perry, Louise Pershing, Paul Pfeiffer, Teak Ramos, Hélène Yamba-Guimbi
with archival material from Rockwell Manufacturing


Make it go
Brittany Reilly

On March 2, 1942 from her unpretentious first Outlines gallery location along Pittsburgh’s Boulevard of the Allies, Elizabeth Rockwell screened Grand Illusion (La Grande Illusion), Jean Renoir’s 1937 tour de force that dared to convey the human spirit above systemic and propagandized national and class divides - an epic, grieving the futility of war.  Borrowing Renoir’s title, the third and final part of this exhibition sequence brings us to a place beyond. 

After seven years of programming things to come - the avant-garde and quotidian in art, architecture and design across three spaces in Pittsburgh, Rockwell’s Outlines project reached its sunset in 1947, leaving her runway to continue divergent, vanguard models of multidisciplinary making and presentation decades later.  While not faithfully documented in a paper scrapbook as were her public facing endeavors, Rockwell’s life happened in the interim.  Attributed to financial breakdown by Rockwell’s own account (though she never aimed to operate a commercial gallery model, this remained the expectation of her supporters, shorter-sighted than the dissident Ms. Rockwell) the closure of Outlines likely reflected the young curator’s evolving and shifting awareness in a postwar nation.

In 1944, Rockwell had screened Ballet Mécanique (1924), artist and war veteran Fernand Léger’s only full film work. Its unsettling choreography of standalone workaday objects designed to assist humankind only with one’s intelligent participation, produce a formidable dance for the ages.  Mockeries of iconic popular figures and amusing kaleidoscopic sequences converge human features with hardware assemblies, on par with the rapture Léger extracts from machine aesthetics, a celebration as much as caution laying way to the high-low haze in the crispness of pop art.

Meanwhile, and toward a different clarity, from the campus of Carnegie Institute of Technology in Pittsburgh, artist Louise Pershing (1904-1986) portrayed in her paintings observed industrial scenes in context of the modern city (a gasoline station in the valley in the shadow of a coal mine), first in a loosely realistic manner and palette and later in color-block quasi-abstractions presenting as hard edged, but revealing a relaxed, unrefined surface on closer inspection. Student of Hans Hoffman and of Alexander Kostellow, pioneer of Industrial Design pedagogy, Pershing’s manner and technique ran such a gamut. Pershing was exhibited at Outlines in 1942 as part of Pittsburgh Moderns. The artist’s late 1950s Inner Bound, the nucleus of grand illusion, presumably borrows its title from the engineering-mathematical concept defining a proven geometric limit or theoretical ‘floor’ on performance, namely when considered with ‘outer bound’ - a strict upper limit on what is achievable. Pershing’s period of 1950s oil on masonite works include depictions of radar towers, transmitters, transformers, reactor components, flagpoles and flattened aerial perspectives of a football field or military airbase.  Beloved friend, pioneering urban designer David Lewis felt Pershing “did not belong to her generation…remaining on the exploratory edge of hard-edge sculpture.” Completed primarily during the 1960s,  her later dimensional works in brass, stainless steel, aluminum and marble combined machined shaped plates and segments into tidy forms that teased at having a practical purpose or function, but often remained static, at times with adjustable elements. Typically branded with her signature “Pershing” in capitalized sans serif, they feel as certain and as ready as a manufactured product.

A selection of 1960s product photography for Rockwell Manufacturing - the company embedded in Willard Rockwell Sr.’s Rockwell International conglomerate across the space, aircraft, defense, electronic and automotive industries - includes the work of two Pittsburgh-based commercial photographers.  Out of a loft on Third Avenue downtown, studio photographer Royal Kane, often with a fantastical eye, captured the products of companies including Kaufmann’s Department Store, Alcoa, Westinghouse and U.S. Steel, crafting their image across print ads and product packaging.  In his lens, Rockwell Manufacturing power tools, arranged in repetition, become their own freeze-frame corps de ballet.  Artist, documentarian and advertisement photographer Harold Corsini chronicled the pulse of industry including interior settings, workers and technicians.  His portrait of a Rockwell valve cutaway treats the object with virtually the same dignity as a mortal subject.

As Rockwell International and Manufacturing became a major force in the space race of the 1960s, Elizabeth Rockwell began supporting the development of a project that brings the focus to the slow-made and the hand-made, in a context making consumerism personal again.