The biggest news of the fall arts season is the opening of the renovated Ailsa Mellon Bruce Galleries of decorative arts and design at Carnegie Museum of Art.
But rather than riding the elevator up to the second-floor galleries, begin your experience by ascending the museum's central Grand Staircase to reach them, taking in the 48 murals painted by John White Alexander between 1906 and 1908.
On the first floor, workers toil, steel mills belch out smoke, trains eject steam. Rising to the second floor, the smoke and steam become celestial clouds surrounding winged images. Go on up to the third floor, which shows images of men, women and children in a ceaseless onward movement toward art, science and industry.
When commissioned by the Carnegie Museum for $175,000 in 1905, they were the largest mural project ever given to an individual. The commission to Alexander manifested the prestige of a man who had risen from being a Pittsburgh-born orphan to an internationally known artist.
The paintings suggest music in "the cadence of beating muscles, the marching feet; the melody of repeated curve in spiraling smoke, in floating wing," wrote Mary Anne Goley, an authority on American artists and founding director of the Fine Arts Program of the Federal Reserve Board, for which she served until 2006.
Alexander was born on Oct. 7, 1856, in the former Allegheny City, a place William Laurel Harris, in a 1915 story about the artist, called "the most inartistic surroundings, destitute of aesthetic refinements."
His father died when he was an infant; his mother brought little John back to her father's house. Tuberculosis claimed her life when the boy was just 5.
At age 12, he left school to work for the Pittsburgh Atlantic and Pacific Telegraph. In "John White Alexander Memorial Exhibition," 1916, at Carnegie Institute, young John was described as "the very little lad who ran hither and thither on the streets of Pittsburgh with a telegraph messenger's bag slung upon his shoulder."
After Alexander's grandfather died, Colonel Allen, the president of the telegraph company, adopted the boy and took him into his home.
Alexander learned drawing by copying illustrations from Harper's Weekly magazine. He spent his boyhood in a small studio overlooking a narrow street in Pittsburgh, rowing a skiff down the Ohio River and trekking along the foothills toward Ligonier.
In 1875, Alexander went to New York, eventually getting a job in the art department at Harper's Weekly.
Interest in European art was growing and after he had saved $300, Alexander in late 1877 sailed with a friend, Albert G. Reinhart, to Liverpool, England, and then on to Paris. They sought out The School of Fine Arts only to find it closed for repairs.
He eventually arrived in Germany and studied for three months at the Academy of Fine Arts in Munich. But the high living costs soon drove him to Bavaria, where he heard a student could live on $12 a month.
It was there he started to paint and won a bronze medal from the Students' Exhibition at the Munich academy.
In his European travels he befriended renowned painters Frank Duveneck, whose free, spontaneous style largely influenced his art, as well as James McNeill Whistler, the leading proponent of the credo "art for art's sake." Whistler's method of indicating the figure only briefly while concentrating on the general composition and movement served Alexander well when he arranged his figure studies later.
In 1881, he returned to New York to work as an illustrator again for Harper's Weekly and began painting portraits. His first subject was the daughter of Henry Harper, his boss. His subjects quickly expanded to include actor Joseph Jefferson, politicians Elliot Cowdin and Thurlow Weed, authors Thomas Hardy and Austin Dobson, and historian George Bancroft.
In 1887 he married a woman who shared his last name, Elizabeth Alexander, daughter of James W. Alexander, the president of the Equitable Life Insurance Co.
A bout with influenza left him weak. The ill health was partly caused by anxiety and disappointment, according to an article at the time in Good Furniture magazine.
The couple had a son and in early 1890 they moved to Paris, where they befriended leading literary figures such as Octave Mirbeau and Oscar Wilde and artist Auguste Rodin.
Alexander returned to New York in 1901 to become a part of the American art scene. His emphatic line, visual poetry of color and form provided an aesthetic unity for architectural decoration, leading to his creation of "The Evolution of the Book" for the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C., which was to proclaim "American renaissance."
In 1905 he got the commission to paint the 5,000-square-foot murals at the Carnegie Museum of Art.
His work, "The Crowning of Labor," showed European stylistic influence, incorporating features of symbolism and art nouveau while localizing the subject matter to Pittsburgh's working life.
It has been "awe-inspiring" to visitors, said Ellen James, the museum's assistant director of marketing.
Today the murals remain just as strong and vibrant as when they were first presented to the public. In 1995, a $50,000 cleaning and restoration project removed an extraordinary amount of dirt with up to eight solvents, bringing back the mural's original colors.
With the Carnegie Museum commission came others, one for the Pennsylvania State Capitol in Harrisburg in 1906, another in the Federal District Court in Cleveland in 1909.
Alexander could never finish any of them; only 48 out of the 69 commissioned panels at the Carnegie Museum of Art were actually painted. The demands of painting oils continually from scaffold ladders taxed his frail physique, and the artist died June 2, 1915.
Preferring to work directly on the canvas he left barely any sketch books behind.
Reaching the height of popularity at his death, Alexander's fame diminished during the subsequent decades until he largely fell into oblivion.
Tastes in American art, according to author Sarah J. Moore in "John White Alexander and the Construction of National Identity: Cosmopolitan American Art" in 2003, was shifting away from cosmopolitan figure painting to native urban realism and modernism.
Still the murals reflect a vibrant history that shouldn't be missed as you head to other exhibits at the Carnegie museum.
