Shadyside gallery owner Mendelson celebrates 40-year love affair with art

Having recently turned 63, art dealer Steve Mendelson has been reflecting a lot over the past 40 years he has spent working in the field of visual art.

Having maintained an art gallery in Pittsburgh for nearly as long, as well as another in Paris for three years between 2000 and 2003, the artist-turned-dealer has hosted countless exhibits, book signings, benefits, political fundraisers and other events; in addition, artists and friends from all over the globe have either stayed the night, shared a meal or both.

That's why, come May 2, many of those friends will converge at his Shadyside home and gallery for the exhibit “Mendelson Gallery Celebrates a 40-Year Love Affair With the Arts.”

“He's a phenomenon in Pittsburgh,” says Pittsburgh Magazine art critic Harry Schwalb. “I can compare him to Ivan Karp (New York City pop-art dealer, 1926-2012), or any of the good gallery owners in Manhattan. He has an exuberant creativity. He can walk into a room and spot good works. He can go to a garage sale, and in the midst of all the crap, he will find an authentic African piece, or a very interesting American piece. He has an eye, and he's creative, and he has this exuberance — and that combination is rare. And that's the only way I can account for his success as a gallery owner for 40 years, four decades, in Pittsburgh.”

The May 2 event will be as grand a party and opening reception as any Mendelson has held over the past 40 years. And oh, what parties he has had, from the clothing-optional opening of an art exhibit that featured a “Nude Descending a Staircase” in homage to Marcel Duchamp (1887-1968) to an “Edible Arts” exhibit, which featured more than 70 participants. Everyone from circus performers to jazz singers have graced the place Mendelson and his gallery have called home since September 1988.

The exhibit will include the work of more than two dozen artists Mendelson has shown over the years, including Swiss artist Not Vital (pronounced note vit-AL). Mendelson has known Vital since working as a mime on the streets of Rome in the mid-1970s, when he locked Vital, a mere onlooker watching the young busker, in an imaginary box.

He recently visited Vital in South America, where the artist has built a home of sorts on his own island, called NotOna, in Patagonia's breathtaking Lago General Carrera.

Mendelson Gallery was the first to exhibit Vital's work in the United States. The artist has since gone on to achieve international fame.

“In the lean first years, I certainly helped him survive and spread his message. In the bulk of the later years, he has enriched my life through visits to art projects in the Sahara Desert, Patagonian islands, Swiss mountaintops, Beijing and the canals of Venice,” Mendelson says. “We could fill volumes with the experiences and friends that we've shared, but like me, Not looks always to the next, not to the last.”

Another artist whose work will be featured is Jane Katselas, wife of architect Tasso Katselas, who Mendelson met when she bought one of his actinographs (large shadow paintings on blueprint paper) from his first exhibit in Pittsburgh at Pittsburgh Filmmakers in 1978.

“When I delivered it to her studio, in the building of her husband, Tasso, the architect, I walked through an empty space,” Mendelson recalls. “Soon, with the gentle good graces of the Katselases, I had my first gallery.”

That first gallery was called Gallery 286, because it was located at 286 Morewood Ave. in Shadyside. “Starting with only my own work to show, I soon attracted many others in my same position — something to say and nowhere to say it,” Mendelson says, “and Mendelson Gallery was born.”

Another architect, David Lewis, played an instrumental role in the opening of the second and current location.

“I felt a kinship with David from the first moment I met him,” Mendelson says of Lewis, who also is represented in the current show with a small painting and steel sculpture. “A generation removed, he has always pointed his finger at me and scolded me to ‘Buck up!' ” Mendelson says.

“He knew very hard times, exiled from South Africa and starving in Cornwall; he befriended the likes of Ben Nicholson, Barbara Hepworth, Henry Moore and Constantin Brancusi. A man of principle with an overview I had yet to earn, he held my hand under the table when I bought the current home of Mendelson Gallery at an IRS auction in 1985.”

Purchased for $32,000, the former brothel “was rat infested. It had to be gutted, needed electricity, new plumbing, floors, everything,” Mendelson says.

Lewis not only encouraged Mendelson to buy the brothel, which was once owned by one of the most notorious of the city's massage parlor operators, Dante “Tex” Gill, he also redesigned it into its contemporary configuration, as a first floor art gallery with living quarters on the second floor.

“I am proud to have been there to encourage him to buy it at auction, and to transform it, with great courage, into a splendid art gallery,” Lewis says.

Back then, Ellsworth Avenue sported only a few restaurants, such as Born Free, the Elbow Room and College Inn Pizza. Aside from Photo Forum, which is owned by his cousin, Eric Mendelson, the street had no art galleries.

“There really wasn't too much down here, but it seemed like the perfect place,” says Mendelson, adding that it took another $40,000 to renovate the place.

“People were interested in the building for speculation,” he says of the auction. “Maybe they wanted to tear it down, maybe they wanted to make it into apartments. But I knew I wanted to make it my business, make it into my home, and it meant everything.”

As for his own art, Mendelson will show several of his latest works, which are multimedia light boxes filled with images and objects gathered during his extensive travels around the world at flea markets, bazaars, holy places and antique shops.

Schwalb was the first to write about Mendelson's art back in the 1970s. “He said I had a ‘bookjacket' life and compared my huge paper works to sculptures made from butter and portraits painted on grains of rice for their practicality,” Mendelson says. “We have been friends ever since, and it continues to be an honor to show his delicate, precise and intimate pencil drawings.”

Three of Schwalb's drawings will be on display in the current exhibit.

“He and Jay Dantry are gentleman from a bygone era that light up the gallery every time they visit,” Mendelson says.

“He loves artists,” Schwalb says. “He is unique in that way. He loves his artists, and I think it shows in what he does.”

Another artist whose work will be on display is Emil Lukas.

“I met Emil in 1985 through John Caldwell, curator at the Carnegie Museum,” Mendelson says. “Emil was imposing, taller than me, with an honest, in-your-face attitude about his art. Having grown up in Braddock, where his father owned a bar and served steelworkers boilermakers for three shifts a day, he had little of the effete nature of a delicate artiste. Emil had raw talent, used strong materials and was dedicated to his work. With dirty hands, in cold open studio space down by the railroad tracks, he created imposing, oversized sculptures.”

“I'd like to believe that I aided in his transformation into the successful international artist he is today, showing most recently at Sperone Westwater in New York and in many other galleries around the world.”

Pointing to Lukas as an example, Mendelson says, “It's kind of my job to be the go-between, to help people progress. But people have helped me, as well. People like David nurtured me. Not Vital has nurtured me at the same time I've nurtured him.”

Mendelson says these kind of symbiotic relationships have been at the core of his career throughout.

“It's almost like a religion where you believe in the arts,” he says, “that people are like-minded brothers and sisters …Obviously it's beyond race, it's beyond religion, it's beyond anything else.”

“Artists are prophets who are preaching to the wind. Nobody's paying them. They are saying what they have to say because they have to say it, and there's not dollars and cents involved in most cases. In most cases, it's just true inspiration, and they deserve to be heard.”

Kurt Shaw is the art critic for Trib Total Media. He can be reached at kshaw@tribweb.com.