Pittsburgh portrayed

Lacking any sense of hubris, Dormont artist Robert Schmalzried looks back on a long, successful career as a painter with pride -- and it's not without good reason.

This tall, dapper man of 73 years has portrayed the city with equal pride for decades in the form of sweeping cityscapes that capture Pittsburgh's vibrancy and beauty like the prisms of a jewel capture light.

Many may recall Schmalzried's depictions of various facets of our fair city throughout the 1980s when his work was invariably linked to WQED television's annual fundraising campaigns. Each year, Schmalzried would re-create some specific view of the city in a kaleidoscope of colors that would be printed by Geyer Printing and offered as incentive to donate.

In his latest solo show at U.S. Steel Tower, Downtown, of 30 works that span more than three decades of the artist's career, visitors will find many of the original paintings from which those prints were made, such as "The Bridge," "Jones & Laughlin, Southside" and "PPG with Reflections of Market Square."

"They really are a record of Pittsburgh as it was when I painted them," Schmalzried says. He insists that, even though the works are in his signature style, which combines acrylics with collage, they are as accurate as any photograph. But unlike a photograph, which in most cases depicts the architecture of a city with austerity, Schmalzried's works project the architecture in jittery gestalts of color and line, ultimately portraying it as unfailingly gorgeous and august.

In these works, a fascination with sunlight and shadow is obvious. From a distance agitated color relationships give way to an overwhelming sense of calm, but up close any sense of atmospheric peacefulness is lost in slivers of contrasting colors. The effect is much like that of the morning sun streaming through a beveled glass window as it casts jewel tones across a pale wall.

This treatment recalls a certain pop artist's penchant for color exaggeration, namely Wayne Thiebaud. But look closely and the observant viewer will notice that Schmalzried's works are indebted to artistic movements even further back in art history -- partly to precisionism, but more specifically to cubism.

The latter is easily explained through an examination of this Pittsburgh painter's artistic pedigree. His service in the U.S. Army in the early 1950s landed Schmalzried on the outskirts of Kyoto, Japan -- to which one aptly titled painting, "Kyoto" can attest. Later, he received his master's degree at the Sorbonne in Paris, where he studied under famed cubist Andre Lhote (1885-1962).

In 1959, Schmalzried returned to Pittsburgh and his native Dormont where he has stayed ever since.-- except for twice-yearly stints on cruise ships, in which he has served as entertainment and art instructor since 1972.

That's one reason the earliest painting in the show, "Sled Riders" from 1970, is so important. A depiction of the hillside behind his ancestral home, it features the triangular rooftops of numerous Dormont four-squares below an afternoon sky of cobalt blue and yellow ochre. But another reason is its obvious connection to Lhote and cubism through the integration of fractured line and shape. With this work, the eye darts from line to line, bouncing off of each rooftop to the next, almost oblivious to the four sled riders in the foreground, which themselves are wonderfully rendered.

Seemingly simple in comparison to the more complex works in the show, this painting is nevertheless profoundly prescient. "It's obviously a forerunner of what I do," Schmalzried agrees.

For example, he has used blue in similar fashion in much of the latter works. "Picasso said it was the color of sophistication and distance, and I thought, if it's good enough for Picasso, it's good enough for me," Schmalzried says. But to his credit, he always contrasts a "cool" blue with a "hot" orange or yellow ochre.

This is most obvious in "South Side Triptych," in which a cerulean blue sky is accentuated with choppy passages of rusty orange. Below this sky full of contrast, the urban sprawl is similarly laid out in contrasting elements of paint and collage. It's interesting to note that the collaged elements not only include bits of wallpaper, but previous portions of the aforementioned prints -- a sort of history repeating itself, if you will, in more ways than one.

Aside from this signature use of color and collage, there is another consistent theme that runs through Scmalzried's works and it's a surprising one: in nearly all he includes a collaged photograph of a pet cat or two. "Frankie," "Little," " Peaches" and "Rosemary" are only a few of the nine strays who have made their way to Schmalzried's home, which he shares with his wife, Annette.

Although it's doubtful that any art lover's interest would be piqued by this magnificent show, it's a definite that every cat lover's will. Additional Information:

Details

'Paintings by Robert Schmalzried'

When: Through Sept. 10. Hours: 9 a.m. to 9 p.m. daily.

Where: Upper lobby of U.S. Steel Tower, 600 Grant St., Downtown.

Admission: Free with presentation of driver's license at Upper Lobby security checkpoint.

Details: (412) 341-9659.