Every once in a while you look at a painting and recognize similarities, in feeling if not structure. Sometimes these similarities are obvious, and sometimes they are not so obvious.

A obvious example, or what seemed obvious to me anyway, was a painting in the Butler Museum of American Art. William Gropper's "The Youngstown Strike" reminded me of Picasso's "Guernica." It would seem this similarity may have been intentional as Gropper related the events.

"The Youngstown Strike" is one of the most gripping social protest works of the period. The painting was apparently prompted by the extended strikes staged in 1936-37 by workers at the Youngstown Sheet and Tube Company, Youngstown, Ohio. During these years chaos frequently reigned throughout much of the city. In one incident, following a savage confrontation with police guards by workers and their families, the police tear gassed and shot at the workers; two strikers were killed and twenty-eight injured. The positioning of figures in Gropper's painting make anything other than an intentional similarity unlikely.

If you didn't pick up on it yet, random events come up randomly and sometimes songs sound similar even when the writers are unfamiliar with another's work. The problem with my theory is Guernica and the Youngstown Strike were painted in the same year. Instead of one work being based on another, the similarities were the result of a zeitgeist gripping the age.

Picasso's painting of course shows the horrors of war, and for what at first may seem like an odd parallel has even been compared to Davinci's "The Last Supper." Guernica depicts the Nazi German bombing of Guernica, Spain, by twenty-eight bombers, on April 26, 1937 during the Spanish Civil War. The attack killed between 250 and 1,600 people, and many more were injured. (While living in Nazi-occupied Paris during World War II, Picasso suffered harassment from the Gestapo. One officer allegedly asked him, upon seeing a photo of Guernica in his apartment, "Did you do that?" Picasso responded, "No, you did.") While the Youngstown Strike event happened in 1916, Gropper painted it in the depths of the Great Depression in 1937.

Guernica was initially exhibited in July 1937 at the Spanish Pavilion at the Paris International Exposition. Perhaps he saw Guernica in a magazine, but it doesn't appear Gropper was in Paris. In 1937 he was in the American West witnessing the dust bowl.

Another example of similarities in paintings may be a bit more of a stretch. At the Westmoreland Museum of Art show on John Sloan, his painting "Election Night" somehow brought to mind Renoir's "Luncheon of the Boating Party." Its not so much Sloan's dark painting of gritty New York that recalled Renoir's colorful work, but they way the characters interact-or avoid meaningful interaction. Each painting has a general good humor about it and yet to each individual character it doesn't seem to matter whether another is there. Renoir's work is slightly different in that some characters are interested in others, only that other has a mind somewhere else.

Many of the Sloan works are from the Delaware Art Museum and are currently on display at the Westmoreland. The Youngstown Strike is permanently at the Butler.

The Butler Institute of Art is of a calibur equal to some of the larger, newer cities outside the Northeast. All of this great art just outside the campus of Youngstown State University is a great example of art being where the money (and population) used to be. The people and city of Youngstown appear to take great pride in their museum and I expect will continue to secure the museum and its great artworks as a catalist for urban rebirth.

I opened the most recent issue of Art and Antiques magazine and on the last page was a work and short article about Charles Sheeler. I recognized it from the Butler's web site and looked forward to seeing it in person on my upcoming visit. Sheeler has been one of my most admired artists and this Ohio steel town is a great place to hold one of his works. It was a few months ago that I bought a stack of New York art magazines from the 1920s and 30s and noticed that Sheeler contributed quite a few photographs.


There are other works that relate directly to Youngstown including a work by William Gropper about a strike in Youngstown that is reminiscent of Picasso's Guernica. There are also some paper mache steel workers and a short video from Good Morning America in 1980 about their making. To look at the video and their life-sized images made me think not only about their life and what it must have been like, but the passing of time, both in terms of these men and the artist, but of Youngstown. I suppose its hard to imagine even now, but some day what was once almost the whole of a culture--the making of steel--will be a footnote in history. If time can do that to something as mighty as the steel industry, what can it do to this art, its subject, video, Good Morning America and myself, the viewer?

Perhaps not much of Youngstown is recorded in paint before the mills came, but the collection of landscapes is what I primarily came for. I continue to be captivated by the work of George Innes, and the Butler holds a fine example of his work. I can usually spot an Edwin Church painting from across the room and there's also a fine example of Eakins work, a prtrait of sculptor Beatrice Fenton, whose work can be seen in Philadelphia's Rittenhouse Square.

On the upper level there's currently an exhibit called the Secret Life of Frames that includes examples of frames designed by Stanford White. It also curiously notes that Thomas Cole thought that a frame was "the soul of a painting."

After seeing all the great art, its disturbing to get a limpse of what was lost. There's a photo of paintings lining the walls of a turn-of-the century (20th) mansion. Its noted that when all these great European works went up in smoke, Joseph Butler decided he better build a proper building for displaying artwork, and the current building (designed by McKim Meade and Stanford White) and museum was born.

Some photos from my visit