City’s skyline gets artistic treatment

A Panorama of Pittsburgh: Nineteenth-Century Printed Views Through October 5 The Frick… A Panorama of Pittsburgh: Nineteenth-Century Printed Views Through October 5 The Frick Art and History Center 7227 Reynolds Street, Point Breeze 412-371-0600

Where has the time gone – 250 years of Pittsburgh!

A lot of it ended up at the Frick Art Museum in Point Breeze in its new exhibit, “A Panorama of Pittsburgh: Nineteenth-Century Printed Views.” The exhibit takes patrons through the city’s history, from its humble beginnings to its short stint as “Pittsburg.” The event runs until Oct. 5.

The exhibit consists of three rooms with prints ranging from standard picture frame size to posters bigger than the average dinner table. Many of the prints have more smoke billowing from buildings than clouds floating about the sky. The exhibit also showcases small open books in display cases and plaques that give the piece’s name, origin and painter/printer.

Many of the pieces are quite historical, showing the industrial look of Pittsburgh’s smoky forges juxtaposing the once open fields along its periphery. Several of the pieces were provided by the Hillman Library Archive Collection, a point of pride for Michael Dabrishus, assistant librarian for archives and special collections. Some of them are one of a kind.

These pieces aren’t paintings, though – a majority of them are lithographed. Lithographing is a technique in which an image is drawn onto stone using a waxy medium, which is then inked and transferred to paper through a special press.

While the prints on display at the Frick Art Museum are now treated as art, they were more often than not advertisements at the time. Elaborate advertisements such as these are so detailed that on some panoramic prints, the buildings might be smaller than your thumbnail, but some of the business names are still legible (often with a magnifying glass).

Sometimes the prints look very similar to one another. Artists would often simply edit minor details into an existing print to make it relevant to the times (such as adding new bridges), guest curator and “Antiques Roadshow” appraiser Christopher Lane said. That, or they would just redraw the original and claim it as their own work.

A presentation at the gallery opening showed the repeated printing of a lithograph that had been slightly altered by artist Otto Krebs at least three times and printed in other media without his permission several times.

“Part of the fun of doing this project is finding minute differences,” said Lane. “There were always at least two major lithographers in Pittsburgh, so it was a very active business.”

While copyrights were developed by the 18th century, prints show an existing place. That means that after one person published a print, another artist could claim to have drawn the same picture from the same spot.

There was no way to disprove these claims, and Lane said he has never found a court case of plagiarism involving prints.

Nonetheless, while the practices of lithographers at the time were questionable, Lane said the exhibit is important for a number of reasons.

“The first is because it’s important for whoever lives in the city to know the history of the city. It documents the changing face of Pittsburgh,” he said.

“I don’t think that a lot of people appreciate how important prints were in the 19th century