By MARTY LEVINE
On May 2, 1985, then-Pitt Chancellor Wesley Posvar posed for a University Times photo, smiling behind two pink flamingos and a garden statue — a white mushroom with red polka dots — that he had placed in the courtyard next to his office in the Cathedral of Learning.
At the time, the courtyard — technically a light bay, about the size of a Cathedral classroom, enclosed on all sides but open to the sky to let sunshine into interior windows — was home only to a few dead plants.
“He’s been trying to persuade his staff to find a ‘nice object’ for the court yard,” the photo caption said of Posvar, “and no one has moved on his suggestion for a piece of sculpture ...”
Someone must have “moved” on that suggestion around 1987, Pitt’s Bicentennial, when a mammoth fundraising effort called the Campaign for the Third Century began. That’s because three figure-like sculptures called “Third Century” now sit on concrete pedestals in the courtyard — barely noticeable to the public.
If you peer through two arched windows in the hallway outside the chancellor’s office on the Cathedral’s first floor, the sculptures seem small. There are no identifying plaques inside or outside the courtyard. Even long-time chancellor’s office employees weren’t sure when or by whom they were created — or that anyone had ever asked to see them close-up in decades.
To get to the sculptures, you have to squeeze through a barely door-sized window in the chancellor’s office. The window angles only halfway open — so it must have been removed to get the sculptures inside. But standing next to the artworks, you realize that the figures are larger-than-life, towers of terra cotta and light green with textured surfaces.
They are the creations of Jerry Caplan, a Chatham University faculty member whose work —such as these clay-over-pipe pieces — can be seen, and approached, all around Pittsburgh and the world. Locally, you can find Caplan’s “Pittsburgh People” in a plaza next to a Boulevard of the Allies parking garage, for instance.
The walls of the courtyard surrounding the sculptures are at different heights, formed by the Cathedral’s different levels. A net atop the lowest wall, four stories high, is meant to keep the pigeons out, and it succeeds (although they still seem to have aimed at the sculptures from above, and missed). Multiple lanternflies have found the space a safe spot to die a natural death, unsquashed. Other than that, the paved floor is bare. Glimpsed through the other side of the arched windows, the people in the Cathedral hallway now seem small and unreal — just like these sculptures have appeared for decades.
The courtyard has one other distinction: Evidence of how dark the Cathedral once appeared after decades exposed to the industrial soot of Pittsburgh’s steel mills. When the Cathedral was cleaned, the late Maxine Bruhns, Nationality Rooms director, as well as the Pittsburgh History and Landmarks Foundation, had hoped to preserve one dark spot for Nationality Room tours. Alas, the area was mistakenly beautified, so Chancellor Mark Nordenberg came to the rescue, requesting that an area inside the courtyard retain the grime instead. One ornamental lightwell remains blackened from top to bottom as an homage to the city’s industrial heyday – and a way to show how lovely the Cathedral limestone is once again.
Elisabeth Roark, professor of art history at Chatham, knew of Caplan and his artworks. Visiting Caplan’s studio after his death, to help gather works he had donated to others, she discovered “it was amazing how wide-ranging he was” as a painter, a draftsman and a sculptor in other media. “He was really a Renaissance man in the art world.”
Caplan was a product of Pittsburgh and of the same childhood art classes at the Carnegie Museum of Art that inspired Andy Warhol and other well-known Pittsburgh artists. But Caplan stuck around, leading the Associated Artists of Pittsburgh at times.
After serving in the army in World War II, and before attending Carnegie Mellon (then Carnegie Tech), he took a job in an industrial water-pipe factory that extruded the clay tubes in various sizes.
“Evidently that inspired this whole long series of work,” Roark says, since similar pieces also adorn the Chatham campus. Caplan would acquire the pipes in whatever sizes he needed, before they were fired, so they were still malleable. Roark believes the size of the Cathedral sculptures “would demand a really large kiln, like something they would have at the industrial pipe factory.”
Indeed, Caplan would sometimes do his work at a pipe factory, employing their giant kilns to finish his sculptures, and even gave classes at one. As Roark found out from Caplan’s fellow local ceramicist Dale Huffman, now a Carlow professor who also used these pipes.
She passed along an email from Huffman, who said: “We generally worked with sections of pipe more like a foot in diameter. … At one point Jerry did try building a loose-stacked propane kiln to fire them with, but it was very difficult to get it to fire evenly enough. … If we wanted color beyond the red of the fired clay, then after finishing the pieces we would decorate them with engobes, which are white slips with various ceramic temperature colorants added. Brushed, rolled, sometimes splattered on.”
Close-up, the surface of the Cathedral sculptures is knobby, textured. Roark says that was likely from the application of crushed brick or other gritty ceramic material, which helps the piece to dry more quickly and reduces shrinkage.
“It looks like he was trying to create a group of people,” Roark says of the sculpture trio, noting that some of the similar Chatham campus figures have arm-like protrusions. But, she adds “that’s the good thing about an abstraction” — passersby are encouraged to form their own opinion.
The bad thing about having this sort of artwork inside an inaccessible courtyard, she said, is that “ideally, you want to be able to walk all around the sculptures. These look to me like they would encourage a person to walk around (them), and it’s unfortunate that you can’t.”
There is another light bay on the opposite side of the Cathedral, with nothing in it but the back end of an air conditioner, sticking out of an office window. What might improve that space, and maybe be accessible to the public? Besides pink flamingos …
Marty Levine is a staff writer for the University Times. Reach him at martyl@pitt.edu or 412-758-4859.
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