Aaron Bohrod (1907–1992), Brighton Road, Pittsburgh

Aaron Bohrod (1907–1992)
Brighton Road, Pittsburgh, c. 1947
Gouache on composition board, 12 ¾ x 18 ½ inches
Gift of the Reverend Richard L. Hillstrom

Bohrod studied at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, in the city in which he was born, and later he went to New York where he studied at the Art Students League with Kenneth Hayes Miller (1876–1952) and John Sloan (1871–1951). Sloan, whom he described as “dynamic,” was a particularly strong influence in his exploration of the people and imagery of the city, and when Bohrod later returned to his hometown, he wanted to “do in my own way with my own city what Sloan had done with New York.” Bohrod later served as Artist in Residence at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, from 1948 to 1973, succeeding John Steuart Curry (1897–1946) in the position. He was associated with the Regionalists like Curry, Grant Wood (1891–1942), and Thomas Hart Benton (1882 1958). In the 1930s and 1940s, Bohrod painted many urban images, including a 1939 gouache in the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, titled Chicago Street in Winter, similar in style and composition to this work from a few years later. In both, the artist explores the particulars of a working-class neighborhood in a manner that recalls John Sloan’s New York scenes. He has captured masterfully a late afternoon in hazy Pittsburgh in which the sun reflects on the windows of the houses on the right and also the trolley tracks that draw the eye deep into this vista down Brighton Road. Bohrod was brought to Pittsburgh in late 1946 to create sketches of the city and Allegheny County, from which he was expected to complete, in his studio in Chicago, around a dozen finished paintings to be part of the Gimbel Pennsylvania Art Collection, sponsored by Gimbel’s Department Store. It is likely that this painting is from that same period, and it bears close similarities to his painting A Puff of Smoke, Pittsburgh, illustrated in the Gimbel’s Collection catalogue Pennsylvania as Artists See It. The artist stated that, along with San Francisco and New Orleans, he always considered Pittsburgh to be one of the “most intrinsically paintable cities of our nation.”

Text from the catalogue for the exhibition The Eight, The Ashcan School, and The American Scene in the Hillstrom Collection, presented in the Hillstrom Museum of Art February 25 through April 21, 2013.