The official start to Pittsburgh’s long-cherished ambition to become a Most Livable City took place on the grey-skied afternoon of May 18, 1950, and it was noisy.
At a shouted signal from Pennsylvania Gov. James Duff, an 1,800-pound wrecking ball slammed into a 103-year-old vacant brick warehouse on Exchange Way between Liberty and Penn avenues as political and business dignitaries and an estimated 2,000 ordinary citizens clapped and cheered to the raucous musical strains of competing marching bands from Carnegie Tech and the University of Pittsburgh.
This May, the 75th anniversary of the landmark urban renewal era known as Renaissance I is being commemorated with a special art exhibit at Benedum-Trees Gallery, 223 Fourth Avenue, Downtown.
“W. Glen Davis: Eyes on the Point, An Artistic Witness to Renaissance I” promises to be a significantly less boisterous occasion. It is conceived by collector Pat McArdle and spotlights newly found photographs by a distinguished Pittsburgh artist whose Modernist aesthetic offered a unique perspective on the city’s audacious attempt at physical and civic reinvention.
During the initial phase of Renaissance I reconstruction, the Allegheny Conference on Community Development, which spearheaded the project, commissioned a cadre of documentary photographers to provide a detailed visual record of the changing cityscape.
“They hired Harold Corsini, Clyde Hare, Esther Bubley, Elliott Erwitt, James Blair, Richard Saunders and Regina Fisher — all of them-up-and-coming photojournalists,” says McArdle, adding that their work can be found at the Carnegie Library in Oakland, archived as the Pittsburgh Photographic Library.
What sets Davis’s photography apart is its seemingly accidental, undevised aspect that disguises the carefully crafted symmetry of intentional composition.
“He shows the innards of the new Pittsburgh rising. He uses rubble and twisted metal as texture for uniquely juxtaposed ways that show the soul of this new city forming from the old.”
In 1950, Glen Davis was a 39-year-old accountant working for the Benedum Trees Oil Company, which in the early 1900s had discovered several of North America’s most successful oil fields. In their heyday, Michael Benedum and Joseph Trees were among the wealthiest men in the United States and were widely acclaimed for their enlightened social philanthropy.
Davis’s aunt Margaret was Michael Benedum’s executive secretary, and she secured an entry-level bookkeeping position for her nephew.
“Every workday, Glen is on the 14th floor of the Benedum-Trees Building on Fourth Avenue doing the company numbers,” says McArdle. “He’s looking out his window and seeing Renaissance I happen right before him. It’s like he’s sitting in the balcony at the most exciting play in town. And then he leaves the balcony and goes down to the stage — and behind the stage — to photograph what’s going on. For an artist, it’s a very inspiring vantage point.
“All the photographers shooting for Allegheny Conference were excellent photo-documentarians, but none of them were shooting things like this. They’re not down there as artists. They’re not sculptors. They’re not painters. Glen is down there with his Leica on his lunch hour, after work, on weekends. He’s shooting with his artist’s eye.”
McArdle first met Davis in the 1990s through Pittsburgh painter-muralist Mary Shaw Marohnic and was immediately impressed by the range and profusion of his output. “Glen worked in pastel, oil, ink, charcoal, gouache, glass. He made mobiles and rayographs and abstract and brutalist metal sculpture. He used photography to create what we now call mixed-media combining sculpture, television images, painting, found objects.”
Following Davis’s death in 2001 at age 90, McArdle acquired his artwork and correspondence. He has pored over boxes of letters, diaries, sketchbooks and family scrapbooks to gain insights into Davis’s creative process and place in Pittsburgh art history. But he has yet to learn precisely what inspired William Glen Davis, only child of Gertrude and David of Pittsburgh’s West End, to devote his entire adult life to making some type of art virtually every non-working, non-sleeping moment.
Davis graduated in 1933 from University of Pittsburgh with a bachelor’s degree in business administration. The height of the Great Depression was a less than auspicious time to launch an independent art career, but in 1939, the 28-year-old Davis moved to New York City for a year of intensive study at the Ozenfant School of Fine Art.
His teacher, Amédée Ozenfant, was a renowned French painter and founder of the 1920s Purism movement that evolved out of Cubism and emphasized basic colors and shapes devoid of traditional decorative features. Ozenfant’s art partner was Swiss expatriate and architect Charles-Edouard Jeanneret, better known as Le Corbusier, whose progressive design ideas for cities, buildings and furniture helped spread Modernism into 20th-century mainstream society.
Davis returned to Pittsburgh in late 1940 with an enhanced commitment to Modernism in both philosophy and action.
“Throughout the 1940s he wrote letters to the editor at local newspapers, defending modern art,” says McArdle. “At that time the standard American art critic was not that open to new ideas or techniques, but Glen took the time to explain and educate in very clear, understandable terms.”
He also kept in touch with breaking artistic trends as a member of Outlines, the Downtown Pittsburgh gallery opened in 1941 by Betty Rockwell, youngest daughter of aerospace and defense contractor Willard Rockwell. Outlines was the city’s first commercial gallery to feature modern art. It served as a congenial gathering spot for Davis and other local artists, while welcoming visiting avant-gardists such as sculptor Alexander Calder, choreographer Merce Cunningham, composer John Cage, writer Langston Hughes and filmmaker Maya Deren.
Davis’s peak moment of national exposure came in 1947 when his oil painting “Blues in the Night” was selected for the 58th Annual Abstract and Surrealist American Art exhibit at the Art Institute of Chicago. Fellow exhibitors included Salvador Dali, Robert Motherwell, Ben Shahn, Mark Rothko, Jackson Pollock, Max Ernst, Milton Avery, Georgia O’Keeffe, Man Ray and a host of the postwar period’s most genre-stretching, norm-shattering visual innovators.
The exhibit evoked passionate reactions in the art world and beyond. Curator Daniel Catton Rich was denounced as a communist sympathizer on the floor of the U.S. Congress by Michigan Republican George Dondero, who excoriated the show’s celebration of “international art thugs” bent on destroying American art and culture.
To the casual observer, “Blues in the Night” does not convey any obvious message of thuggery or destruction. Eighteen thick black lines radiate across the canvas to form an interlocking mesh of triangles backgrounded by dense shadings of indigo and dark imperial blue offset by two small triangles, one hansa-tinged yellow and the other a deep-rusted red orange, that draw the eye deeper into the painting’s interior.
It’s a forceful application of the Purism principles he had absorbed from Ozenfant and prefigured the approach Davis used with his Renaissance I photowork fusing geometric abstraction with the blunt grey-white-black realism of a city stripped to its structural core.
“W. Glen Davis: Eyes on the Point, An Artistic Witness to Renaissance I” furnishes an up-close look at the behind-the-curtain grit and grime of urban rebirth taking tortuous shape, as rendered by an artist skillfully navigating the desolate elegance of debris.
The collection is devoid of living creatures except for two photos: one showing the back of a bent-over figure poking at the base of a towering rubble pile, the other framing two men in dark suits and wide-brimmed fedoras (faces turned from the camera) sitting on a bench bisected by a sign pole, one man reading a newspaper as the other turns toward him, perhaps to ask a question or simply stare mutely into the distance.
With 75 years of hindsight, it can be tempting to view Davis’s photos as a prescient commentary on the human and social cost of top-down urban renewal campaigns that devastated vulnerable populations in the Hill District, East Liberty and North Side. Pittsburgh Mayor David Lawrence, who presided over the first decade of Renaissance I, was famously quoted as saying, “The town has no worship of landmarks. Instead, it takes pleasure in the swing of the headache ball and the crash of falling brick.”
Davis’s photos encourage the viewer to consider the unembellished aftermath of that swing-crash pleasure orgy. It’s a Modernist response to modernization, a stark and evocative counterpoint to the “you can’t make an omelette without breaking eggs” maxim.
Over the next decade, Pittsburgh’s pace of large-scale construction projects slowed, and by the late 1970s Renaissance I was morphing imperceptibly into Renaissance II. Davis kept his exhibitions local and took an active role in supporting the growing Pittsburgh art community. He joined the Associated Artists of Pittsburgh, the city’s oldest artist-run organization, and became a founding member of several new entities — the Art and Crafts Center (now Pittsburgh Center for Arts and Media), Pittsburgh Society of Sculptors and the Abstract Group, an artists collective formed in 1944 to advance the acceptance of abstract art in Pittsburgh and which still actively exhibits today as Group A.
A lifelong bachelor, Davis remained in his parents’ residence at 611 S. Main St., a property Zillow currently lists for sale as a “historic 4-bed, 2-bath home built in the late 1800s, brimming with character and potential.” Some of that character likely derives from its artistic former occupant. When McArdle first visited, Davis had six cats, one dog and multiple turtles, which he used for various art exercises.
“He took countless photos of the turtles,” says McArdle. “He showed them digging holes for their eggs, laying eggs, little turtles coming out of the eggs. He’d enlarge them in his darkroom, and they’d look like something from a horror show. He was never at a loss for inspiration. Every day, he would do a sketch of something, which would often be transformed into a sculpture.”
His works are frequently in online art catalogues and featured in auctions by Pittsburgh galleries such as Concept Gallery and Silver Eye Center for Photography. Davis, however, never sold a single work during his lifetime, nor attempted to.
“Some artists are like that,” says McArdle. “They say, ‘I prefer to give it away, or I prefer just to create for my own satisfaction.’”
Despite Davis’s regular participation in numerous group shows over the years, McArdle says he pointedly resisted ever having a solo show.
“I wanted to give him a show, but he was not interested. I believe I found out why after he passed away. I spoke to his neighbor, who recalled Glen telling him that he thought working artists who did art for their living should have solo shows. He didn’t want to skew the market for the independent artist who needed to earn. That’s the kind of guy he was. Humble, thoughtful and considerate.
“He was about the art; the art wasn’t about him.”
W. Glen Davis: Eyes on the Point, An Artistic Witness to Renaissance I” runs May 17-August 17, 2025, at Benedum-Trees Gallery, 223 Fourth Ave., Pittsburgh; opening reception May 17 from 6-9 p.m.
L.E. McCullough is a Pittsburgh musician, writer, inside-outside thinker. He is a former press director at Hall Institute of Public Policy in Trenton, N.J. and author of “The American Voter 2012: How We Vote and Why” and “Dancing on Ice Floes: Survival Strategies for Artists in the Atlas Shrugged Era of Public Arts Funding.”
