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Harry W. Scheuch (his Pennsylvania Dutch surname is pronounced Shoyshh) was born in 1906 in Elizabeth, New Jersey. Scheuch was orphaned at the age of five following the death of his father, Henry Scheuch, a violinist for the New York Metropolitan Opera, and was placed in the care of an aunt in Tamaqua, Pennsylvania.
Scheuch enrolled at the Carnegie Institute of Technology in 1928. He had intended to study electrical engineering, but after an visit to the Carnegie Museum he was inspired to change his curriculum to fine arts, receiving instruction from Alexander Kostellow and G. Romagnoli. While still a student, he joined the Associated Artists of Pittsburgh and began exhibiting in the group's annual shows. During his student days he also fell in love with a Russian emigree named Helen, and they were soon married.
With the onset of the Depression, Scheuch was was forced to take a number of part-time jobs to augment his income from selling paintings, supporting himself and his wife at one point by working as a fortune-telling swami. He held his first one-man show at the Gulf Galleries in 1934, recieving mixed reviews.
The following year, Scheuch was invited to participate in the Carnegie Institute's second Summer Show, featuring the work of outstanding Pittsburgh painters. In a review of the show, John O'connor Jr., the Assistant Director of Fine Arts at the Carnegie Institute, wrote:
"Harry Scheuch in his paintings The Vendors and May Afternoon is primarily interested in composition. It is surprising what he accomplishes in May Afternoon, which pictures the rear of a house with its garage. In The Vendors he adds the element of distinct and vivid color to his problem of composition."
Scheuch was later included in the sixth annual Summer Show of 1939, the eighth annual of 1941, and the thirteenth in 1946.
The Steidle Collection's Off-Hand Glass Blowing was also painted in 1935. In it one can see the artist's above-mentioned interest in composition. Four glassworkers are shown in the midst of a number of pipes, stands and air hoses. The artist's use of color in minimal, asfolded woman, Scheuch instead painted the figure as a man, and deleted the blindfold.
With the outbreak of the Second World War, the government ended the WPA programs and Scheuch enlisted in the United States Army. He returned to Pittsburgh following the war, and continued his art studies at the University of Pittsburgh. In 1946, he was awarded the Associated Artist's First Prize at their thirty-fifth annual exhibition. The painting, Soho Portrait, was later included in that year's Pepsi-Cola Annual. Norwood MacGilvary, President of the Associated Artists, commented:
"It speaks well of this Jury's lack of bias that, after awarding the Institute Prize to abstract work, they saw sufficient merit in Harry W. Scheuch's representational Soho Portarit to give it the Associated Artists First Prize of $150. Though the subject matter of this painting is naturalistic--an alley between ramshakle buildings, junk piles, an foreground figures--the artist was able to organize out of such material, with the aid of a concealed abstract analysis, a stisfying compostion enriched by a fine color harmony and a variety of interesting textures. It shows us that an artist may go slumming and yet discover something besides sordidness and tragedy, which would be the obvious thing. Again, as a contrast to some of his earlier rather brutal brushings, this more illusive, rather happy treatment shows that he is still fluid in his attitude and has not become set too soon in any formula--a hopeful augury in a young painter."
At the Associated Artists 37th annual in 1947, Scheuch was awarded the Carnegie Institute Prize for the best group of two oil piantings for Chit Chat and Hill District Landscape. C. Kermit Ewing, president of the association that year, remarked:
"Each of these paintings possess the social content with which Jack Levine has been occupied for years. The same heavy burden, the sadness, sometimes despair, and frequent biting satire can be found in both Scheuch and Levine's work. In Hill District Landscape Mr. Scheuch depicts the congested, poorly housed condition prevalent in our city. It is a theme he has returned to with regularity over the past fifteen years. And it is more than echo of his Soho Portrait of last year, which went on to be included in the Pepsi-Cola Annual, and attract the attention of the Whitney Museum. His squat little people are helpless victims of their environment. In an enlightened world that can split the atom, Mr. Scheuch, thruogh paint, is delivering a powerful sermon on a condition existing within our society. He has selected the Christmas season. Against a setting of defaced, decaying buildings, beautifully woven into a fabric of subtle color passages rich in texture, he has placed his figures in the act of selecting Christmas trees. But here Christmas appears to be an empty symbol and it is through Mr. Scheuch's ability to give expression to his idea that we respond to the tragedy which he feels. The painter has been searching for a truth in his local scene and most certainly in these twosuccessful paintings he has discovered it."
In 1948 and 1949 Scheuch was awarded the Pepsi-Cola National Art Prize, and the following year held a much admired one-man show at the Pittsburgh Playhouse. From 1949 to 1953 he was an art instructor at Carnegie Institute, leaving in the summer of 1953 to spend seven weeks painting in Paris. He sold shares in the paintings he planned to produce in order to fund his trip, and upon his return held an exhibit at the 130 N. Bellefield St. Gallery in Pittsburgh.
Scheuch continued to exhibit with the Associated Artists from the 1940s to the early 1970s, and received awards at the 1948, 1952, 1953, and 1972 shows. He also exhibited at the Art Institute of Chicago in 1937 and 1938; the Butler Art Institute in Youngstown, Ohio, in 1942 (prize) and 1943; the Pepsi-Cola Exhibition in 1947. In the 1950s he was invited to exhibit at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, the Chicago Art Institute, the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., and other institutions.
Pa is his modeling of the figures. Scheuch's workmen are rendered primarily in shades of blue and black, with dark outlines used to enclose their flat, almost two-dimensional forms. The interior of the glass-factory is also confined to a limited palette of grey, black and brown. Only the red-hot globs of molten glass and the fiery kiln in the background depart from the artist's rigid color scheme.
In the late-1930s, Scheuch found employment with the federal government's Works Progress Administration. From 1937 to 1940 he served as head of the Federal Art Project in Pitttsburgh. During this time he was commissioned to paint murals for some of the public buildings in the Pittsburgh Area. For the post office in Scottdale he painted a mural showing the early Mennoites who founded the town. He also painted a nine by thirty-six foot mural for the Common Pleas Courtroom No. 11 in the Pittsburgh City-County Building. Making an unusual departure from traditional portrayal of the allegorical figure of Justice as a blindul Chew, former director of the Westmoreland County Museum of Art in Greensburg, Pa., wrote, "The artist never painted any cars into his outdoor scenes, even though he painted from the 30s to the 70s. The Pittsburgh in Scheuch's works is one of narrow alleys bordered by tall, thin 19th-century houses; gray-blue skies over dark mills and factories, and small, ordinary people who exude the mood of the Depression."
Dr. Chew quotes Scheuch's comments on his own painting. The artist remarked, "To what school do I belong? I'd say I'm a regional painter like everyone else. My style is contemporary leaning toward genre painting--meaning outdoor scenes and people."
The Westmoreland County Museum of Art hosted a one-man show by Scheuch in March and April, 1962, and in April and May, 1983, the Historical Society of Western Pennsylvania exhibited a collection of 31 paintings by the late artist.
Sources:
Chew, Paul. Southwestern Pennsylvania Painters. Greensburg: Westmoreland County Museum of Art, 1989.
O'Connor, John Jr., "Presenting Pittsburgh Artists," Carnegie Magazine, vol. 9, June 1935, pp. 66-71.
________, "Paintings by Pittsburgh Artists," Carnegie Magazine, vol. 13, June 1939, pp. 79-80.
________, "Thirty Pittsburgh Artists," Carnegie Magazine, vol. 15, June 1941, pp. 76-77.
Carter, Clarence Holbrook, "Thirty-Fourth Annual in Review," Carnegie Magazine, vol. 17, February 1944, pp. 259-266.
MacGilvary, Norwood, "Associated Artists Prize Winners," with illustration of Soho Portrait in Carnegie Magazine, vol. 19, March 1946, pp. 259-266.
"The Summer Show," Carnegie Magazine, vol. 20, July 1946, pp. 77-78.
Ewing, C. Kermit, "Out of the Smog," with illustration of Hill District Landscape in Carnegie Magazine, vol. 20, March 1947, pp. 227-235.
Frankfurter, Alfred M., "A handful of promise," Art News, vol. 46, January 1948, pp. 20-23.
Spruance, Benton, "About Painting in These Parts," with illustration of Point Breeze in Carnegie Magazine, vol. 27, March 1953, pp. 77-81.
"Nuturing the Heritage of WPA Art," with illustration of Scheuch's Scottdale, PA, post office mural," Architecture, vol. 72, December 1983, pp. 26-27.
Falk, Peter Hastings, ed. Who Was Who In American Art. Madison, CT: Sound View Press, 1985.