Leonard Havens and Walker Evans
Leonard Havens, South Chicago. 194, color linocut. Gift of Raye Havens Isenberg, Smart Museum of Art, The University of Chicago, 2020.25.
Walker Evans, Untitled (Clothesline and Smokestacks). Ca. 1930, printed 1980, gelatin silver print. Gift of Arnold H. Crane, Smart Museum of Art, The University of Chicago, 1980.99.
Placed side by side, these two objects—one a color linocut, the other a diminutive photograph—speak to the impact of industrial extraction and manufacturing on the urban landscape. Leonard Havens’ print offers a dramatic representation of a South Chicago steel mill, which dominates the horizon and seems to radiate a strange light. Born in Pittsburgh, Havens studied at the Art Institute of Chicago and participated in the New Deal’s Federal Art Project before being called to serve in WWII. The print’s energetic lines, canted angles, glowing earth tones, and inky blacks convey a certain ambivalence towards the steel industry, which was undergoing expansion to meet the needs of the war effort at the time Havens created this work.
By contrast, Walker Evans’s small picture, contact-printed from a camera negative, offers a more sober representation of the industrial environment. Taken from street-level at an upward angle, the photograph contrasts the strong verticals of urban smokestacks with the bowed curve of two clotheslines laden with linens. The juxtaposition calls to mind the proximity of industrial and domestic space, a problem that continues to impact the health of marginalized communities across the United States.