William Baziotes
Cecilia Beaux
Arthur B. Carles
Clarence Carter
Mary Cassatt
Fern Coppedge
Virginia Cuthbert
Charles Demuth
George Erickson
Daniel Garber
William Glackens
Aaron Harry Gorson
Johanna Hailman
Robert Henri
Roy Hilton
Joseph Hirsch
John Kane
Albert King
George Luks
Norwood MacGilvary
Violet Oakley
Malcolm Parcell
Maxfield Parrish
Horace Pippin
Hobson Pittman
Joseph Plavcan
Edward Redfield
Samuel Rosenberg
Morton Livingston Schamberg
Walter Elmer Schofield
Charles Sheeler
Everett Shinn
John Sloan
Robert Spencer
Walter Stuempfig
Henry Ossawa Tanner
A. Brian Wall
Christian Walter
Everett Warner
Franklin Watkins
N.C. Wyeth

Johanna Hailman (1871-1958)
Mills, Trains, and Barges, 1940

In the twentieth century, women increasingly challenged societal strictures about appropriate female behavior. More women became artists than ever before, though their careers were often less successful and they were judged by a different standard. The daughter of wealthy Pittsburgh painter who married a steel industrialist, Johanna Hailman could have settled for a life of privilege and amateur painting. Yet this woman possessed of a strong personality and exuberant energy who linked Pittsburgh’s art and social worlds did not settle for the easy route, and combined an art career with a strong commitment to civic service. When she showed in New York in the 1920s, Forbes Watson characterized her as an individual “troubled by no doubts and no hesitation.” By the 1930s, Hailman was regarded as “Pittsburgh’s foremost woman artist” and the “dowager doyen of Pittsburgh,” yet this painter still had more than twenty-five years left in her career. An avid gardener, she was well known for her paintings of flowers, regarded as an acceptable subject for a woman artist. She was also an art patron who for many years annually purchased a painting from the Carnegie International (she bequeathed her collection to the Carnegie). Her work was shown in the International beginning with the first exhibit held in 1896 when she was twenty-five, and exhibited every year thereafter (except two) until 1955, three years before her death at the age of eighty-seven.

Hailman shared Gorson’s enthusiasm for industrial subject matter, as seen in her stunning Mills, Trains, and Barges (1940). Portraying industry and technology remained a largely masculine enterprise, but some powerful images were created by Hailman. Many of her works were inspired by the seascapes and landscapes she saw on her travels (she wintered in Nassau), and gardens, she could also powerfully portray the spectacle of the smoking mills of the industrial city that remained her lifelong home. Other strong works include her Jones and Laughlin Mill (c. 1925-30, Carnegie Institute) whose buildings and fumy smokestacks capture the visual essence of one of the city’s leading industry.

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