American Art Collaborative

One from a series of drawings made for the 1907–8 Pittsburgh Survey, a sociological study of the most heavily industrialized city in the United States, Joseph Stella’s Pittsburgh, Winter offers an aerial view of the steel town in a blizzard, with rooftops and factory chimneys visible only as vague shapes in the churning of white snow and gray smoke. Recalling the blizzard that prompted his drawing, Stella wrote that the “tragic town of the steel mills seemed transformed. She had lost that oppressive atmosphere of a damned infernal city.”