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After Lee Dittley retired in the 1950s from a career as a sign painter, he traded a broad brush, bucket and ladder for smaller brushes, a palette and a chair. In less than a decade, he was entering art competitions and winning awards.
Once dubbed Pittsburgh’s “Grandpa Moses,” Dittley was one of a handful of artists, including John Kane, who honed their craft as industrial laborers.
He captured a city in transition, from its heavy industrial past to a metropolitan area with a newfound appreciation for its scenic buildings and streetscapes.
Dittley lived in a visually rich environment. The South 15th Street home where the artist spent most of his 91 years is perched on a hillside with a panoramic view of Downtown and the South Side Flats. All he had to do for inspiration was step off his porch into the shadow of the majestic St. Michael’s Church across the street and take in the view.
Karl Leopold Dittli was born in 1896. His father John was a Swiss immigrant who worked as a foundry laborer. His mother, Annie, had been born in Pennsylvania and raised in the South Side Slopes. Both parents died within days of each other in the summer of 1915: John Dittli on July 9 and Annie Dittli on July 21. Elizabeth Dittli Kraemer, the artist’s older sister, inherited the family home.
After serving in the Army during World War I, he returned to Pittsburgh and began calling himself Lee Dittley. Again living in the South 15th Street home that his mother’s family had owned since the 1850s, Dittley went to work as a sign painter for the O.J. Gude Co. Based in New York City, the national advertising company had offices on Fifth Avenue in Oakland. Before the war, Dittley had painted signs for the Gude company’s predecessor, the G.G. O’Brien Co.
While working for Gude, in 1922 Dittley played on the company’s baseball team. The next year, Dittley fell from a 45-foot scaffold while working. He broke two arms and never fully recovered, recalls grandson Jim Veraldi.
“He fell off there and the only thing that saved his life is he fell on the roof of a car,” Veraldi recalled. “But it was pretty high up roof and his arm, they had to rewire and put some wires in it and he always had a little bit of trouble with that.”
Dittley wanted to return to work but his bosses wouldn’t put him on the schedule.
In 1924, he married Margaret Stark. Her father, Harry, was a sign painter, and Dittley found work with him.
Dittley retired in the 1950s and began painting for fun. His daughters bought him a paint set and he set up a studio in the basement near the Pittsburgh potty and furnace.
“You’d go down these steep steps into the basement,” Veraldi explains. “There was a huge laundry chute that they had that was there. And you go into the coal and in that coal room with the furnace in the back, and he had a table there.”
“It was in very cramped quarters. It was difficult to walk down the steps to even get there,” recalls Dan Deiseroth, another grandson. “I don’t believe there was any natural light that got in there.”
The artist didn’t paint with an easel. He used a table pushed up against a wall and anchored canvases in place using cut lumber.
Dittley painted familiar subjects. His favorites were the inclines connecting the Slopes to the Flats, especially the curving Knoxville Incline. It crossed Brosville Street a few blocks away from his home and it’s featured in several paintings.
“He never told me why he liked them so much,” says Veraldi. “But he did, you know, because his paintings show that.”
Dittley won his first award in a 1955 amateur competition with a painting he titled “Incline Bend.” The Pittsburgh Press quoted the judges, in describing Dittley’s work. The painting, they said, contained “all the forcefulness of a Grandma Moses primitive and refreshing simplicity of a canvas by John Kane.”
Dittley jokingly told the Press, “If all that’s true, I guess that makes me ‘Grandpa Moses.’”
Unlike Kane, his Pittsburgh predecessor, Dittley left behind few written words for historians to understand his muses and methods. Those that do survive show a deep love for the city and its built environment.
In 1957, the Pittsburgh Railways Co. (a Pittsburgh Regional Transit predecessor) proposed closing the Knoxville and Castle Shannon inclines. Dittley came to their defense in a letter to the editor published in the Pittsburgh Sun-Telegraph on Aug. 5, 1957.
“The determination of the Pittsburgh Railways Co. to abolish these landmarks not only would inconvenience the public, but also would rob the city of points of interest, especially for out-of-town visitors,” Dittley wrote.
Defending the inclines came from a deeply personal place. Besides inspiration, Dittley relied on public transportation, relatives and friends for transportation. The artist, recalls Veraldi, “never drove a car, never owned a car.”
Dittley switched from being a sign painter to becoming an artist at time when Pittsburgh itself was in transition. Smoke was disappearing from the skies and the city was embarking on an ambitious program to rehabilitate aging neighborhoods through massive urban renewal projects Downtown and in the Hill District.
The South Side was showing its age, too. Buildings were falling into disrepair and the streets weren’t as clean as old-timers remembered. Yet, this was the place that inspired Dittley. He sketched churches, stores and inclines on his walks through the neighborhood.
Inside his basement studio, the painter created idealized visions of a neighborhood devoid of soot, trash and disinvestment. His skies were blue and the buildings were freshly and brightly painted.
“Dittley consistently presents the South Side as a clean, well-kept neighborhood,” wrote art historian Kahren J. Hellerstedt in the 1979 book “From These Slopes and Flats: Lee Dittley’s Old South Side.”
“His mantra was that he would paint a neighborhood, but he would clean everything up while he did it,” explained Dan Deiseroth.
“Very Swiss of him,” added Lee Deiseroth, Dan’s older brother.
Louise Lippincott, a retired Carnegie Museum of Art curator and the co-author of “American Workman: The Life and Art of John Kane,” says that Dittley was drawing from a deep wellspring of nostalgia.
“There’s a good-old-days thing going on which involves sunny skies and all the old neighborhoods and the old buildings at a time when all of this stuff is being threatened by the industrial decline and urban renewal,” says Lippincott.
Lippincott wasn’t familiar with Dittley’s work but after viewing photos of several of Dittley paintings that I emailed her, she compared Dittley to Kane.
“Kane was very much about the good old days, too, or the way things ought to be, the way where he would like things to be,” Lippincott explains. “Looking at Mr. Dittley’s paintings, the streets are clean and tidy and all the pavers are in place and there’s no litter and no mess. And, you know, it’s kind of idealized.”
In 1961, Dittley won his first national competition with another incline painting that he submitted to Motorola, the electronics company. His prize: a stereo console. The company featured Dittley’s painting in its 1962 wall calendar.
“We don’t know where that painting went. It went out to Chicago and supposedly it was hanging in the corporate offices of Motorola,” says Veraldi.
Over the next 20 years, the painter took home awards from local art shows. Dittley was a favorite at the annual Everyman’s Art Show in Shadyside. WQED featured his work in a 1970s documentary. He was, as longtime Post-Gazette art critic Donald Miller reported in 1981, the South Side’s “best-known painter.”
Dittley’s second career took off just as Pittsburgh and the nation were discovering historic preservation. In the early 1960s, Arthur Ziegler and James D. Van Trump founded the city’s oldest preservation organization, the Pittsburgh History and Landmarks Foundation.
“Certainly preservationists appreciated his work,” Ziegler replied in response to emailed questions about Dittley.
In 1972, after the Pittsburgh Press featured Dittley’s work in its Sunday magazine, Ziegler wrote to the artist asking to use some paintings in an upcoming exhibit. “Our organization has had an active program in South Side in trying to save and restore the old buildings for several years now,” Ziegler wrote to Dittley in a letter saved among family papers.
“We had the gallery at that time at the old Allegheny Post Office, and having discovered his marvelous art, we worked with him to put on an exhibit. We had an opening, and had a good turn out, but I really don’t remember much more than that,” Ziegler wrote to me.
Dittley died in 1988 in the home where he was born. He was 91.
Dittley’s work is an important, if not mostly forgotten, chapter in Pittsburgh’s history. The focus on Kane last year with a critically acclaimed Heinz History Center exhibit and book is an opportunity to look for other artists who also impacted the city’s culture in ways beyond aesthetics.
“Although several generations apart, Dittley and John Kane had much in common: Both painters had little schooling, and spent a life working in the Pittsburgh industries, including house or sign painting,” says Marie-Stephanie Delamaire, Carnegie Museum of Art curator of European and American art. “Largely self-taught, they found beauty in their immediate surroundings, and left behind a rich legacy of landscape and urban scene, which now give us an idealized view of Pittsburgh’s past.”
Though Lippincott has a similar view of Dittley’s position in the city’s arts history, she disagrees with the characterization that he was “self-taught.” Like Kane before him, Dittley honed his skills in the industrial world before turning them to fine arts.
“This idea of a self-taught artist is kind of wrong,” Lippincott says. “They didn’t just start painting out of nowhere. I mean, to use John Kane as an example, he didn’t just, you know, start painting out of the blue. He learned how to paint as a house painter and decorative teacher.”
What can Dittley’s story teach 21st-century Pittsburghers? Lippincott has this perspective:
“There is an incredible amount of talented people who loved art in Pittsburgh, who made really interesting quality stuff and who got very little attention or support. There are all these talented, wonderful people right under our noses and why aren’t we paying more attention to them?”
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