Man at Work

A portrait of construction

MSOE welcomes new collection of paintings

By Sean Ryan

Eckhart Grohmann (right) admires his favorite painting from the 600-piece collection. Looking at “After the Mine Accident” by Fernand Dresser, Grohmann said it’s a reminder that death is also a part of the industry. Photos by Sean Ryan

Adolph Hitler put Germany’s construction projects on display when he wanted to impress the world.

He green-lighted the Autobahn highway project quickly after becoming German chancellor in 1933. He ordered construction of the 64,000-seat Congress Hall in Nuremberg and numerous hydroelectric power plants.

Then he hired Erich Mercker to immortalize Germany’s projects in paintings. The miniature people in Mercker’s paintings are composed of three simple strokes — head, torso and legs — and stand as afterthoughts under looming half-built Autobahn bridges and a flaming red tower crane backed by Congress Hall’s huge limestone pillars.

The paintings make construction look impressive, and they were meant to make Germany look modern and strong. They show tiny humans using technology to manipulate colossal objects into engineering wonders.

Europe’s art community shunned Mercker’s paintings after the fall of the Third Reich, and some of his works were burned. But those that remained finally found an audience in Eckhart Grohmann, a native of Silesia on the German, Polish and Czech borders, who started collecting Mercker’s works in the early 1970s. Since finding his first Mercker in Munich, Germany, Grohmann has collected about 80 of the artist’s paintings.

“When you have a government that wants to show the world how great they are in this kind of bragging thing, you can’t blame the artist,” Grohmann said of the paintings’ history. “What we really like is people doing the work.”

“Steamroller at Road Construction” By Wilhelm Brandenberg, 1937 “The Tower of Babel” From the Studio of Hendrick van Cleve “Tunnel Construction” By Lajos Marko “Autobahn Construction Munich - Salzburg” By Wilhelm Dieninghoff, 1936

Grohmann spent the last 30 years scouring the world for paintings of people doing hands-on labor, and the collection dates back to the Middle Ages.

It includes more than 600 artworks. It’s the world’s largest assembly of industrial paintings and sculptures. And it’s found a home at the Milwaukee School of Engineering.

Grohmann donated his collection, dubbed Man at Work, to the MSOE, which is planning to build a museum for it. Only 208 of the 600 works are on display, but MSOE leaders hope to have all 600 when the museum reaches completion.

They also expect the downtown Milwaukee museum to become a popular attraction.

“This will be a destination because in the museum we will have the best collection of industrial art in the world,” said MSOE President Hermann Viets. “People will come to see it.”

The museum is the culmination of Grohmann’s effort to sustain a dying genre of art and the values it represents. Grohmann and Viets, who has 16 Man at Work paintings hanging in his office, say they want people to feel the old-fashioned experience the artworks were created to invoke.

For now, though, industrial art has fallen out of favor with the world. Grohmann said the industrial art he loves and collects isn’t popular in the auction circuit. Sitting beside “The Forge,” an 1869 painting of two men prodding a glowing-hot rod under a forge hammer, he recalled winning the painting in a 2002 Christie’s International auction in New York.

“That was the only one that went out under estimate,” he said. “Who buys a painting like that?”

Grohmann has found a kindred spirit in German artist Hans Dieter Tylle, who has painted industry for 25 years and has yet to meet another specialist like himself. Tylle works the same way his predecessors did — he is commissioned by factories and contractors to paint their workers and equipment in action. He also painted a mural of student athletes for the entrance hall of MSOE’s new Kern Center. That mural includes an image of Grohmann in the background.

But Tylle said he’s worried that people don’t appreciate industry any more. Like children that think a steak comes from the supermarket and forget the butcher and farmer, people use the products of the modern world without considering the intricate work that created them.

“For me, it was very interesting that most of the people are thinking about the world without labor,” Tylle said. “They only use the car or things for daily life, but they don’t know how they are done. Even the sons don’t know what their fathers do.”

Matthew Fuchs, vice president of Total Team Construction in Brookfield, said he’s seen Wisconsin’s builders experience the same sense of abandonment. Fuchs said he thinks people today are more impressed by the electronic world’s campaign for smaller and faster devices than with construction’s heavy machinery.

Fuchs, MSOE Architectural and Building Construction Department chairman from 1973 to 2002, cites an impending labor shortage in the skilled trades as proof of disinterest.

“Masons and carpenters in Milwaukee, there’s going to be a shortage in the future,” he said. “Look at the glamour world — electronics are certainly at the top.”

The Man at Work collection comes from a time when construction impressed the glamour world. People commissioned paintings of their projects because backhoes and tower cranes raised eyebrows in the mid-1900s.

It puts things in perspective to see seven men struggle to push a boulder out of the path of a new road by wedging it with a board. It’s easy to forget with the 21st century’s menagerie of gas-powered equipment that less than 100 years separate the crane operator from the lever.

“Autobahn in Palatine” By Erich Mercker “Congress Hall in Nuremberg Under Construction” By Erich Mercker “Construction of U-Boat Lock at La Rochelle” By Erich Mercker

“Back then, how did you move that stuff?” Fuchs said. “Bulldozers were something that didn’t come around for a long time. It was men and wedges and ropes and pulleys.”

Grohmann said the collection will give MSOE students an “appreciation of where they come from.” The collection chronicles the history of one of humanity’s defining attributes — the use of tools to produce useful things.

“When the students spend four years on campus, they will look at them every day, and they’ll see something different each time,” he said. “The collection goes back to the 1600s, so you are dealing with trades into the Middle Ages.”

John Kopmeier, director of the Man at Work collection, said he worries future generations could lose the chance to appreciate contemporary industry because of present-day lack of interest. He said he’s concerned for the future because the practice of painting industry has fallen by the wayside.

“The photos can’t be displayed for more than six days at a time or they will fade, but 1600s paintings are still around,” he said. “Look at the Boston Tunnel contract. It was one of our biggest public works projects and nobody painted them.”

Tylle said he’s aware that indus-trial art is waning, and the awareness drives his desire to capture a sense of place and a moment in the history of human industry.

He said his paintings aren’t meant to be photographs. They’re meant to encapsulate his experience while visiting the construction site or factory that he’s painting.

They’re about helping people understand the power and the atmosphere of human industry in a particular place so future contractors can smile at the ingenuity and appreciate a generation’s hard work.

“It’s very interesting for all the children who can see what their parents did in these paintings and their grandparents,” Tylle said. “My paintings are history now already.”