Steel Shadows

It's a combination of great Pittsburgh poetry--visual this time--with a sense of past and present that readers will recognize and enjoy.

This could turn out to be the perfect Pittsburgh-themed coffee table book of the season . . . Packed with black-and-white pictures of his myriad drawings of the city's panoramas, some of which are done quite realistically while others display an expressionistic style with skewed angles and multi-perspective views, this book rewards even the slightest glance with a sense of profound artistry.

Having encountered Douglas Cooper's stunning murals of Pittsburgh in their original grand scale, I imagined it would be difficult to capture their sweeping sense of place within the confines of a book. .. Yet the University of Pittsburgh Press has done just that in a handsome volume entitled Steel Shadows: Murals and Drawings of Pittsburgh... Mr. Cooper has set a very high standard in capturing the drama of Pittsburgh geography, using only the subtle gradiations of black and white and a keen eye for detail. Perhaps improbably, Mr. Cooper not only manages to portray the natural curves of the city's rivers and hills, but also the manic attempt to impose order on them with mills and bridges, sjyscrapers and row houses. Infused with a string sense of the past, Mr. Cooper's trick is to provide every necessary detail for convincing realism while creating an overall effect that seems nothing short of fantasy.

This is a dizzying but intriguing look at the art of Carnegie Mellon Professor Douglas Cooper. These stories and drawings enrich the work and the history of the city, including places that are no more.