The group of oil paintings now on exhibit at the Bake Library of the Business School in Room 223 contains some outstanding studies of industrial subjects by Gerrit A. Beneker. More restricted in field than the late Joseph Pennell, Mr. Beneker has undertaken to show only the art of steel manufacture and the men who engage in the task. Unlike the etchings of Pennell which represent merely the image that reaches the human eye, the rich oils of Beneker convey all the realism of being, and all the strength and solidity of steel. Perhaps it is the medium in which the work is done that accounts for the difference; the paintings depict with more life-like fidelity and color the shapes of qualities of things, the stylus tends to tinge the reproduction with the impression that the mind receives, and the imagination which is evoked by the vision.

The difference may be in the man. Both worked in industrial subjects, both were Carl Sandburgs in the field of painting. Just as Sandburg found as much beauty in the steel of a skyscraper as in the waving wheat, so Pennell and Beneker were not so blinded by the beauty of Nature as to foresake the task of translating onto canvas beauty for the hand of man. Beneker made these oil paintings while in actual contact with the operations of the steel mills in Cleveland 12 years ago.

His closer acquaintance with the subject, lessened the complement of imagination necessary to register the whole image on canvas. He is impersonal. He catches with the eye, of the camera, and he fortifies the object with symbolism; but his symbolism is the soul emanation of the object, not the essence which the mind imposes upon it. When Rivers, the famous Mexican mural painter, draws a tractor, he does not delve into his folio for a model or into the store of his technical information for the knowledge, but relies upon his mental image, with the result that his machines though often crude and grotesque, are always recognizable and familiar.

Beneker's men and machines, his colors, his spaces, his lights, are drawn with a mathematical accuracy that is not cold, for its all of its exactitude. There is a certain dignity, hardness, and massiveness, that is the very essence of steel. Steel is cold and immaterial Steel is smooth. It is this spirit of the metal itself that reflects in Beneker's men, and materials.