Kane's Life

When the new building of the U. S. Department of Labor was opened in Washington in 1935, an exhibition of 15 paintings dignified it. They were by John Kane, Pittsburgh laborer and house painter whose canvases stand alone in U. S. art as monumental documents of the Monongahela and Allegheny Valley steel country. An Irishman, who grew up working in Scottish mines and came to the U. S. at 19, Kane was unknown as an artist until he was past 60. He died in 1934 at 74. This week the rugged, blue-eyed, peg-legged man's extraordinary autobiography, Sky Hooks,* is finally published as it was told to his friend, Marie McSwigan.

Kane was lucky in a few of the many people who took him up toward the end of his hard life. He was lucky in Miss McSwigan. As a reporter on the Pittsburgh Press she interviewed him in 1927 when the Carnegie International Exhibition first accepted a Kane painting. During the last two years of his life she spent two or three evenings a week in the cluttered Kane parlor, filling four big composition books with his reminiscences. A work of taste as well as devotion in its straightforward arrangement, Sky Hooks is as faithful a mirror of Kane's life as his painstaking pictures are of what he saw.

* Lipponcott ($3.50). "Sky Hooks" are round hooks to hang painter's scaffolding.

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