112th Engineers Cleveland Armory 6th Street and Lakeside

A street corner in smog-laden Cleveland. There stands a massive stone building: the armory of the Ohio Army National Guard's 112th Engineer Battalion. The year is 1940, a record from just before the world was engulfed in the flames of World War II.

James C. Klahn was 32 years old when he painted this work. It is said that as a child, he preferred pencils to sweets. He was the son of immigrants who had crossed the sea from the former region of Bohemia.

While also a painter, he was a 'worker.' He trained as a lithography apprentice and worked in an automobile factory. His hands, intimately familiar with the coldness of iron and the weight of stone, rendered the building's details with astonishing precision. This is not merely a landscape painting; it is the very 'breath' of this city, where industrial pride and military tension coexist.