The Illinois State Register Building, c. 1945

​With its stripped-down forms and fanciful color, Lillian Scalzo's view of the Illinois State Register building offers a modern take on the dignified downtown architecture of her native Springfield. Parked cars, commercial signs, and lampposts lend the image a distinct informality that hints at the influence of jazz and popular graphic design, along with the deliberate distortions and simplification characteristic of modernist art.

This work is one of a group of paintings on paper depicting scenes in Springfield's business district that Scalzo made in the 1940s. At the time, the building housing the Illinois State Register newspaper (now the State Journal-Register) was also known as Herndon's, for the venerable women's clothing store housed on its ground floor. Clad in pale brick, but not white as shown in Scalzo's image, it was notable for its facade's vertical emphasis, a distinctive feature of 1920s design. Although the building still stands on South Third Street near the intersection of East Capitol Avenue, the older neighboring structures shown here have given way to parking lots. Scalzo's images of "contemporary" Springfield have unintentionally become records of a vanished commercial and architectural era.

Scalzo studied music before attending the Springfield Art Association (SAA) and the Art Institute of Chicago. In the late 1930s, she also enrolled at Chicago's New Bauhaus school (later the IIT Institute of Design), where founder László Moholy-Nagy's innovative integrated approach to art and design gave her the "most valuable training that I had." In Springfield, Scalzo developed a broad program of art instruction at SAA, where she conducted classes for the rest of her career. Scalzo both taught and practiced a wide range of mediums, from printmaking and painting to pottery, copper enameling, and fiber arts.