When the industrial revolution started in America after the Civil War, two schools of thought emerged on the subject: industry is good and industry is bad. As time went on, it became obvious that industry was going to be a permanent part of the 20th century landscape. While some people considered the city and the factory to be ugly blemishes on the earth, others viewed them as powerful symbols of mankind’s progress.

In the 1920’s, factory construction was booming and new buildings were being erected at record pace. The Brooklyn Bridge, a huge span of steel and cement between Brooklyn and Manhattan, had captivated the interest of millions during its construction in the 1880’s. Now buildings were going to new heights with the help of better steel: the Chrysler Building, completed in 1930 rose 1046 feet above Lexington Avenue in New York, and the Empire State Building, still one of the ten tallest buildings in the world at 1,472 feet was officially opened by President Hoover a year later. These buildings immediately drew the interest of many artists, who have painted and photographed them continuously since they were built. Among the men and women who painted or drew the bridge were Joseph Stella, who’s The Bridge, painted in 1920, was one of the first pieces of the cubist-industrial movement. (Figure I)

This movement was not purely a fascination with single monumental structures, however. Many artists looked at entire cityscapes for inspiration. One of the most famous such painter is Louis Lozowick, who painted a series of cities, including Chicago New York, Pittsburgh, and Seattle. Born in 1892 in the Ukraine, Lozowick immigrated to the United States in 1906, where he enrolled in Ohio State University. (8) Upon graduation he began traveling and painting – an occupation which kept him busy for a decade and a half, before he moved to New York City to live out his life. His portraits of city and machine are easily recognizable as cubist works: very geometric lines separate distinct colors with very high contrast. Besides his prowess with the brush, Lozowick was also a brilliant lithographer. His Machine Ornament series highlighted these skills, showing massive industrial equipment in an extremely geometric form. Through the use of relatively few panels, Lozowick captured, as he stated in 1927, “the trend towards order and organization which find their outward sign and symbol in the rigid geometry of the American city: in the verticals of the smoke stacks, in the parallels of its car tracks, the squares of its streets, the cubes of its factories, the arches of its bridges, the cylinders of its gas tanks.” (1,207)

While Lozowick’s Cubist paintings and lithographs portrayed the awesome physical elements of the modern city and machine, other styles showed other aspects of the industrial revolution. The Precisionist, or Immaculate, style focused on extremely life-like representations of simplified images. (5) Because they were so life-like, paintings of this style were also classified as Realist works. Usually, the scenes were light and almost cheery, showing the best of the subject’s qualities. Man-made objects, especially machines, were favorite subjects, and they were represented without any personal touch from the artist - almost to a fault in the minds of many art critics. This movement was started in the latter stages of the 1920’s by a pair of American artists: Charles Sheeler and Charles Demuth.

Charles Sheeler, born in 1883, examined the factory as a work of art. Formally trained in Philadelphia, his hometown, at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Art, Sheeler began his artistic career as an architectural photographer. In the Twenties, however, he became interested in the Precisionist movement, and by late in the decade he had developed a method of painting that yielded nearly photographic art from oil and canvas. His detailed drawings, often taken from photographs, showed the inner workings of huge production plants, such as Ford Motor Company’s River Rouge facility. In these paintings, Sheeler portrays a small portion of the factory in all of its complexity, as seen in Criss-Crossed Conveyors, River Rouge Plant, painted in 1932. (Figure 2) Although Ford commissioned the River Rouge series, challenging the ideals that the paintings convey, these pieces most clearly demonstrate Sheeler’s ability to capture industry in a tranquil, peaceful state. (2,181) Sheeler continued to paint Precisionist subjects for over 35 years, including one of the best examples of his work with machines, Steam Turbine, (Figure 3) in 1939. In Steam Turbine, a massive piece of machinery has been ripped from its undoubtedly hot and noisy working state and placed onto Sheeler’s canvas in a much cooler, more personal light. (7) By eliminating heavy brush strokes and blurry edges, Sheeler creates a silence that alludes to the mystery of the machine. This became a signature, which he moved away later in his life, painting barns and houses in a more Cubist style before his death in 1965.

Charles Demuth, whose work also focused on urban and industrial objects, was born in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. His career was formed largely in part to his contracting Perthes, a disease that stunted the growth in one of his legs, as a young child. At the time, the only known remedy was two months of traction followed by two years of bed rest. (6) During the two years Demuth spent bedridden, he became interested in art through several amateur artists in his father’s family. When he was well enough, Demuth was sent to prep school and then to Drexel, before that school’s art institute closed, forcing Demuth to enroll in the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Art. Upon graduation, he made several trips to Europe, and began a career as a cubist still-life painter. Later, after treatment for diabetes, he began painting again, showing great interest in the industrial aspect of art. His My Egypt (Figure 4) and Figure 5 in Gold paintings were done in 1927 and 1928, respectively. The former is a very cubist view of a grain elevator, shown in bright light that suggests that it is some form of shrine. (3,139) Unfortunately, Demuth’s career was cut short by his mounting health problems. He died in 1935, at the age of 51.

Sheeler and Demuth both concentrated on the static components of industry, but some artists portrayed the human element of the industrial revolution. One of the best such artists was Hugh Ferriss, who strived to capture man’s awe of structure. Ferriss, an American born in 1889, was most famous for his paintings of the mid-Twenties, which showed people marveling at the sheer magnitude of a city. Prime examples of Ferriss’s work include The Lure of the City (Figure 5) and Lobby, Daily News Building, drawn in 1925 and ’29, respectively. Both works show man taken aback by what has been created. In each, light radiates from the center of the scene; creating an aura that adds to the temple-like effect of the buildings Ferriss drew. These black-and-white, charcoal images met mixed reviews from Ferriss’s peers. Some artists felt that the huge structures were reminiscent of the Egyptian pyramids: timeless symbols of the power of man over his environment. (5,194) Critics, however, balked at the positive portrayal of the city, arguing that the beauty of nature was being ignored and, in many cases, destroyed. Regardless of what the critics thought, the illustrations were well received by people who saw them – both in the city and in more rural settings.

It is important to note that all of the artists who portrayed the new mechanical prowess of modern man were members of American society. This is of great importance because elsewhere in the world during this time period, the view of machines and industrialization was a very negative one. Only in America, where the destruction of World War I was not felt firsthand, did society look so favorably on industry. In Europe, especially, machinery was viewed as a great oppressor, and consequently the Precisionist movement never caught on abroad.

The results of the Precisionist and Cubist-industrialist movements moved away from the city and factory after just a few years, however. Later artists of these styles were taken to creating fantastic replicas of nature, most notably Georgia O’Keeffe’s flowers and views of the desert near her New Mexico home. Earlier in her career O’Keeffe had found great success in abstract art, her later Realist paintings of nature remain extremely popular.

Although it is impossible to say what effect the artists who showed the industrial progress of man had, their work led to a school of Twentieth century art and increased popular appreciation of the art that surrounds every person in the cities man has created. Furthermore, it is the work of artists like Demuth, Lozowick, and Sheeler that captured American society’s interest in mechanical things, if only for a few fleeting years, and pointed out the beauty and grandeur of it all.

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