America Is Hard to See

May 1–Sept 27, 2015

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Please note: Floor 8 is no longer on view.

“Every age manifests itself by some external evidence,” wrote Charles Sheeler in 1937. In the years following World War I, industry and mechanization came to define life in the United States no less than religion had in Medieval Europe. Now, Sheeler mused, “It may be true, as has been said, that our factories are our substitute for religious expression.”

As smokestacks, silos, and skyscrapers transformed the American landscape, many artists seized on the emblems and even the industrial materials of the Machine Age. Some, such as Sheeler, Elsie Driggs, and Charles Demuth, depicted grandly scaled industrial subjects in a pristine, seemingly objective manner, which minimized evidence of their hands just as new modes of manufacture supplanted traditional craftsmanship. Variously dubbed Immaculates or Precisionists, these artists might be understood to revel in the effects of industrialization or to critique the sense of alienation it could provoke. During this time, print and photography, with their crisp surfaces and mechanized processes, proved perfectly suited to describing the stark geometries and assembly line production of the modern world. Some artists even shuttled freely between the realms of art and commerce. Toyo Miyatake ran a commercial portrait studio in Los Angeles’s Little Tokyo community, while Edward Steichen created advertisements for the products of America’s booming corporate concerns.

Below is a selection of works from this chapter.