America Is Hard to See | Art & Artists

May 1–Sept 27, 2015

Machine Ornament

Large industrial building with rays of light crossing it.

Machine Ornament

Floor 8

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.

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Man Ray, New York, 1917

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Narrator: Man Ray called this sculpture New York, 1917, because he made the first version of the work in that year. It was a time of rapid change in the city. And like many early twentieth-century artists, Man Ray was in love with the energy of modern urban life—and the upward thrust of New York's skyline.

Francis Naumann: So there was an absolute fascination with the whole subject of skyscrapers. And to render them or to address them on any level was to render the modern. Render what was new.

Narrator: Francis Naumann is an independent scholar, curator, and art dealer, and author of Conversion to Modernism: The Early Work of Man Ray.

Francis Naumann: Man Ray lived. . .right next to what is today's Grand Central Station, in a building he said was constantly under construction. And he could hear them building Grand Central Station across the street from him and he loved the sound and the noise of the streets of New York City, because for him, that symbolized modernity, that symbolized what was new.

Narrator: Some of the city's chaotic spirit is captured in this work's origins. The work you see here is stainless steel. But the first version, from 1917, was made from some wood slats that Man Ray picked up off his studio floor and held together with a C-clamp. He noticed that it resembled a skyscraper, and so he named it New York.

In 1917, Man Ray took some wood scraps from his studio, braced them in a C-clamp so they would stand upright, and titled the object New York. Its jagged profile echoed the New York skyline, under constant construction and growing increasingly vertical. Half a century later, Man Ray made the sculpture on view here by casting the original form in bronze and plating the elements initially made in wood with glinting nickel.

Man Ray was a close friend of Marcel Duchamp, who famously caused a scandal by displaying an upended urinal at the exhibition of the 1917 Society of Independent Artists and calling it Fountain. Like Duchamp, Man Ray made frequent use of found or “readymade” objects during these years, typically combining them in poetic or evocative ways.

Charles Sheeler based this painting on photographs he had made of the Ford Motor Company’s River Rouge complex in Michigan five years earlier. He had been hired by an advertising agency to document the 2,000-acre plant, the first factory to manufacture a car—in this case the Model A—in its entirety, from the processing of raw materials to the finishing touches. The photograph that became the basis for this painting was typical of Sheeler’s series in that it did not show any of the plant’s 75,000 workers. The radiant calm that pervades the painting belies how much had changed in the five years since Sheeler had visited the plant. By 1932—the depths of the Depression—brutal hostilities had broken out between the workers and management.

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Joseph Stella, The Brooklyn Bridge: Variation on an Old Theme, 1939

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Narrator: Artist Joseph Stella first saw the Brooklyn Bridge when he arrived in New York from a small town in southern Italy. He was struck by the technological wonders of the city. The bridge was an iconic symbol of the possibilities of the new world—simultaneously grand and frightening. Many nights, Stella visited the vast expanse of the bridge’s walkway. He later wrote, “I felt deeply moved, as if on the threshold of a new religion.”

Henri Petroski is the Aleksandar S. Vesic Professor of Civil Engineering at Duke University.

Henri Petroski: The cables that dominate this picture are the suspension cables. The Brooklyn Bridge was really a ground-breaking suspension bridge. It was designed by John Roebling, the civil engineer who wanted to connect Brooklyn and New York, which were then separate cities across the East River.

Stella's perspective is essentially the impression you get as you walk along the bridge. The elevated walkway is cradled in these cables, so you’re caught in this net of cables and wires and it’s really a very spectacular setting.

The Brooklyn Bridge walkway provides one of the classic walks in the world. To walk across the bridge and to approach Manhattan at a walking pace is something that is hard to reproduce anywhere else. It gives you ample time to reflect upon the magnitude of the city, the achievements of the engineers and architects who made the city what it is. The people walking on the walkway coming towards you, walking with you, also remind you of the real diversity of the city. It’s just a spectacular, spectacular experience.

To Italian-born Joseph Stella, who immigrated to New York at the age of nineteen, New York City was a nexus of frenetic, form-shattering power. In the engineering marvel of the Brooklyn Bridge, which he first depicted in 1918 and returned to throughout his career, he found a contemporary technological monument that embodied the modern human spirit. Here, Stella portrays the bridge with a linear dynamism borrowed from Italian Futurism. He captures the dizzying height and awesome scale of the bridge from a series of fractured perspectives, combining dramatic views of radiating cables, stone masonry, cityscapes, and night sky. The large scale of the work—it is nearly six feet tall—conjures a Renaissance altar, while the Gothic style of the massive pointed arches evokes medieval churches. By combining contemporary architecture and historical allusions, Stella transformed the Brooklyn Bridge into a twentieth-century symbol of divinity, the quintessence of modern life and the Machine Age.

In My Egypt, Charles Demuth portrayed a massive grain elevator that rose above his hometown of Lancaster, Pennsylvania. Showing it from street level, he used the town’s rooftops to frame it from below—emphasizing just how monumental the structure must have felt to locals. The elevator is depicted through a network of refracting diagonals, a compositional strategy rooted in Cubism. With their resemblance to rays of light, these vectors help convey a sense of awe. So does his title: by invoking Egypt, Demuth suggested that the building, and the architecture of American industry, is on par with the pyramids. But there is ambivalence here as well. When he made this work, Demuth was frequently confined to his family’s home in Lancaster—far from his sophisticated circle of friends in New York. By calling this image his Egypt, Demuth linked Lancaster to the Biblical narrative of Egypt as a site of involuntary bondage.

Elsie Driggs was inspired to make this painting by a childhood memory of Pittsburgh’s steel mills. Returning twenty years later to capture the scene, she initially tried to paint it from inside the mills. But the owners thought the factory floor was no place for a woman, and management worried that she might be a labor agitator or industrial spy.

As much as the painting may seem to viewers today to be a warning about the dangers of industrial pollution, Driggs had no oppositional agenda. She ended up basing the work on drawings she made from a hill above her boardinghouse, later writing that she stared at the mills and told herself: “‘This shouldn’t be beautiful. But it is.’ And it was all I had, so I drew it.”

Earl Horter was close to Charles Demuth, Charles Sheeler, and other Precisionist painters who used crisp lines and flat geometric planes to depict the forms of modern architecture. The Chrysler Building Under Construction combines straightedge drawing and watercolor in-painting to define a composition that accords with the subjects and style of his cohorts. With its passages of repeating patterns in the window grids and near monochromes in the shadows, the image conveys a bold impulse toward geometric abstraction. Horter’s use of light to define the composition and emphasize the rising profile of the Chrysler Building, as viewed from 42nd Street near Third Avenue, captures the intense verticality and ambitious spirit of the skyscraper, then the tallest building in the world.

Toyo Miyatake began his photography career in 1909, shortly after immigrating to Los Angeles from Japan. He first studied under pictorial photographer Harry Shigeta and later Edward Weston, with whom he developed a close friendship. Miyatake shared with Weston an interest in Japanese woodblock printing and European Modernism—sources that would influence his approach toward form and composition. In 1923 Miyatake established his own studio and began making portraits in the Little Tokyo section of Los Angeles, capturing figures such as the painter and poet Yumeji Takehisa, novelist Thomas Mann, and modern dancer Michio Ito, who made Miyatake his company photographer. The artist’s photographs from this period range from intimate portraits of the dancer to abstract studies of motion, light, and shadow.

In 1942, following Pearl Harbor and the US declaration of war on Japan, more than 100,000 Japanese Americans were relocated to internment camps. Miyatake and his family were forced from their home and taken to a camp in Manzanar, California, a remote outpost in the desert. As photography was outlawed in the camp, Miyatake smuggled in a lens, built a makeshift box camera, and began surreptitiously documenting life at Manzanar. He was eventually discovered but allowed to continue shooting, in part because of support from his friend Ansel Adams, who had photographed the camp as a visitor. Miyatake’s photos are among the most poignant traces of this historical episode.

Adapted from Whitney Museum of American Art: Handbook of the Collection (2015), p. 268. Published by the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; distributed by Yale University Press.

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View 646 works

America Is Hard to See | Art & Artists

May 1–Sept 27, 2015

America Is Hard to See | Art & Artists

Exhibition works

Machine Ornament

Man Ray (1890-1976), New York, 1917/1966

Charles Sheeler (1883-1965), River Rouge Plant, 1932

Ralph Steiner (1899-1986), (Louis Lozowick with gears), n.d.

Installation view

Joseph Stella (1877-1946), The Brooklyn Bridge: Variation on an Old Theme, 1939

Edward Steichen (1879-1986), Advertisement for Gorham Silver, 1929

Charles Demuth (1883-1935), My Egypt, 1927

Elsie Driggs (1895-1992), Pittsburgh, 1927

Earl Horter (1881-1940), The Chrysler Building Under Construction, 1931

Victoria Hutson Huntley (1900-1971), Lower New York, 1934

Louis Lozowick (1892-1973), Machine Ornament, c. 1925-27

Toyo Miyatake (1895–1979), Self Portrait, 1932

I. Rice Pereira (1902-1971), Boat Composite, 1932

Artists

Explore works from this exhibition
in the Whitney's collection

On the Hour

America Is Hard to See | Art & Artists

May 1–Sept 27, 2015

America Is Hard to See | Art & Artists

Exhibition works

Machine Ornament

Man Ray (1890-1976), New York, 1917/1966

Charles Sheeler (1883-1965), River Rouge Plant, 1932

Ralph Steiner (1899-1986), (Louis Lozowick with gears), n.d.

Installation view

Joseph Stella (1877-1946), The Brooklyn Bridge: Variation on an Old Theme, 1939

Edward Steichen (1879-1986), Advertisement for Gorham Silver, 1929

Charles Demuth (1883-1935), My Egypt, 1927

Elsie Driggs (1895-1992), Pittsburgh, 1927

Earl Horter (1881-1940), The Chrysler Building Under Construction, 1931

Victoria Hutson Huntley (1900-1971), Lower New York, 1934

Louis Lozowick (1892-1973), Machine Ornament, c. 1925-27

Toyo Miyatake (1895–1979), Self Portrait, 1932

I. Rice Pereira (1902-1971), Boat Composite, 1932

Artists

Explore works from this exhibition in the Whitney's collection

Explore works from this exhibition
in the Whitney's collection