America Is Hard to See

May 1–Sept 27, 2015

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Machine Ornament

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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.

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

Man Ray, New York, 1917

In America Is Hard to See

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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.

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Maya Man, A Realistic Day In My Life Living In New York City

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