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

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

In The Whitney's Collection: Selections from 1900 to 1965, Where We Are and America Is Hard to See

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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.

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

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