America Is Hard to See

May 1–Sept 27, 2015

All

5 / 23

Previous Next

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.

Back

7 / 13

Previous Next

Large industrial building with rays of light crossing it.

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.

Artists

Explore works from this exhibition
in the Whitney's collection

View 648 works

America Is Hard to See

Machine Ornament

5

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

Artists

Explore works from this exhibition
in the Whitney's collection

On the Hour

America Is Hard to See

Machine Ornament

5

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

Artists

Explore works from this exhibition in the Whitney's collection

Explore works from this exhibition
in the Whitney's collection