The mechanics of art
Cult of the Machine
ONApril 10, 1940, the Associated Press distributed a story that reported from the agricultural center of Davis, California: “Robots with the ability to outwork dozens of humans are moving into California’s specialty crop fields, which have been heavy users of ‘stoop labor,’ particularly migratory workers.” It was the latest manifestation of a problem that had been growing since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution. Still, the social ramifications of a mechanized workforce had been setting off more and more alarms in recent decades.
The word “robot” had been around only since 1922, when it was introduced to the English-speaking world through Karel Cˇ apek’s play R.U.R.: Rossum’s Universal Robots, given in New York that autumn with Spencer Tracy and Pat O’Brien making their Broadway debuts in the parts of … robots. In 1929, Eugene O’Neill’s play Dynamo involved a young man who turns to a hydro-electric generator for spiritual fulfillment and, not receiving it, sacrifices himself through electrocution. “Is Man Doomed by the Machine Age?” ran a headline in the March 1931 issue of the magazine Modern Mechanics and Inventions. “Well, where are we heading?” mused the writer. “Will machines, sooner or later, destroy civilization by putting all men out of work and concentrating wealth in the hands of a few?”
Nearly a century later, the question still hovers unanswered. That is one reason the exhibition Cult of the Machine: Precisionism and American Art, currently running at the de Young Museum in San Francisco, is so compelling. It has one foot planted mostly in the 1920s and ’30s while the other taps nervously at the present. Many art lovers will be heading to that city to catch a show of monumental new paintings by Julian Schnabel at the Legion of Honor, the sibling museum of the de Young; together, they make up the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco. But visitors should not overlook this less imperious exhibition, elegantly curated by Emma Acker, its hundred-plus artworks ranging through seven invitingly designed rooms, not counting a spacious introductory corridor.
Precisionism can be hard to pin down. As Acker points out in an essay in the accompanying catalogue, the Precisionist artists were not a clearly organized “school.” It was never promoted through a manifesto. She quotes Precisionist artist Elsie Driggs: “We never got together and said now we will be different. It was not devised. Each one of us came to it in our own way and on our own time. It was just that everything came together at one point because there was something in the air.” One sees from the works that it had roots in Cubism and Futurism, both of which lent to the technique of many Precisionist artists. They liked the look of Duchamp, Picasso, and Picabia. It was almost entirely an American approach to making art; foreigners among their ranks are few. The relationship between man and machine was not a uniquely American concern, to be sure; indeed, Cˇ apek’s play originated in Czechoslovakia. Nonetheless, the United States was broadly viewed — and viewed itself — as the epicenter of mechanical innovation. That this exhibition should be on display in the Bay Area, the anchor of the new technology, makes it all the more resonant.
The movement was already well established before it was named. The word “Precisionist” seems to have been first used in 1927, when it was employed in a
New York Times review of works by Preston Dickinson and Niles Spencer and by the art historian Alfred H. Barr Jr. in a lecture about Charles Sheeler and Charles Demuth. The term didn’t really take hold until the late ’40s, when the approach had almost run its course. In the meantime, works now considered Precisionist were sometimes said to belong to clever monikers like the “Immaculate School,” the “New Classicists,” or the “Be Hard School.”
Indeed, most Precisionist imagery is conveyed with a hard edge, rendering subjects — essentially all of it is representational — with almost photographic clarity. Acker writes that “traces of the artists’ brushwork are often minimized almost to the point of effacement.”
“Capturing what Sheeler termed ‘the spirit of the age,’” she writes, “the Precisionists created art that looked ‘machined’ — replacing the emotionally resonant and expressive visual languages of turnof-the-century American art movements such as the Ashcan School with crisply painted, lucid forms that conveyed the artists’ seemingly objective relationship to their subjects, and belied the intensive labor their production entailed.”
It is hardly surprising that the Precisionists found common ground with actual photographers. A striking image is Alfred Stieglitz’s Georgia O’Keeffe — Hand on Wheel, a photograph from 1933, in which O’Keeffe’s hand either grips or (more likely) caresses the wheel of an automobile, the gleam of the bracelet encircling her wrist echoing that of the hubcap. The image resembles a moment in the Charlie Chaplin film Modern Times (1936; a loop from the movie is projected as part of the exhibition), where he is rolling around through the gears of a factory where he is unsuccessfully employed — basically an ironic riposte to Stieglitz’s photograph.
“Precisionist” is not the first word that leaps to mind at the mention of O’Keeffe, but she is represented by several paintings in the show, in every case by pieces that preceded her move to New Mexico. Very striking in this context is her City Night (1926). “With a glimmering moon low on the horizon,” writes Acker, “the sliver of night sky wedged claustrophobically between the soaring columns of tall building is the only reference to nature in this aggressively vertical, man-made environment.” It is one of several paintings in the show that seem to be close cousins, including in particular works by George Copeland
MOST PRECISIONIST IMAGERY IS CONVEYED WITH A HARD EDGE, RENDERING SUBJECTS — ESSENTIALLY ALL OF IT IS REPRESENTATIONAL — WITH ALMOST PHOTOGRAPHIC CLARITY.
Ault. Nor is it far from an analogous aesthetic in the decorative arts, as in the Skyscraper bookcase (circa 1926) by Paul T. Frankl, just short of eight feet tall. It seems not at heart a work of Art Deco, as one might anticipate from furnishings of that era; it is, rather, a Precisionist rendering that uses architectural elements of skyscraper design, including setbacks that make the piece narrower as it rises.
Precisionism was especially at home in the urban world. In a catalogue essay titled “The Absence of Presence: The Precisionist City,” Sue Canterbury observes that “the planar forms and sharp angles of urban architecture were perfect vehicles for experimentation with a reductive realism characterized by precise lines; hard, flattened shapes; a narrow color palette; and a flawless surface finish devoid of decorative detail.” The straight lines of barns and silos were not at all off limits, to be sure, but the Precisionists approached them as buildings, as man-made constructions that dominate and ultimately transform the flowing rurality that surrounds them.
An essay by Lauren Palmor focuses on images of steel mills, which, like factories of other sorts, were favorite subjects of these artists. An oil painting by Charles Demuth, Incense of a New Church (1921), makes one think of O’Neill’s play and the young man who views the electric dynamo as his new God. Demuth’s painting portrays the Lukens Steel Company of Coatesville, Pennsylvania. The inflexible lines of its rooftops and chimneys are the classical stuff of a Precisionist building portrait, but Demuth’s touch of brilliance is to surround them in swirls of smoke, the incense that sends out seductive tentacles to draw in new believers in the industrialist cult.
Objectivity was the watchword for the Precisionists. This is highly unsentimental art. In fact, people rarely appear, and when they do, it seems as if their principal role is to suggest the massive scale of nearby machinery. A few paintings, however, do use human figures to plumb the relationship between people
and the starkness of the machine age. The show ends with a particularly disturbing image: War Bride (1940), by the relatively unsung Clarence Holbrook Carter. Acker quotes the artist: “The mills were going full blast and it made a great impact upon us. That night I dreamed I painted a picture that was very vivid in my mind. … Some of the girls in my senior painting classes were getting married before the boys would be leaving to go into the coming war. This got mixed into my dream painting of the steel mill which became the sanctuary.” A painting born of a dream is, practically by definition, surrealist in inspiration. And yet, the meaning of this one would seem immediately apprehensible and profoundly logical. We see the bride from behind as she walks down the aisle of the church, which has merged with the steel mill. Polished conveyers take the place of pews, and gigantic rollers wait at her destination, in the place of an altar. The groom is not there. He and everyone else have effectively been subsumed into the mill, dispensable pawns in what would soon become known as the military-industrial complex. Does the bride hold out much hope in her confrontation with implacable rollers? Like the young man who prays to a dynamo in O’Neill’s play, or the “incense” emitted by the “new church” of the steel mill in Demuth’s painting, Carter’s bride inhabits an increasingly machine-driven world in which humanity has decided to worship at the altar of technology.
details
▼ Cult of the Machine: Precisionism and American Art
▼ The de Young Museum, San Francisco; through Aug. 12 (deyoung.famsf.org)
▼ The exhibition then travels to the Dallas Museum of Art (dma.org), where it will be on view from Sept. 9, 2018, through Jan. 6, 2019.
▼ The catalogue, Cult of the Machine: Precisionism and American Art, is published by Yale University Press.