| Artist: | Sheeler, Charles |
|
|---|---|---|
| Title of Work: | Classic Landscape | |
| Date of Work: | 1931 | |
| Nationality: | American | |
| Context: | Post-War Utopian Machine Aesthetic | |
| Movement: | American Precisionism | |
| Medium: | Oil | |
| Subject: the American industrialized landscape, which Sheeler sees as having a "classical" beauty in its own right. The scene is very geometrically ordered in its cylindrical shapes and the parallels of its train tracks. It is these structural forms that seem to interest the artist more than even the subject itself. The American Precisionists found total abstraction too radical a move and they thus maintained a subject, but a hard-edge geometric abstraction of form is what underlies their industrial themes. This factory scene is not rendered with any critique of industrial fallout or ecological concern; instead, it is depicted with a utopian idealization of technological progress and a profound appreciation of a machine aesthetic. Peopleless and without any emotional expression, the scene stresses order and stability with a classical, idealizing sensibility that has been updated to the modern world. Style: the American Precisionists were sometimes called "The Immaculate School" due to their clean, cool, detached style of painting that eliminated all traces of the painting process and personal touch. Anti-gestural in style, they favored a clean-edged line so precise that it seemed almost surgical. Order is almost compulsive in this logically, highly disciplined work, which seems almost as if it were painted by a machine. The painting is characterized by a smooth, precise technique in which subject matter is defined by sharp-edged, simplified forms and a flat, non-painterly handling of color. It is no wonder that he greatly admired the Italian Renaissance painter, Piero della Francesca, known for his order and reductive, simplified forms. Sheeler also liked Shaker furniture, for precisely its minimalist aesthetic of pure, unadorned forms and solid craftsmanship. "Classic Landscape" is a carefully structured image that is as much an abstraction in terms of the architectonics of its design as it is representational. Context: in the 19th c., America's Manifest Destiny was measured in terms of her vast wilderness spaces and her open, seemingly infinite frontier; in the 20th c., following WWI, America's destiny shfits radically from nature to industry as the U.S. takes advantage of the window of opportunity for industrial growth that opened up after the war. With Europe still recovering from the devastation of her losses and a world war fought on her soil, the U.S. surged ahead with a utopian optimism during the 1920s. Faith in industrial production and the machine became a new religion and a widespread belief in progress through technology became deeply embedded in the American psyche. American Precisionism-- contemporary with Mondrian's grids, Russian Constructivism, and Germany's Bauhaus--reflects an uncritical view of this period of rapid urbanization and industrialization during the twenties. No sense of the increasing labor unrest or violence that greeted newly emerging unions is shown in this pristine scene of industrial stability and "classical" beauty. "The dominant trend in America of today," wrote Lozowick, a Precisionist painter, "is toward order and organization which find their outward sign and symbol in the rigid geometry of the American city: in the verticals of its smoke stacks, in the parallels of its car tracks, the squares of its streets, the cubes of its factories, the arc of its bridges, the cylinders of its gas tanks." | ||
