"We must look to the artist brain, of all brains, to grasp the significance to society of this thing we call the Machine…" - architect Frank Lloyd Wright, 1901 In the early 1900s, as American technological and manufacturing prowess transformed modern life, some spoke of industry as a new religion and the machine as an object of worship. New technologies like the steam engine, light bulb, and telephone seemed supernatural and all-powerful. Writer Henry Adams first witnessed electrical generators at the Great Exposition of 1900 and said he felt “the forty-foot dynamos as a moral force, much as the early Christians felt the Cross”; photographer Paul Strand called the camera the “New God”; and writer E.B. White noted, “The church merely holds out the remote promise of salvation: the radio tells you if it’s going to rain tomorrow.” This exhibit contains American works of art of the last 100 years in which the machine, both sublime and perilous, acts as muse. For artists seeking a break from tradition, the machine’s potential to reinvent the world made it an ideal symbol. Industrial complexes, urban architecture, and machine-crafted forms became potent modern subjects. Still, an undercurrent of anxiety and at times outright protest has a tangible presence in this work. Artists, always the emotional barometers of a culture, were sensitive to the potential for unchecked technology and industry to oppress the artistic impulse and to devastate humanity and nature.
Showing 1 to 12 of 23 Records |
John C. Wenrich
Watercolor
American Watercolor
John C. Wenrich
Watercolor, gouache and graphite
American Watercolor
Childe Hassam
Lithograph
American Print
John Marin
Etching
American Print
Stuart Davis
Lithograph
American Print
Charles Sheeler
Conte crayon
American Drawing
Charles Ephraim Burchfield
Watercolor, charcoal and graphite
American Watercolor
Charles Sheeler
Gouache
American Watercolor
Elizabeth M. Olds
Lithograph
American Print
André Kertész
Gelatin silver print
American Photograph
Ralston Crawford
Color Lithograph
American Print
Robert Frank
Gelatin silver print on paper
American Photograph
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