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Human scale and the technological sublime. An iconology
of the “crisis of civilization” in the 1930s
MAX BONHOMME
Compared with the technophile enthusiasm that generally characterized the 1920s, the
visual culture of the 1930s was marked by imagery of civilizational decline nourished by
allegorical images, the rhetoric of which I propose to analyze here. The key hypothesis of
this survey is that technological anxiety finds its visual formulae through scale
relationships. In the 1930s, the humanist ideal of man understood as “the measure of all
things” was countered by an image of man threatened by his own technical achievements.
Of course, this type of representation was not dominant in mass culture as a whole. In the
midst of the crisis, the illustrated press continued to glorify technological progress
achieved by Western countries, while a new consumer culture was developing; one that
embraced technical modernity (automobiles, aviation, the radio, and promises of
television). Photographically-illustrated magazines—the principal mass medium of the
era—fully participated in this modernist culture while offering, though not without
paradox, increasingly sharp criticism of industrial civilization and the dangers of
technology.
In March 1933, the illustrated weekly Vu published a special issue devoted to the
social consequences of machinisme (the French term for mechanization) and the threats it
represented to civilization.1 Published at the heart of the economic crisis, which affected
France a few years after the United States, the magazine echoes a debate that had been
stirring the French intellectual world since the late 1920s and that Georges Duhamel
referred to as the querelle du machinisme.2 A photomontage by Marcel Ichac provides the
cover: a dystopian image of a civilization doomed by over-mechanization (fig. 1). This
motif of a man trapped between colossal gears, the meaning of which is explained by the
title of the issue, “End of a Civilization,” is part of a long series of similar images; a
famous sequence from Charlie Chaplin’s film Modern Times (1936) is a memorable
example.
The common media trope of civilizational decline that developed around 1930 can
be summed up by three recurring elements: First, the image of gears as a metonym to
designate either industrial work or work in general, or a phenomenon of autonomous and
1 Vu no. 259 (March 1, 1933).
2 Georges Duhamel, “Sur la querelle du machinisme” in Revue de Paris, XL (15 avril 1933), 721-752; Michel
Raimond, Éloge et critique de la modernité (Paris: PUF, 2000), 92–117.
SHIFT 2
uncontrollable movement; second, a depersonalization of the human figure reduced to a
silhouette whose identity is difficult to distinguish; and third, the disproportion between
man and machine, a contrast maximized by the rupture of scale.3
Should we consider these images of the “crisis of progress” as political allegories?
Indeed, it is tempting to understand them as the visual equivalent of the “rhetoric of
decline,” very much praised by the pamphleteers of the far right.4 However, the political
use of these images betrays diverse and sometimes antithetical ideological positions. The
ideal of a return to the rural, which has its visual counterpart in the revalorization of
landscape, does not reflect a left-right political split.5 Hence, my aim here will be to read
mass media images in their relation to contemporary debates regarding nature, man and
3 We assume that the reduction of the human figure to a silhouette epitomizes humanity as a whole, not just
the industrial worker. In some cases, the reference to the assembly line is more explicit; the image would
refer to anonymity and alienation as effects of the scientific rationalization of work on the individual.
4 Juliette Rennes, “L’argument de la décadence dans les pamphlets d’extrême droite des années 1930” in
Mots 58, no.1 (1999), 152–164.
5 Romy Golan, Modernity and Nostalgia: Art and Politics in France Between the Wars (New Haven: Yale
University Press, 1995).
Figure 1. Vu, no. 259 (March 1, 1933), cover.
Photomontage by Marcel Ichac. © Musée
Nicéphore-Niépce, ville de Chalon-sur-Saône,
France.
Bonhomme | Human scale and the technological sublime 3
technology inasmuch as they betray common rhetorical devices. I propose to identify a
body of both visual and verbal images, characterized by the use of the same stylistic
tropes. But images also possess specifically visual rhetorical means, typically used for
communication or propaganda purposes. These rhetorical devices are the object of
“political iconography,” a current of art history concerned with the political relevance of
Aby Warburg’s and Erwin Panofsky’s iconological method.6 Thus, political iconography
is concerned not only with how images represent relations of power but also how images
actively contribute to shaping political forms. In that sense, it calls for close
iconographical analysis, since the relation between visual elements is considered an
allegory and/or a prefiguration of political organization.7 But considering that the images
studied here were all published in the mass media, the notion of narrative imagery, put
forward by André Gunthert, could also be relevant for understanding the dynamics of
imitation and appropriation typical of the functioning of cultural industries: “To the
question: what do images do? we can answer: they produce other images. This
characteristic productivity makes it possible to distinguish between iconography, a group
of images isolated from any criterion, and imagery defined by its public success, which
presents internal coherence traits, but also an evolutionary dynamic.”8
Critics of mechanization in France and Europe
The cover of Vu cannot be understood outside the ideological context of France circa
1930, marked by harsh debate over the merits and dangers of machinisme. The intensity
of the polemic increased after 1931, when the effects of the economic crisis were first
felt, even though the condemnation of “the Machine” is a literary topos whose roots go
back to Romanticism.9 The critics of mechanization, emanating both from the intellectual
world and from workers’ resistance, had until then been rather measured in the French
context, compared, at least, to the situation in Britain.10
After the ravages of the First
World War, the enthusiasm for technical progress was already strongly altered: it was
6 Uwe Fleckner, Martin Warnke, Hendrik Ziegler, eds., Handbuch der politischen Ikonographie, 2 vol.
(Munich: C.H. Beck, 2011).
7 A classic example is the frontispice of Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan: Horst Bredekamp, “Thomas Hobbes’s
Visual Strategies” in The Cambridge Companion to Hobbes’s Leviathan, ed. Patricia Springborg (Cambridge
and New York : Cambridge University Press, 2007). Carlo Ginzburg, Fear, Reverence, Terror (Calcutta and
London: Seagull Books, 2017). See also Christian Joschke, “À quoi sert l’iconographie politique?” in
Perspective, no.1 (2012), 187–192. Patrick Boucheron, The Power of Images: Siena, 1338 (Cambridge, UK
and Medford, USA: Polity, 2018).
8 André Gunthert, “Comment lisons-nous les images? Les imageries narratives” in Politiques visuelles, ed.
Gil Bartholeyns (Dijon: Les Presses du réel, 2016), 223, author’s translation.
9 Serge Audier, La société écologique et ses ennemis (Paris: La Découverte, 2017).
10 François Jarrige, Techno-critiques. Du refus des machines à la contestation des technosciences (Paris: La
Découverte, 2014).
SHIFT 4
now clear that “the Machine” could prove to be destructive and that industrial war could
take on horrifically inhuman forms. This memory of the First World War weighed
heavily on the authors, whom, in the interwar period, placed themselves on the side of
critics of machinisme.
Georges Duhamel, one of the main protagonists in this debate, stressed the
importance of his first-hand experience of war as he raised awareness about the
potentially destructive nature of technology. In 1930, Duhamel published a pamphlet
entitled Scènes de la vie future, which was met with considerable success.11
In this
account of the writer’s journey to the United States at the end of 1929, he criticizes the
supposed materialism of American civilization, which he detects in industrial production
and increasingly mechanized daily life as well as cultural production (cinema and
recorded music). In what Duhamel considers an excess of rationalism, he targets both the
transformation of work due to mechanization, which he opposes to qualified manual
work, and the transformation of culture, which has become a mass culture; in particular
cinema, whose unbridled rhythm he believes is not conducive to reflection. Scènes de la
vie future was commented on profusely by critics at the time and gave rise to a vivid
debate in the press around 1930.12
Many works contemporary to Duhamel’s pamphlet
multiply arguments against mechanization by further developing this rhetoric of
excessiveness.13
For Georges Duhamel, as for most of the French authors who took part in the
quarrel, the United States constituted the emblem of the modern machinist civilization
characterized by excessiveness. The skyscraper is but one of the symbols of its
technological excess. Jean-Louis Cohen has shown to what extent this association has
marked, often in the negative, the French architectural imagination.14
In this notion of
excessiveness, political and aesthetic stakes are tightly knotted, as the negative image of
the United States (but also of its Eastern mirror, the USSR) represents for these authors a
threat to a “spirit of measure” considered specifically French. For Duhamel, America and
gigantism are inseparable, if only by the very scale of the American territory:
11 Georges Duhamel, America: The Menace, trans. by Charles Miner Thompson (New York and Boston:
Houghton Mifflin Co., 1931).
12 Anne-Marie Duranton-Crabol, “De l’anti-américanisme en France vers 1930: la réception des Scènes de la
vie future” in Revue d’histoire moderne et contemporaine, no. 48-1 (2001), 120–137. See also Gérard de
Catalogne, Dialogue entre deux mondes: enquête (Paris: Alexis Redier, 1931).
13 Jean-Léopold Duplan, Sa majesté la machine (Paris: Payot, 1930); Gina Lombroso, La rançon du
machinisme (Paris: Payot, 1931); Louis Hoyack, Où va le machinisme? (Paris: Marcel Rivière, 1931); Henri
Bergson, Les Deux Sources de la morale et de la religion (Paris: Félix Alcan, 1932); Henri Daniel-Rops, Le
Monde sans âme (Paris: Plon, 1932); Nicolas Berdiaev, L’Homme et la Machine (Paris: Éditions Je sers,
1933).
14 Jean-Louis Cohen, ed., Scènes de la vie future: l’architecture européenne et la tentation de l’Amérique,
1893-1960 (Montréal: Centre canadien d’architecture and Paris: Flammarion, 1995).
Bonhomme | Human scale and the technological sublime 5
Its inhuman cities, the American people have set them up on a ground that
never invites moderation. Lakes, valleys, rivers, forests, plains, everything is
oversized, nothing seems to be done to incline man towards a thought of
harmony. Everything there is too big. Everything discourages Apollo and
Minerva.15
Contrary to criticisms of mechanization developed since the nineteenth century, which
focused essentially on the nature of industrial work and sometimes on its environmental
consequences, the discourse of decline around 1930 goes so far as to anticipate the
destruction of humanity itself. In later decades, science fiction would make its own the
narrative of the uprising of machines: a result of the original Promethean sin.16
In
Germany, philosopher Oswald Spengler pursued a similar idea in a markedly more tragic
tone than Duhamel’s Voltairian satires. Spengler’s reception in France was, nonetheless,
very limited. This is not surprising given the explicitly Francophobic character of his
Decline of the West (1918–1922).17
Technology had an ambivalent status in Spengler’s
view: considered as the epitome of Western civilization in its Faustian relationship to
nature, the exponential development it had recently experienced testified, according to
him, to a harmful domination of materialism; a symptom of the civilizational decline he
condemned.18
Above all, it was with Spengler that the idea of a technological excess—
both fascinating and terrifying—was most explicitly formulated, in terms that betray his
taste for the aesthetics of the sublime. Modern technology would indeed testify to an
impetus “towards faraway places without limits”19
:
15 “Ses cités inhumaines, le peuple américain les a dressées sur un sol qui, jamais, n’invite à la modération.
Lacs, vallées, rivières, forêts, plaines, tout est démesuré, rien ne semble fait pour incliner l’homme vers une
pensée d’harmonie. Tout y est trop grand. Tout y décourage Apollon et Minerve.” Georges Duhamel, Scènes
de la vie future [1930] (Paris: Mille et une nuits, 2003), 81, author’s translation.
16 Jean-Baptiste Fressoz, L’apocalypse joyeuse : une histoire du risque technologique (Paris: Seuil, 2012).
The myth of machines uprising dates back at least to the nineteenth century, in particular to the work of
Samuel Butler (1835-1902) which had been rediscovered in the 1930s: see J.B. Fort, “Les idées de Samuel
Butler” in Revue Philosophique de la France et de l’Étranger, t. 122, no. 9–10 (Sep–Oct. 1936), 215–239.
17 Oswald Spengler, The Decline of the West [1918-1922], trans. Charles Francis Atkinson (New York:
Vintage Books, 2006). First French translation by M. Tazerout: Paris, Gallimard, 1931 [first part] and 1933
[second part].
18 “The creature is rising up against its creator. As once the microcosm Man against Nature, so now the
microcosm Machine is revolting against Nordic Man. The lord of the World is becoming the slave of the
Machine, which is forcing him—forcing us all, whether we are aware of it or not—to follow its course. The
victor, crashed, is dragged to death by the team.” Oswald Spengler, Man and Technics: A Contribution to the
Philosophy of Life [1931], trans. C.F. Atkinson (New York: Alfred Knopf, 1932), 46. See also Eric Michaud,
“Figures nazies de Prométhée, de l’’homme faustien’ de Spengler, au ‘Travailleur’ de Jünger” in
Communications, no.78 (2005), 163–173.
19 Oswald Spengler, Le déclin de l’Occident, esquisse d’une morphologie de l’histoire universelle, v. II
[1922], trans. by M.Tazerout (Paris: Gallimard, 1948), 462, author’s translation from the French edition.
SHIFT 6
That is why the word spoken is sent instantly beyond the seas; that is why we
witness this ambition for records and dimensions, giant hangars for giant
machines, frightening ships and bridges, skyscraper constructions; fabulous
forces that obey, in a hurried point, the hand of a child; factories of steel and
glass that reel, tremble, groan, and in which the tiny homunculus circulates
as absolute master and finally feels nature below him.20
Lucien Febvre rightly noticed how Spengler’s theory of History was fed by the fears of
Germany in the 1920s and how the rhetoric of civilizational decline nourished an
unhealthy joy (Schadenfreude) that consisted in anticipating one’s own ruin:
Spengler had, in the 1920s, some of the most coveted commodities, say, a
certain pathos, a resolute anti-intellectualism, the heroic notion of destiny,
anti-aesthetics, the thrill of the human creature before the majesty, the ample
majesty of History.21
In France, some authors described as “non-conformists,” most of whom shared a
rejection of democracy and liberalism, agree with certain Spenglerian theses concerning
the role of technology in the “decline” of civilization, considered as a harmful victory of
materialism over “the Spirit.”22
It would be inaccurate, however, to attribute these
criticisms of modernity solely to a reactionary line of thinking, not only because
dictatorships have often put forward a façade of reconciliation between the Blut und
20 “C’est pour cela que le mot prononcé est envoyé instantanément au delà des mers; c’est pour cela qu’on
assiste à cette ambition des records et des dimensions, géants hangars pour des machines géantes, bateaux et
ponts effrayants, constructions de gratte-ciel; forces fabuleuses qui obéissent, en un point pressé, à la main
d’un enfant; usines d’acier et de verre qui tanguent, tremblent, gémissent, et dans lesquelles le minuscule
homunculus circule en maître absolu et sent finalement la nature au-dessous de lui.” Spengler, Le déclin de
l’Occident, 463.
21 “Spengler tenait boutique, en ces années 20, des denrées alors les plus convoitées disons, un certain
pathétique, un anti-intellectualisme résolu, la notion héroïque du destin, l’anti-esthéticisme, le frisson de la
créature humaine devant la majesté, l’ample majesté de l’Histoire.” Lucien Febvre, “De Spengler à Toynbee,
quelques philosophies opportunistes de l’histoire” in Revue de métaphysique et de morale, 43rd year, no. 4
(1936), 579, author’s translation.
22 Jean-Louis Loubet del Bayle, Les non-conformistes des années 30: une tentative de renouvellement de la
pensée politique française (Paris: Seuil, 1987). Olivier Dard, Le rendez-vous manqué des relèves des années
trente (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 2002). In fact, since the 1920s, mechanization has been
associated with a kind of unnatural perversion by conservative writers: “The machine is an automaton artisan
by which the man, lured and exhausted by the very effort of this birth, pretends to be replaced. But he is
betrayed. He grieves himself and spoils himself in his vain machinations as in the substitutions of sexual life.
[. . .] Because there can be no question of repudiating it, [. . .] it is necessary to ward off the deviation, the
inversion.” Pierre Drieu La Rochelle, Mesure de la France (Paris: Grasset, 1922), 112, author’s translation.
(“La machine est un artisan automate par quoi l’homme, leurré et épuisé par l’effort même de cet
enfantement, pretend se faire remplacer. Mais il est trahi. Il se chagrine et s’abîme dans de vaines
machinations comme dans les substitutions de la vie sexuelle. […] Car il ne peut être question de la répudier,
[…] il faut conjurer la deviation, l’inversion.”)
Bonhomme | Human scale and the technological sublime 7
Boden tradition and Promethean technology, but also because anarchist and socialist
currents also warned—for other purposes—against the possible dangers of technological
development (with positions that helped to form the modern concept of political ecology
or ecological society).23
From the crucified worker to the worker-monument
The cover of Vu calls for another genealogy, one that highlights the presence of
mythological Nachlaben in twentieth century political iconography.24
Indeed, Marcel
Ichac’s photomontage makes visual references that evoke the negative connotations of
the iconography of torture (the breaking wheel), the representation of the underworld
(with the flames in the background) and, more specifically, the figure of Ixion. This
association between mechanized work and torture instruments was already very present
within militant iconography, especially in anarchist imagery. In 1906, the painter
František Kupka published a lithograph showing a worker crucified on a cogwheel in the
anarchist newspaper Les Temps nouveaux (fig. 2).
This iconographic type works as a visual analogy between work and torture.
Possibly, this visual formula could have developed in reference to the supposed
etymology of the word travail (work), purportedly derived from the Roman word
tripalium, a torture device used in ancient Rome to punish rebel slaves. Although this
etymology has been questioned by linguists, it is likely that it fed the analogies observed
in the political imagery of that time.25
The visual metaphor was used in the 1930s in
connection with criticism of the “scientific” organization of work known as Taylorism.
For example, in 1934 the American communist illustrator Hugo Gellert published a
pictorial interpretation of Karl Marx’s Capital (fig. 3), in which workers are shown
tortured on huge gears.26
The metaphor works on two levels: the worker is reduced to a
simple cog in the industrial machine, but he is also sacrificed (like the crucified Christ)
on the altar of capitalist profit.
23 Jeffrey Herf, Reactionary Modernism: Technology, Culture, and Politics in Weimar and the Third Reich
(Cambridge [UK]: Cambridge University Press, 1984). Audier, La société écologique.
24 On the notion of Nachleben, see Georges Didi-Huberman, The Surviving Image. Phantoms of Time and
Time of Phantoms: Aby Warburg’s History of Art (Philadelphia: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2018).
25 André Eskénazi, “L’étymologie de Travail” in Romania, vol. 126, no. 503 (2008), 296–372. Christoph
Bertsch, “Der grekreuzigte Arbeiter. Anmerkung zu einem vernachlässigten Bildtypus der
Zwischenkriegzeit” in Arbeit und Industrie in der bildenden Kunst, ed. Klaus Türk (Stuttgart: Steiner,
1997), 40–49.
26 Hugo Gellert, Karl Marx’s Capital in Lithographs (New York : Ray Long & Richard Smith, 1934), n.p.
SHIFT 8
As a counterpoint to this negative imagery of industrial labor under a capitalist
regime, the affirmative visual strategies of communist propaganda tended to reverse the
relation of scale between man and machine. From the crucified worker, dominated by the
mechanical element, one passes then to the worker-monument, now overhanging the
means of production of which he has become master. A photomontage by John Heartfield
for the cover of the German communist magazine Arbeiter Illustrierte Zeitung could be
defined as a visual hyperbole, the meaning of which is oriented by scale relationships
(fig. 4). The face of a Soviet worker occupies two thirds of the image, surmounting
industrial buildings. These cover the man’s arms, turning him into a man-machine hybrid,
as suggested by the caption “A new man—Master of a New World.”
Communism, in fact, is characterized by an emancipatory vision of technology,
insofar as it places power in the hands of the workers and not the capitalists. We know,
for example, the enthusiasm with which Taylorist principles were welcomed in Lenin’s
Russia. At the time of the French querelle du machinisme, the Communists of course
took part in the debate, but only to denounce the reactionary “bourgeois” character of
Figure 2. František Kupka, untitled lithograph
published in Les Temps nouveaux 12, no.32
(December 8, 1906), 8. © Bibliothèque La
Contemporaine, Nanterre, France.
Figure 3. Hugo Gellert, Karl Marx Capital in
Lithographs (New York : Ray Long & Richard
Smith, 1934), n.p. © Digital Library of India,
Kolkata.
Bonhomme | Human scale and the technological sublime 9
these critics of mechanization.27
The position of the French Communist Party in this
regard is summed up by sociologist Georges Friedmann in the communist magazine
Regards:
Line work, in itself, facilitates production, makes it faster, often easier. But
for this to happen (as Marx still says about the tool) man must use it and not
serve it. This control of the machine is only possible in a socialist regime
where the instruments of production are actually exploited for the benefit of
the community, as we see in the USSR.28
In this respect, one should stress the importance of the magazine L'URSS en Construction
(USSR in Construction), a propaganda magazine illustrated with photographs and
designed by artists, most of whom were protagonists of Constructivism. This magazine
contributed crucially to the dissemination of the Soviet ideal of technological progress in
Western Europe, magnified by the magazine’s large format (30 by 41 centimeters) and
the quality of its photographic reproductions.
From the visual point of view, one of the recurring elements of communist
propaganda consists in formulating an analogy between the gigantism of the machine and
the gigantism of the worker himself (these “heroic” figures are mostly masculine). This is
the case, for example, with the cover of a book by Paul Vaillant-Couturier published by
the French Communist Party (fig. 5). The blue lettering of the title, “The Industrial
Giants,” is superimposed on a photograph by Max Alpert showing two workers from
below, which accentuates the effect of monumentality. Photomontage lends itself
particularly well to these antinaturalistic scale games, insofar as it is based on the
assembly of photographic fragments, sometimes heterogeneous in size, without
necessarily relying on the rules of linear perspective. In this regard, one can speak of
meaningful perspective or perspective of importance to characterize an image in which
objects are represented not according to their spatial situation but according to their
symbolic importance, as is often the case in medieval art.29
In the photomontages of the
1920s and 1930s, there are also occurrences of inverted perspective (the vanishing lines
do not meet in the background of the image, but in front of it). For art historian Devin
Fore, this reversal of perspective testifies to a desire to undermine the anthropocentric
27 Georges Friedmann, Problèmes du machinisme en URSS et dans les pays capitalists (Paris: Éditions
Sociales Internationales, 1934); Georges Friedmann, “Machine et humanisme” in Europe, no. 151 (July 15,
1935), 437–444.
28 “Le travail à la chaîne, en lui-même, facilite la production, la rend plus rapide, souvent plus aisée. Mais il
faut pour cela (comme dit encore à propos de l’outil, Marx) que l’homme s’en serve et non pas qu’il le serve.
Ce contrôle de la machine n’est possible qu’en régime socialiste où les instruments de production sont
réellement exploités au bénéfice de la collectivité, comme nous le voyons en URSS.” Georges Friedmann,
“Machinisme” in Regards sur le monde du travail, no. 16 (April 1933), n.p., author’s translation.
29 Erwin Panofsky, Perspective as Symbolic Form [1927] (New York: Zone Books, 2012).
SHIFT 10
humanist paradigm, particularly within the constructivist avant-garde which celebrated
the new culture of the machine.30
Technological Sublime
In the United States in the 1930s, representations of industry in the illustrated press were
often imbued with the aesthetics of the sublime, in continuation with what David Nye
30 Devin Fore, Realism after Modernism: The Rehumanization of Art and Literature (Cambridge, MA: MIT
Press, 2012), 27–74.
Figure 4. Arbeiter Illustrierte Zeitung 13, no.44
(November 1, 1934), cover. Photomontage by John
Heartfield. © Bibliothèque La Contemporaine,
Nanterre, France.
Figure 5. Paul Vaillant-Couturier, Les bâtisseurs
de la vie nouvelle : neuf mois de voyage dans
l’URSS du plan quinquennal. Volume 3 : Les
géants industriels (Paris: Bureau d’éditions, 1932),
cover. Designer unknown, photographs by Max
Alpert. © Bibliothèque La Contemporaine,
Nanterre, France.
Bonhomme | Human scale and the technological sublime 11
described as the “American technological sublime.”31
Intended to counter the very idea of
alienation and technological risk by placing modern industry within a horizon of mastery
over the earth and crossing of borders (the frontier), the aesthetics of the technological
sublime is inseparable from a political project. That is, it maintains the ferment of
national unity in times of crisis, by reestablishing a transcendence, formerly associated
with the wilderness and now with the works of man himself. David Nye also underlines
the fact that the sublime is inseparable from a feeling of terror mixed with admiration.
Associated in principle with the unlimited powers of nature, the sublime generated by
human creations (Nye gives as examples bridges, dams, and towers) can induce the idea
of a threat to man himself, overwhelmed by the scale of his own achievements.
The first cover of Life magazine, a weekly founded by Henry Luce in 1936, shows
Fort Peck Dam photographed by Margaret Bourke-White (fig. 6), a photographer well
known for her images of factories and industrial objects. Bourke-White had already done
much to spread a positive image of great American industry, particularly through her
collaboration with Fortune magazine, an illustrated weekly dedicated to trade and
31 David Nye, American Technological Sublime (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1994); Leo Marx, The
Machine in the Garden. Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in America [1964] (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2000).
Figure 6. Life, no.1 (November 23, 1936),
cover. Photograph by Margaret Bourke-White. ©
Bibliothèque La Contemporaine, Nanterre,
France.
SHIFT 12
industry, also founded by Henry Luce in 1930. The dam, the construction of which was
part of the policy of major works conducted as part of the New Deal, is staged here in
such a way as to highlight its gigantic scale. The technical feat represented is in contrast
with the minuteness of the human figure, which lends scale to the image. The enormous
mass of the cliff-like dam evokes the geological formations of canyons and such
emblematic national sites as Yosemite. Inscribed in the image, therefore, is the
imagination of the conquest of the West and the aesthetic of the sublime by which the
American landscape had been characterized since the nineteenth century.32
For Terry Smith, the industrial sublime is part of a political and cultural strategy
that consists in naturalizing technology and nationalizing the idea of modernity (hitherto
rather associated with European culture, especially in the artistic field).33
James S. Miller
also shows how Fortune contributed to the invention of an “industrial folklore”
legitimizing industrial capitalism as the result of an authentically American vernacular
and equally shared entrepreneurial spirit between the people and the elites.34
While the
glorification of modern industry seemed to contradict the regionalist artistic currents then
very popular in the United States, Fortune’s case demonstrates that the valorization of the
American vernacular and “primitive” traits serves to formulate a reconciliation between
the past and the present, and to inscribe modern technological development in a long-
term tradition.
Following a reading of history in terms of civilizations (rather than nations or
social classes, for example), the photographs of the Fort Peck Dam elevate it to the status
of a monument, an equivalent to the colossal buildings built by ancient civilizations: a
monument of the machinist civilization. This articulation between modernism and
primitivism is also found among American precisionist painters such as Charles Sheeler
or Charles Demuth, who entitled one of his paintings of silos My Egypt (1927).
France, the “country of balance”
From the French point of view, American technological excess aroused both fear and
fascination. In a special issue of Vu (May 30, 1936) devoted to the theses of economist
Jacques Duboin, we find a photograph of the Hoover Dam reproduced on a double-page
spread (fig. 7).35
The intervention of graphic designers Marc Réal and Alexandre
32 Anthony F. Arrigo, Imagining Hoover Dam: The Making of a Cultural Icon (Reno: University of Nevada
Press, 2014).
33 Terry Smith, Making the Modern: Industry, Art, and Design in America (Chicago and London: University
of Chicago Press, 1993).
34 James S. Miller, “White-collar Excavations: Fortune Magazine and the Invention of the Industrial Folk” in
American Periodicals 13 (2003), 84–104.
35 Jacques Duboin defended a distributive economy based on an acceleration of mechanization and a
reduction in working time. The issue of Vu was published shortly after the victory of the Popular Front in the
1936 legislative elections.
Bonhomme | Human scale and the technological sublime 13
Liberman consisted in underlining the microscopic size of man confronted with the
titanic mass of the dam. The graph on the right emphasizes the exponential increase in
industrial production since the 1920s, while repeating, in legend, the haunting fear of a
loss of control over machines: “Will the machine get its revenge? Will man lose control
of his work?”
Faced with the two technological giants that were the United States and the USSR,
journalists and politicians have constantly presented France in the 1930s as the “country
of balance.” “La France, pays de la mesure” was indeed the title given to a special issue
of Vu (fig. 8) dedicated to the consequences of the economic crisis in France.36
This ideal
also pervades one of the most widely distributed collections of photographs in the 1930s:
La France travaille (France at Work) by François Kollar, published in several issues
from 1931 to 1934. If some of Kollar’s images perpetuate certain codes of industrial
photography in which the workers pose next to gigantic machines, the photographer
generally refused the rhetoric of excessiveness. Most of his images show the workers in
close-up, emphasizing their manual skill and control over their work tools (fig. 7). In
short, Kollar’s work exemplifies the so-called “humanist” photographic style, in the sense
36 Vu, no. 220 (June 1, 1932).
Figure 7. Vu, special issue (May 30, 1936). Photographer unknown, graphic design by Alexander Liberman
and Marc Réal. © Musée Nicéphore-Niépce, ville de Chalon-sur-Saône, France.
SHIFT 14
that it opposes the depersonalization and disproportion that I identify as iconic figures of
the “crisis of civilization.”
Three years after Scènes de la vie future, Georges Duhamel published a lecture
entitled L'Humaniste et l'automate, illustrated by photographer Jean Roubier.37
Against
the excesses of technical rationalization, Duhamel defended the transmission of manual
knowledge and the intuitive knowledge that a practitioner can have of his working tool,
which demands long-time learning. The “humanist” ideal of technique that characterizes
Kollar’s collection thus crossed the visual and verbal formulations of the man-machine
relationship in France before becoming a leitmotif in the propaganda of the Popular
Front.
The International Exhibition of “Arts and Techniques Applied to Modern Life,”
which took place in Paris in 1937, could be globally interpreted as an attempt, on the part
of the organizers, to present France as the country of measure, faced with totalitarian
countries’ demonstrations of power. As Shanny Peer has shown, the image of the nation
conveyed by the exhibition was that of a balanced economy, in which industry would not
37 Céline Glatard, “Jean Roubier et Georges Duhamel” in Études photographiques 33 (Autumn 2015),
http://etudesphotographiques.revues.org/3557 (accessed April 13, 2018).
Figure 8. Vu, no. 220 (June 1, 1932),
cover. Artist unknown. © Musée
Nicéphore-Niépce, ville de Chalon-sur-
Saône, France.
Bonhomme | Human scale and the technological sublime 15
overtake agriculture.38
Unlike some retrospective readings that would like to see it as a
precedent for the “return to the soil” ideology put forward by the State of Vichy under
Nazi rule, the 1937 Exhibition must be understood as an effort on the part of the
government to display the image of measured modernization, a position of balance
between communist productivism and the haunting fear of excessive mechanization.39
François Kollar’s images are ubiquitous in the exhibition. One of his photographs
is used in a monumental photomontage entitled Travailler, made by Fernand Léger for
the Pavillon des Temps Nouveaux. Conceived as a showcase for the CIAM (International
Congress of Modern Architecture), the Pavilion deploys a didactic approach in favor of
modern urban planning, whose philosophical foundations rely on faith in the virtues of
mastered technology in the service of human progress. From this point of view, Fernand
Léger’s photomontage works as an emblem of a harmonious relationship with
technology, associating the Promethean dimension of the modern project with a concern
for “humanistic” human scale. According to Romy Golan, “The motif reads like an
actualization of Leonardo’s Vitruvian Man, who continues to stand, imperturbably, at the
epicenter of the mechanical world and remains, as such, the measure of all things.”40
Conclusion
This case study of an iconographical motif omnipresent in 1930s visual culture has
shown how certain images and rhetorical devices cross discourses and pictures, drawing
the contours of a coherent political mythology. “The Machine” (in the singular, according
to a recurrent hypostasis in the discourse), and more specifically the cogwheel, function
as visual allegories of the uncontrolled movement of History, the fatal outcome of which
is then announced. To the verbal topoi of excessiveness correspond as many images in
which proportion ratios function as signifying elements.
Faced with the predicted collapse of modern civilization, the iconography of
decline must be analyzed for its prospective and mobilizing value. Operating on the
register of anticipation, readily hyperbolic, the rhetoric of these images is intended to
strike the imagination and possibly trigger action. Following the inventory of political
iconography initiated by Martin Warnke, the motif of the man and the wheel can be
considered one of those visual formulae loaded with historical references and ready to be
38 Shanny Peer, France on Display: Peasants, Provincials, and Folklore in the 1937 Paris World’s Fair
(Albany: State University of New York Press, 1998), 14–20; Gérard Namer, “Les imaginaires dans
l’exposition de 1937” in Cahiers internationaux de sociologie, year 28, vol. LXX (January–June 1981), 35–
62.
39 Golan, Modernity and Nostalgia, 119–136.
40 Romy Golan, Muralnomad: The Paradox of Mural Painting in Europe 1927–1957 (New Haven: Yale
University Press, 2009), 162. On the modern reinterpretations of the Vitruvian man, see Giovanni Lista, Da
Leonardo a Boccioni: l’Uomo vitruviano e l’arte moderna (Milan: Mudima, 2012).
SHIFT 16
used for (sometimes antithetical) political purposes.41
Coming from socialist and
anarchist iconography, the motif of the machine as torture wheel has been gradually
abandoned in favor of a new Promethean vision of technology, put forward by both the
USSR and the United States. In the context of France in the 1930s, these two countries
were seen as countermodels for their supposed technological gigantism; hence the
elaboration of a “humanist” iconography that aimed to reconcile man, machine and land.
Max Bonhomme is a PhD candidate in Art History at Paris-Nanterre University. His
doctoral dissertation deals with political photomontage in France between 1925 and
1945.
41 Fleckner et al., Handbuch der politischen Ikonographie.
