The Machine age in America 1918-1941 · 2009. 6. 6. · [From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia] Louis Lozowick (December 10, 1892 – September 9, 1973) was a painter and a printmaker

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Self-Negotiated Unit // MSN 2 // Research 003 // The Machine Age

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Terms, pictures and quotes taken from the following book [except a noted otherwise]:

The Machine age in America 1918-1941Richard Guy Wilson, The Brooklyn Museum, 1986

Term: Geometrical simplificationMachine-styled art and design of the 1920s appear to have been influenced by the perception of parts – gears, cams, axles – or of factory complexes involving many buildings and multiple smokestacks. Machines (...) were simple geometrical elements arranged in complex patterns.[from MODERNE OR DECORATIVE GEOMETRY]

Term: Machine purityA purified style of machine aesthetics began to replace the decorative modernistic in the late 1920s, and by the early 1930s assumed an almost canonical position. Its preeminence in America was due in part to increasing knowledge of the avantgarde European design – the German Bauhaus, Dutch de Stijl, and French purism – and an American equivalent, the objectivist photographers and painters Paul Strand, Charles Sheeler and Charles Demuth. (...)[from MACHINE PURITY]

Term: Machine BeautyAll extolled, along with (Fernand) Léger, unconscious “Machine Beauty, without artistic intention,” and “the true creator ... who daily, modestly, unconsciously, creates and invents these handsome objects, these beautiful machines make us live.”

Term: The poetry of the landscapeBy the twentieth century the machines had radicallytransformed what Ralph Waldo Emerson once called “the poetry of the landscape”.[from ENGINEERING A NEW ART]

Erich Mendelsohn (1887-1953),Drawing for Optical Factory. 1917

Louis Lozowick, Stage Setting for Gas. 1926



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Louis Lozowick[From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia]

Louis Lozowick (December 10, 1892 – September 9, 1973) was a painter and a printmaker. He was born in Russian Empire (Ludvinovka, Ukraine), came to United States in 1906, and died in New Jersey in 1973. He is recognized as an Art Deco and Precisionist artist, and mainly produced streamline, urban-inspired monochromatic lithographs in a career that spanned 50 years. (...)

By 1926, when he joined the editorial board of the left-wing journal, New Masses, he was well-versed in current artistic developments in Europe, such as Constructivism and de Stijl. These hard-edged, linear styles, evident in New York (Brooklyn Bridge), suggest the possibility of an efficient reframing of the world, as did the political theories espoused in New Masses. (...)

Louis Lozowick occupies a premier position among the artists whose imaginations have been touched by the city and its rich variety of architectural forms. In his paintings, drawings, and especially his superb lithographs, Lozowick achieved new aesthetic dimensions in his interpretations of the skyscrapers, smokestacks, elevated trains, and bridges of America. He was a man of diverse interests and talents – historian and critic as well as pioneering artist – whose significant contribution to the art and thought of his age are only now coming to be fully recognized.

Lozowick’s paintings and drawings of American cities embodied the essence of the Machine Age. (...) But the spirit of optimism, the confidence in a rational society enhanced by the triumphs of science and engineering that had motivated Lozowick, became difficult to sustain in the economic shambles of the thirties. Like many artists and writers of the period, he began to reexamine the validity of his early imagery against the claims of broader social content.

[Janet, Flint. The prints of Louis Lozowick : a catalogue raisonne.

New York : Hudson Hills, 1982]

Louis Lozowick, Third Avenue, 1929



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Louis Lozowick, Through Brooklyn Bridge Cables, 1938

Louis Lozowick, Blast Furnaces, 1929



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Louis Lozowick, Stormy Clouds over Manhattan, 1935

Louis Lozowick, Cleveland, 1923

Louis Lozowick, Storm over Manhattan, 1935

Louis Lozowick, New York, 1925



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Hugh Ferriss[From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia]

Hugh Ferriss (1889 – 1962) was an American delineator (one who creates perspective drawings of buildings) and architect. According to Daniel Okrent, Ferriss never designed a single noteworthy building, but after his death a colleague said he ‘influenced my generation of architects’ more than any other man. Ferriss also influenced popular culture, for example Gotham City (the setting for Batman) and Kerry Conran’s Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow.

the grand scale of detail...it is amazing the simple powerblack and white images possess.

CITIES OF TODAY | The City at Night

PROJECTED TRENDS | Evolution of the Set-Back Building - 4 Stages



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PROJECTED TRENDS | Verticals on wide avenue

PROJECTED TRENDS | Overhead traffic-ways

PROJECTED TRENDS | Buildings in the modeling

PROJECTED TRENDS | Crowding towers



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AN IMAGINARY METROPOLIS Looking West from the Business Center

AN IMAGINARY METROPOLIS | Finance

AN IMAGINARY METROPOLIS | Religion

AN IMAGINARY METROPOLIS | Industrial Arts



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Hugh Ferriss (1889-1962)

Hugh Ferriss mastered the medium of shadow and light, molding form in a way that truly captures the spirit of place and being. His massing of form frequently overburdens the viewer and creates an ominous weight of reality in his drawings. Darkness and light collide in manners that define and shape space as well as create mystery. Mystery invites exploration. But perhaps more than anything else, the human scale is what becomes particularly

poignant in Ferriss’ renderings. Structures are depicted at such an immense scale; their vastness is almost beyond comprehension. Yet we can relate to those individuals in his works, their personal perspective of the world around them becomes ours. The striking disparity of towering structures, the megaliths of our times, and the detail of personal space, is what provides this drama of place. We can relate to this drama, living vicariously in a world we may never experience, and understand it implicitly.

The intersection of the ‘big idea’ and a singular perspective of thought are what balance the realms of design in Ferriss’ renderings. Detail becomes acutely obvious because of the whole, not in spite of it. It is this precious sense of life in the presence of an overwhelming whole, the grand scale of place, that provides the stage for smaller realms of interaction to occur. Through his striking portrayal of yet unbuilt worlds, Ferriss lures the viewer into a drama as real as the world beyond the image. A theater for rendering the spirit of life itself.

the rendering is a means to an end;the end is architecture.hugh ferriss, 1940

http://www.johncoulthart.com/feuilleton/2007/12/30/hugh-ferriss-and-the-metropolis-of-tomorrow/

AN IMAGINARY METROPOLIS | Power

CITIES OF TODAY | The Shelton Hotel

Pictures taken from: Hugh Ferriss, The Metropolis of tomorrow, London, 1986



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Illumination.Vitrolite panel in the Niagara Hudson Building,Artist unknown.



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Church Street EL, 1920

Charles Sheeler[From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia]

Charles Sheeler (July 16, 1883 – May 7, 1965) is recognized as one of the founders of American modernism and one of the master photographers of the 20th century. (...)Sheeler painted using a technique that complemented his photography. He was a self-proclaimed Precisionist, a term that emphasized the linear precision he employed in his depictions. As in his photographic works, his subjects were generally material things such as machinery and structures. He was hired by the Ford Motor Co. to photograph and make paintings of their factories.

Sheeler had an uncomplicated, factual world view and regarded his paintings pragmatically, free of romantic or obscure overtones. In this efficient view, there was little room for experimentation; there could be no evidence of any hesitation in achieving the final result. A compulsion about clarity and order permeates Sheeler’s work, and throughout his long production he never relaxed self-imposed standards of organization and “finish”. Sheeler’s personal detachment pervades his art. Essentially he was the anonymous, but acutely selective, observer who always remained outside of the subjects he analysed and reordered. Such self-insulation and self-protection seem to have been a life pattern. (...)



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Ore into Iron, 1953

Ballardvale, 1946

Convolutions, 1952 Aerial Gyrations, 1953

SHEELER AND THE PRECISIONISTSDuring the 20s the Precisionist attitude made its unheralded appearance in the work of a number of American painters (...). The adjective “Precisionist” was used by writers – especially Henry McBride – to characterize rigorous, sharply defined painting style that ranged from photographic realism to abstraction applied themes derived from the American environment. “Immaculate” and “Cubist-Realist” are other general terms used to describe the styles of the group. (...)

Sheeler’s hermetic visualizations of the city’s geometry had no connection with its daily life. Its factories, bridges, gigantic cranes, ore boats, and locomotives existed without human presence. All components of the industrial environment were processed through his vision with equal clarity and dispassion, the same attention given to a wraith of chimney smoke as to a gigantic grain elevator. (...)

Sheeler painted a universe whose various elements relate in perfect harmony. (...) The time is now – the idealized present.

Terms: Formalism, aesthetic of austerity, elimination of nonessentials

[Martin Friedman. Charles Sheeler, Washington : Smithsonian Institution, 1968]



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On a Shaker Theme, 1956

Manchester, 1949

Convergence, 1952

Incantation, 1946

Documents

The Machine age in America 1918-1941 · 2009. 6. 6. · [From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia] Louis Lozowick (December 10, 1892 – September 9, 1973) was a painter and a printmaker