G H O S T I N T H E

GEARB X Cult of the Machine:

Precisionism and American Art at the de Young Museum
by James D. Balestrieri

Auburn Automobile Company, Cord 812 Phaeton, 1937. Iron, steel, copper, brass, chrome,
rubber, glass, leather, vinyl, wool, plastics and paint, 58 x 70 x 192 in. Academy of Art University
Automobile Museum, San Francisco. Photograph by Randy Dodson.

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 Charles Sheeler (1883-1965), Classic Landscape, 1931. Oil on canvas, 25 x 32¼ in. National Gallery of Art,
Washington, D.C., Collection of Barney A. Ebsworth, 2000.39.2.

DESIGN FOR AN ESSAY ON PRECISIONISM

 1 I heard my father’s voice when I saw that “coffin nose” on the image of the Cord 812 Phaeton
convertible in the catalog for Cult of the Machine: Precisionism and American Art, the exhibition opening
at the de Young Museum in San Francisco. During the Depression, one of his many jobs was as a
salesman for the Auburn Cord Duesenberg dealership in Milwaukee. It came just after his stint
running bootleg liquor—very quickly, in a souped up Model A—between Milwaukee and Grand
Junction, Nebraska (a tale for another time). Did he sell a Cord? Let him tell it. “Who in hell’s
bells was going to buy a Cord in the middle of a Depression? They were too pricey, even for the
well-to-do who still had money.” For fun, out of boredom, he put them through their paces along
Milwaukee’s Lake Drive. Not many Cords were made; fewer were sold.Yet Gordon Buehrig’s design
was visionary, is legendary, and the Cord was the car of choice among those of us who spent grades
5 through 8 drawing cars during filmstrips about the Hoover Dam.

1a It’s the famous “coffin nose” on the Cord that makes it a keystone piece in an exhibition that
describes American art’s ambivalently brief love aff air with the machine, a love aff air that swiftly
soured as artists saw the dehumanizing effects of factory work and the war machine of the First World
War where machines were angels of death rather than saviors of humanity.

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 2 Listen to Maurice Ravel’s La Valse, the woodwind notes rising like ghosts from clay, like flares and
tracers, out of silence and static. Ravel, who fought in World War I, claimed—violently—that La Valse
was not about the war, not about night in “No-man’s Land:” product of machines, charnel house
between trenches, devoid of life, reducing men to meat. Death gives rise and gives way, briefly, to the
waltz, to its regular 3/4 time Vienna meter, but the eldritch world recurs, and a barrage of strings, brass
and percussion fractures the dance, drowns it out, screams it to frenzy. If that isn’t a farewell to the 19th
century, what is…

2a While you’re listening to Ravel, look at Clarence Holbrook Carter’s 1940 painting, War Bride.
On the eve of the “Second” World War—deja vu all over again, a nightmare repeated and amplified—
the bride faces a massive rolling mill. She is alone, will waltz alone, her groom called to battle before
she’s had time to change from her diaphanous wedding gown to Rosie the Riveter overalls. The
rolling mill—the real groom—waits, inevitable as history, silent as time, to growl to life—to grind life.
“If anyone here knows any reason why these two should not be wed…? Seeing none…”

3 The machine age was supposed to usher in a world of plenty and ease, freeing humanity from the
laborious and the tedious.

Early on, you see this in art. Consider paintings of the Brooklyn Bridge and the past-busting desire at
the root of Italian Futurism, to shed the genius of the Renaissance that sat on the shoulders of every
artist who came after. Industry, they hoped—and they were right—would permeate design, creating
new, sleek orders of beauty, the flutes and steps of power switches mimicked in cocktail shakers and the
aluminum airplane as the ultimate expression of the age.

Clarence Holbrook Carter (1904-2000), War Bride, 1940. Oil on canvas, 36 x 54 in. Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh, Richard M. Scaife American
Painting Fund and Paintings Acquisition Fund, 82.6. Photograph by Richard Stoner © Estate of Clarence Carter.

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 Charles Demuth (1883-1935), Incense of a New Church, 1921. Oil on canvas, 26 x 201⁄8 in.
Coumbus Museum of Art, Ohio, Gift of Ferdinand Howald, 1931.135.

4 Artist Louis Lozowick’s 1927 quote opens the catalog. It perfectly sums up the error in American
art’s flirtation with the machine. Listen: “The dominant trend in America…is towards 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…the squares of its streets, the cubes of its factories, the arc
of its bridges, the cylinders of its gas tanks…The whole of mankind is vitally affected by industrial
development and if the artist can make his work clear in its intention, convincing in its reality,
inevitable in its logic, his potential audience will be practically universal.”

Lozowick had bypassed what was happening in European art post-World War I: modernist elegance
embracing (or running from) ugliness. But then, it—the war—hadn’t happened here, but “over there.” He
forgot that art isn’t interested in mirroring the imagined perfections in any system. Art sees the chaos in
the clouds, the contradiction in a smile, the ghost in the machine. Art is anxious. Audience is accidental.

4a Long before 1927, Lozowick’s optimism had acquired a shadow, even in isolated America. Morton
Schamberg’s 1916 work, Painting (Formerly Machine), one of a series, divorces the form of the machine
from its function. It might be part of a camera but what this thing does, despite the industrial quality of
the draftsmanship, is and will forever remain a something of a mystery. We belong to the the machine,
we have faith in it, and in those who design and build such things—and must—because we don’t really
know how it works. This is the center (and censer) of Charles Demuth’s Incense of a New Church.

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 Fig. 1 – American Tree Diagram with Feedback Loop Circa 1900-1940

Pessimistic
(Technology
as Anxiety)

Machine
Precisionism Style
(Art Deco) Surrealism
Ma al
c on
optimism ti
hi

a
(Technology

Irr
ne

as Savior)

| S p i r i t ua l |
Age

American Barns, Rural

Craft America
I n dust

Movement (Nostalgia)

ht
Reimagined
ri

ug
al

past

ta
is
m f- l
Se
Outsider
Living History Art
Folk Art Williamsburg
(Nativism)

Simplicity
(Shaker)

5 Charles Sheeler, perhaps the arch precisionist, runs the gamut from optimism to pessimism. Then he
backdates the graphic lines and smooth planar shapes, applying them to the simplicity of the barn,
the home, the hearth, the past (“’Tis a gift to be simple, ’tis a gift to be free…”), as if all they lacked
was the invention of controlled combustion to transform them into mechanized, urban America (see
Figure 1). This helps to explain the turn to Folk Art (American Crafts, Williamsburg’s living history),
and also then, the sweep to surrealism through the “discovery” of obsessive, self-taught Outsider
Artists. People are things; things are people. Materials, like art and artists, can be “found” and they
reveal the impossibility of precision (devoid of humanity) being real. It was natural to push beyond
the mechanized real by reinjecting the fallible, the irrational— the human.

5a Compare Sheeler’s Classic Landscape with his Bucks County Barn or Kitchen, Williamsburg. Both
are products of human ingenuity—of art, in a way—yet they are utterly devoid of humanity—that is,
people. Bathed in harsh light, the only sign of life is in Classic Landscape as the smoke rises from the tall
chimney, but it is eerie, as if someone, perhaps long ago, left the furnace on. An archaeological “Long
ago” is the feeling that both paintings arouse, though one describes the new, machine age, while the
other describes a reimagined colonial past.

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Morton Livingston Schamberg (1881-1918), Painting (Formerly Machine), 1916. Oil on canvas 301⁄8 x 22¾ in.
Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, Connecticut, Gift of Collection Société Anonyme, 1941.673.

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Georgia O’Keeffe abandons the city for New Mexico, but retains precisionism’s hard lines, flat
planes of color, and the blueprint-like emphasis on blown up details that reveal the architectural
mechanisms inside the Remembrance Day poppy and the funereal lily as well as the ghosts inside
their floral architecture.

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 Ralston Crawford (1906-1978), Overseas Highway, 1939. Oil on canvas, 28 x 45 in. Private collection.
© Estate of Ralston Crawford / Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY.

7 Leonardo da Vinci is hot right now. A new biography, a Scorcese/DiCaprio film in the works, the
Salvator Mundi incident, art meeting—and being overwhelmed by, yet again—popular culture and
commerce. Leonardo meshed art and science in the 7,000 extant pages of his notebooks, solving artistic
problems scientifically; solving scientific problems through art. He would recognize precisionism and
the world that has spilled out since, marveling at the clockwork gear, the slide rule, the protractor,
French curves, the calculator and the computers: digital and quantum, the algorithm, the web, the
cloud, social media. But he would deconstruct it (without knowing anything of that loaded term).
He’d find the thing that doesn’t fit, the string hanging loose from our world and our art, and pull it,
just to see what makes it tick. And then he’d wonder what comes next, like, say, Ralston Crawford,
whose Overseas Highway is so familiar we forget to look at it (who remembers Crawford?). Rails keep
us on the concrete ribbon to a vanishing point at the flat horizon of the sea, on a journey solitary and
inevitable—there’s Lozowick’s inevitability again, only it’s the opposite here of what he means.There’s
speed, but there are no exits on this daylight noir highway, no exits and no turns, and no opportunities
to exert individual will. Overseas Highway is as existential as Sartre, and just as bleak.

IMAGES COURTESY FINE ARTS MUSEUM OF SAN FRANCISCO.

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8
Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein was often cited by artists and critics in the crucial period of precisionism,
between the World Wars. And why not? Man-made creature—man reduced to machine, biological
AI—that exceeds and turns on its creator is a superb symbol for what machines had done and could
do, but Bram Stoker’s Dracula is equally relevant (Is it any wonder that Universal made a killing
filming these texts in the early 1930s, as the technology of talking pictures brought horror, in vivid
black-and-white, to life?) as the vampiric engine wakes beneath the lid of the “coffin nose” of the
Cord to suck the humanity out of humanity.

8a I hear my father saying “hell’s bells” in his operatic tenor voice. He worked at A. O. Smith—a
hot, hulking, cacophonous maker of water heaters—during World War II, making bomb casings and
landing gear for B-29’s. Precisionism sang its tremulous aria to the machine, but the machine ran hot
and cold, as lovers do. Perhaps the machine was otherwise occupied, enamored with its own song, the
din of hell’s bells.

Charles Sheeler (1883-1965),

March 24-August 12
Cult of the Machine: Precisionism and American Art
de Young Museum
50 Hagiwara Tea Garden Drive, San Francisco, CA 94118
t: (415) 750-3600 | www.deyoungmuseum.org
Kitchen, Williamsburg, 1937. Oil on
hardboard, 10 x 14 in. Fine Arts Museums
of San Francisco, Gift of Mr. and Mrs.
John D. Rockefeller III, 1993.35.24.
Photograph by Randy Dodson.

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