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(Figure 21b).
19
Ultimately the machine as the subject of art was realized
in the aesthetic of 'machine purity' by the precisionist artist Charles
Sheeler and others (Figure 21c). These American artists revered the in-
herent beauty of machines rendering them in a pristine fashion akin to
those found in mechanical drawings. Although historians of machine-age
art often tend to focus on an artist's fascination with the mechanical as-
pects of the machines they portrayed, as shown in Figure 21 the relation-
ship of such art to chemical processes is just as, if not more, important.
These artists not only employed tubular shapes as principle geometric
forms in many of their compositions, which implicitly links their work,
and much of the abstract art of that time, to the conduits and smokestacks
associated with industrial chemistry, they often
explicitly
represented
chemistry. This is clearly shown in Léger's
Le Mécanicien
which por-
trays a man holding a cigarette backgrounded by a small industrial plant
with a smokestack which presumable indicates his status as a 'mechanic'
(Figure 21a); Grossberg's
Der Gelbe Kessel
where a chemical tank is the
primary subject of the painting (Figure 21b); and Sheeler's
Ballet
Mechanique
which depicts a network of conduits carrying “compressed
air and excess gases between the power house and the blast furnaces”
(Troyen 1987, p. 124) of Ford's River Rouge Plant. As demonstrated by
these images there is a direct visual connection between the work of the
machine-age artists and the abstracted images of chemical plants created
by today's commercial photographers (see Figure 20).
The precisionists also rendered machines as pristinely devoid of
grime and human interaction. As machine purists they, unlike the Dada-
ists of this same time period (who employed a machine aesthetic as so-
cial critique), embraced an aesthetic of the machine endowed with an op-
timism representative of the rise and promise of American industry,
including chemical industry (Lugon 2003). In fact, for American preci-
sionists in particular, the line between their art and the utopian promise
of American industry was porous, enabling them to work as both fine art-
ists and commercial artists without hesitancy and to employ the same
19
Although recognized as an Neue Sachlichkeit artist Grossberg's images of industrial
plants have also been considered to be aligned with surrealism and magical realism
(see Hughes 2004, pp. 123-125 and Guenther 1995, pp. 46-48.
