Cult of the Machine: Precisionism in American Art

Cult of the Machine examines American culture from the 1910s to the Second World War and reveals how the American love affair with new technology and mechanization shaped architecture, design, and the visual culture of the United States. 

This tour-de-force presentation includes key paintings by American Precisionists such as Charles Sheeler, Georgia O’Keeffe, and Charles Demuth, and iconic works by the masters of straight photography such as Paul Strand, Berenice Abbott, and Edward Steichen. Their creations were highly structured, geometric compositions with smooth surfaces and lucid forms that sought to mimic a streamlined, “machined” aesthetic, with themes ranging from the urban and industrial to the pastoral. Reconciling realist imagery with abstracted forms, Precisionism married the influence of avant-garde European art styles such as Purism, Cubism, and Futurism with American subject matter.

Credit: Exhibition overview from museum website.         

Image 1: Charles Sheeler Yankee Clipper 1939 oil on canvas Museum of Art Rhode Island School of Design Providence Jesse Metcalf Fund and Mary B. Jackson Fund 41.006

Image 2: Gerald Murphy, Watch, 1925, oil on canvas, Dallas Museum of Art, Foundation for the Arts Collection, gift of the artists, 1963.75.FA, © Estate of Honoria Murphy Donnelly, Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY

Whether you go or not, the exhibition catalog, Cult of the Machine: Precisionism and American Art, featuring more than 100 masterworks, sheds new light on the Precisionist aesthetic and the intellectual concerns, excitement, tensions, and ambivalences about industrialization that helped develop this important strand of early American modernism.  Essays explore the origins of the style—which reconciled realism with abstraction and adapted European art movements to American subject matter—as well as its relationship to photography, and the ways in which it reflected the economic and social changes brought about by industrialization and technology in the post–World War I world. In addition to making a meaningful contribution to the resurging interest in Modernism and its revisionist narratives, this book offers copious connections between the past and our present day, poised on the verge of a fourth industrial revolution.

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