| This project builds on histories of the art of the Machine Age by putting the work of well-known artists such as Diego Rivera, Charles Sheeler, and Stuart Davis in the context of a larger visual culture dominated by metaphors of the body and the machine. I treat these artists as prominent examples of a more general consciousness in American culture of the 1930s of a crisis in human experience. Physical and psychic wholeness, rewarding labor, and a life of the imagination appeared to be foreclosed by the mechanisms of technological modernity.; In the first chapter, a critique of culture offered by Lewis Mumford, Waldo Frank, Stuart Chase, John Dewey and others provides a context for the case studies that follow. These writers imagined the body and the machine as adversaries and as symbiotic partners, and argued that the human community must find ways to adapt successfully to technological modernity. The second chapter discusses the photographic essays, articles, and advertising in mainstream American magazines, chiefly Henry Luce's Fortune Magazine and Life Magazine. These examples show that much Machine Age imagery functioned as a compensatory visual culture offering a false sense of physical strength and psychic health to a body politic under attack by the effects of the Depression.; The third and fourth chapters of this project analyze the efforts of artists to address the "anaesthetic" human experience of modern Americans. The third chapter places Diego Rivera's Detroit Industry mural cycle in a larger cultural context than has previously been offered. I show that Rivera's imagery in the Detroit murals expressed his faith in the power of art to restore the psychic health of the worker, and that the mural's affective power was supported by a contemporaneous fascination in the United States with Mexican culture. Rivera synthesized modern technology and pre-Columbian imagery, asking his audiences to imagine the machine and the laboring body in a productive symbiotic relation that would lead to a future society in which art, beauty, and myth were ingrained in daily experience.; The final chapter addresses a program among American artists to bring the experience of art into the daily lives of citizens. In the general context of leftist art and activism, artists of varying political convictions consistently argued for the right of American workers to enjoy an aesthetic dimension to their lives. With the work of Stuart Davis as a central example, I show the malleability of certain ideas that had a Marxist ring to them, but that in fact expressed a more general belief that art and being were inseparable.; The dissertation concludes by asserting that the crisis in American culture of the 1930s centered on the sundered unity between body and spirit and that the remedy for this was to be found in the sensory and imaginative impact of art on human consciousness. |
