Betsy Fahlman

Current Research on the Art of Industry Artists at Work: Imaging Place, Work, and Process

Men at Work: Art and Labour in Victorian Britain. By Tim Barringer. The Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art. New Haven, Conn.: Yale Univ. Press, 2005. 392 pp., 146 illus. (113 b&w, 33 color), notes. $65 hb. (ISBN 0300103808).

Man at Work: 400 Years in Paintings and Bronzes: Labor and the Evolution of Industry in Art. By Klaus Türk. Milwaukee, Wisc.: MSOE Press, 2003. 432 pp., 424 illus., bibl. $49.95 hb (ISBN 0912804404, English ed.; 3898612090, German ed.).

Milwaukee School of Engineering Man at Work series, Milwaukee, Wisc.: MSOE Press

Physicians, Quacks and Alchemists. Man at Work Series: Vol. 1., 2005. 68 pp., 60 illus. (1 b&w, 59 color). $19.99 hb (ISBN 0972804439, English ed.; 3936744114, German ed.).

Iron and Steel Production. Man at Work Series: Vol. 2., 2006. 108 pp., 101 illus. (1 b&w, 100 color). $19.99 hb (ISBN 0972804455, English ed.; 3936744157, German ed.).

Agriculture, Textiles, and Tanning. Man at Work Series: Vol. 3., 2006, 64 pp., 77 illus. (5 b&w, 72 color). $19.99 hb (ISBN 0972804463, English ed.; 3936744165, German ed.).

Construction. Man at Work Series: Vol. 4. 2006. 98 pp., 100 illus. (7 b&w, 93 color). $19.99 hb (ISBN 0972804471, English ed.; 3936744173, German ed.).

Craftsmen. Man at Work Series: Vol. 5., 2006. 62 pp., 75 illus. (21 b&w, 54 color). $19.99 hb (ISBN 097280448X, English ed.; 3936744181, German ed.).

Industry in Art: Pittsburgh, 1812–1920. By Rina C. Youngner. Pittsburgh, Penn.: Univ. of Pittsburgh Press, 2006. 200 pp., 94 illus. (86 b&w, 8 color), notes, bibl. $29.95 hb (ISBN 0-8229-4276-3).

Born of Fire: The Valley of Work: Industrial Scenes of Southwestern Pennsylvania. By Barbara L. Jones; foreword by Judith Hansen O'Toole; essays by Edward K. Muller and Joel A. Tarr. Greensburg, Penn.: Westmoreland Museum of American Art, 2006. 160 pp., 192 illus (141 b&w, 51 color), notes, bibl. 37.50 hb (ISBN 0-931241-31-6, Westmoreland Museum of American Art; 0-8229-4325-5, Univ. of Pittsburgh Press).

American Impressionism: The Beauty of Work. By Susan G. Larkin. Greenwich, Conn.: Bruce Museum of Arts and Sciences, 2005. 186 pp., 108 illus. (62 b&w, 46 color), notes, bibl. $40 pb (ISBN 097663810X, museum ed.; 0711225850, trade ed.).

Railroads and the American Industrial Landscape: Ted Rose Paintings and Photographs. By Curtis L. Carter and Jeff Brouws. Milwaukee, Wisc.: Patrick and Beatrice Haggerty Museum of Art, and Madison, Wisc.: Center for Railroad Photography & Art, 2006. 68 pp., 65 illus. (31 b&w, 34 color), notes, bibl. $22.95 pb (ISBN 0-945366-19-1).

Introduction

Sheffield was England's "paradigmatic industrial city," competing with Pittsburgh as "The City of Soot."¹ A handsome engraving dating from 1819 that provides a distant view of that British manufacturing center marks a starting point for the range of imagery that will be explored in the books under review (see figure 1). By the end of the 19th century, the agrarian scale typical of early industrial scenes had been replaced by the formidable complexes, typical of big steel. Labor made the transition from solitary craftsmen to anonymous teams of workers employed by enterprises of a size unimaginable for the Sheffield engraver. A broad array of artists chronicled industry during this transition, their portrayals shaped by national character to create an aesthetic of work located at the bedrock of modern economic development.

Figure 1. George Cooke after Edward Blore, Sheffield from the Attercliffe Road, 1819. Engraving, frontispiece to Joseph Hunter, Hallamshire: The History and Topography of the Parish of Sheffield in the County of York (London, England: Lackington, Hughes, Harding, Mavor and Jones, 1891). Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection.

The subject of art and industry is a visually robust and culturally significant one, and the publication between 2003 and 2006 of 11 books exploring different aspects of this theme provides welcome additions to the literature. A leading academic press printed a 19th-century British-oriented volume. Another contribution covers a 400-year span of art history and presents a university collection comprised of European historical and contemporary work with a strong focus on Germany. That museum has also published five shorter thematic books drawn from its ever-growing holdings. Still another of the volumes contains representations of a city synonymous with industry—Pittsburgh—while another focuses on an important collection of industrial art at a museum in western Pennsylvania about an hour from that city. Two of the recently published books on art and industry are catalogs accompanying museum exhibitions. One considers American Impressionist views of work and labor, while the second presents photographs and paintings by a 20th-century American artist whose specialty was railroads. The collective vantage is international, although the perspective of each book is substantially grounded in the work of a specific country (Germany, Britain, or the United States).

All are illustrated with excellent color reproductions, and together they comprise an exceptional visual compendium of the intersection of art and industry. That more than one publication mentions or reproduces the work of a number of artists permits intriguing intellectual connections. As the nature of industrial production has changed globally, works of art like those in these books serve as valuable cultural records of social, economic, and technological history. They chart changing attitudes towards industry as well as providing documentation for those that have disappeared. Such a rich bounty of scholarship provides a good point from which to take stock of the current literature in the field of art and industry.

Men at Work: Art and Labour in Victorian Britain, by Tim Barringer

The industrial revolution began in England in the 18th century, and rhetoric linking industrial progress with prosperity assumed definitive form during the mid-Victorian era (1851–78), a period when industry and empire advanced together. In Men at Work: Art and Labour in Victorian Britain, Tim Barringer splendidly considers the "Victorian spectacle of labour,"(p. ix) and states his purpose: "In this book I argue that the sphere of the visual image, and more specifically the representation of the male labouring body, provided the most powerful and significant formulation of work as the nexus of ethical and aesthetic value" (pp. 1–2). By interpreting a cluster of images presented in a series of paradigmatic case studies, he defines "a critical iconography of the working man" during a period of intense economic growth and imperial expansion, explicating the social history of art and labor through the lens of visual culture (p. 2).

Barringer introduces his topic by considering the vigorous national rhetoric linking industrialization and progress as exemplified by the Great Exhibition of the Works of Industry of All Nations held in London in 1851 (popularly known as the Crystal Palace from its iron and glass construction). Although the Victorians celebrated "the economic, the moral, and the aesthetic" dimensions of work, much of the labor force endured harsh workplace and living conditions (as they did in Pittsburgh) (p. 1). The dialectic of art and industry that defined the "iconography of the working man" was complex (p. 2). The manufacturing machinery prominently displayed at the Great Exhibition was a source of English pride. While the displays included moving machinery, no workers were present, making it "a fantasy of production without labour, a world without a working class" (p. 8).

The central focus of Barringer's first chapter, "Art, Religion, and Labour," is the painting Work (1852–65) by Ford Maddox Brown, characterized by Barringer as a "a vibrant tableau of labour" (p. 21). The canvas presented a scene that was a "spectacle of Victorian masculinity" and that embraced cultural, ethical, moral, economic, and gendered dimensions of work (p. 30). Yet, what was represented was not actually industrial.² Barringer contextualizes Brown's painting using Henry Mayhew's London Labour and the London Poor (1850–52), a four-volume publication organized around a taxonomy of occupation. Mayhew's project of social classification was seen through "moral rather than economic or sociological criteria," and was divided into sections devoted to those that will, cannot, and will not work (p. 46).

Artists portrayed rural harvest scenes and hand technologies as embodying a pastoral calm, and these agrarian landscapes are the subject of Barringer's second chapter, "The Harvest Field in the Railway Age." However, as the new machinery shown at the Crystal Palace introduced the "techniques of capitalist farming" into practice, agricultural production became industrial in scale (p. 87). With considerable irony, trains transported tourists and artists from urban termini to the country for leisure, where the working poor were part of the charm of the relaxing spectacle. But the picturesquely puffing engines set in verdant Edenic landscapes that were such prominent signifiers of progress for American artists of the Hudson River School are not evident in these serene canvasses of rural England.

The material covered in the chapter "Blacksmith and Artist" will be of especial interest to SIA readers. Barringer discusses a steel engraving of The Forge (1859) by James Sharples: "an image that lays bare the workings of the industrial scene with a directness unequalled in Victorian visual culture" (p. 133) (see figure 2). A working man who actually portrayed the working man," Sharples was "a blacksmith who was an artist by night" and "an artist who was a blacksmith by day" (p. 136). Sharples, who executed both the painting and the steel engraving of his interior view of process and labor, was more concerned with recording the scene in meticulous detail than in the dramatic lighting effects that fascinated Joseph Wright of Derby in An Iron Forge (1773). Nor was he interested in the dramatic satanic mill exteriors portrayed by Philip James de Loutherbourg in Coakbrookdale by Night (1800). To Barringer, another paradigmatic canvas of "industrial realism" was William Bell Scott's Iron and Coal on Tyneside in the Nineteenth Century (1856–61). Later significant examples were executed by American painter John Ferguson Weir with his The Gun Foundry (1864–66) and Forging the Shaft (1874–77, replica of destroyed 1868 original), and in Germany The Iron Rolling Mill (Modern Cyclops) (1872–75) by Adolph Menzel.

Figure 2. James Sharples, The Forge, 1859, steel engraving, 12 7/8 × 17 1/4 in. Private collection.

In the chapter "Art and Industry," Barringer examines "the iconography of labour in relation to the geography of improvement," (p. 187) taking as his exemplar Godfrey Sykes, an artist and designer who produced Tilt Forge (c. 1856–59)(see figure 3). Sykes was from Sheffield, where the "dark coal smoke" that hung over the city was simultaneously "emblematic of modernity" and the "dehumanizing effects of industrial labour" (pp. 190, 194) Sykes became the chief designer of London's South Kensington Museum, which used the profits from the Crystal Palace Exhibition to found an institution of industrial education, a social project aimed at improving the lives of the workers by training them in new skills.

Figure 3. Godfrey Sykes, Tilt Forge, c. 1856–59, 18 1/2 × 24 1/8 in. Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection.

Barringer's last chapter, "Colonial Gothic," examines India, "the grandest of the British imperial territories" (p. 243). India's display at the Crystal Palace occupied 30,000 square feet and was a "counter-industrial image" (p. 248). Under England's presumed benevolent and protective rule, India offered "a spectacular alternative to Britain's industrial modernity" (p. 248). Traditional Indian handicraft skills represented "a critique of modern labour practices and social structures," and despite Britain's embrace of the Arts and Crafts movement, for its imperial rulers India came to signify "historical stasis and degeneracy," whereas Britain represented progress and the future (pp. 258, 259). In the eyes of British officials, a stark dichotomy existed "between British machine-made and Indian handcrafted manufactures" (p. 259). Ironically, India's were better designed than the "vulgar products of mechanised industry," the cheap goods mass-produced in England's factories (p. 260).

Barringer's conclusion, "bbbbstheticism and Labour," discusses John Ruskin's famous denunciation of the work of James Abbott McNeill Whistler, whose apparent minimal labor on a painting, Ruskin felt, failed to justify the high price asked by the artist. Whistler defended himself by declaring that potential buyers were paying for the experience he had gained in a lifetime. Charging what the market would bear worked as well in art as it did in industry.

Men at Work: Art and Labour in Victorian Britain has no separate bibliography, but its many notes provide a wealth of references for those wishing to read further. While this handsomely illustrated volume may contain more discourse on art history than the average SIA reader would want, the range of imagery will reward those interested in the social history of industry in its broadest definition.

Man at Work: 400 Years in Paintings and Bronzes by Klaus Türk and other publications based on the Eckhart G. Grohmann Collection

The Eckhart G. Grohmann Collection, which was installed in its own museum in 2007 at the Milwaukee School of Engineering (MSOE), comprises nearly 700 paintings and sculptures produced over a 400-year span, primarily by European artists.³ Together they offer a summary history of work and industrial development of fascinating breadth, documenting an expansive range of human and mechanical labor. Milwaukee's historically strong German character (and works by artists from Germany dominate the collection) and its rich mix of working-class ethnicities make the city the ideal home for the Grohmann Museum.

In establishing a museum to present "the related histories of culture, work and technology" (p. 35), the collector aimed to demonstrate to students pursuing degrees at MSOE the historical context of their studies. By linking the past with the present, they could "better understand the roots of today's modern production process" (p. 6). Themes relating to metalworking, especially iron and steel, dominate, reflecting both the collector's particular interests and the dramatic subjects that the production technologies involved in metalworking provided for artists.

For Eckhart G. Grohmann, art and industry have been linked since childhood. The collector grew up in Silesia, where his grandfather owned a large marble-processing business and quarry. Sculptors visited regularly to select material for their carvings, and he was fascinated by the hard work of the stonecutters, blacksmiths, carpenters, and quarrymen. When Poland annexed Silesia from Germany at the end of World War II, Grohmann's family was forced to leave. Eventually, he came to the United States, acquiring the Aluminum Casting & Engineering Company in Milwaukee in 1965. At that time, he began to collect art on the general theme of industry and labor. He also commissioned works by contemporary artists, including Hans Dieter Tylle's Cleaning the Furnace (2003), set in Grohmann's own facility (see figure 4).

Figure 4. Hans Dieter Tylle, Cleaning the Furnace, Aluminum Casting & Engineering Co., Milwaukee, 2003, oil on canvas, 47 × 71 in. Eckhart G. Grohmann Collection, Milwaukee School of Engineering.

Historically, it has been unusual for industrialists to collect or commission images of the enterprises that were the source of their wealth. One exception was John Ferguson Weir, whose first major work was purchased by Robert Parker Parrott, the superintendent of the West Point Foundry. Although Weir's painting of the foundry was not commissioned, Parrott followed its production, exhibition, and critical reception with keen interest before acquiring the dramatic canvas. In France, François Bonhommé benefited from the patronage of the owners of the foundry at Le Creusot.

In the 19th century, newly wealthy industrialists, eager to surround themselves with the trappings of culture, sought to purchase either European Old Masters, if they could afford them, or 19th-century French landscapes and academic painting. The art they purchased deflected the aggressiveness of modern capitalist business practices, and American industrial magnates, including Henry Clay Frick and Andrew Carnegie, engaged in extensive cultural philanthropy in founding libraries and museums.

Typical of the principles fundamental to the Grohmann Collection is a painting by E. A. Kaiser, Workers' World (1937), which presents a positive view of industry and its employees (see figure 5). In the first of four panels, Kaiser depicts a group of men walking to the factories in the morning. The woman who waves to them serves as a reminder of the families that their jobs support. The middle two panels show the men hard at work (but in no way oppressed): they are healthy and strong. In the final scene, they return home as the sunset infuses the sky with a rosy glow. A woman, her child, and the child's grandfather (retired from his labors to enjoy his old age) await the return of her husband. This pleasing image of the cycle of industrial existence shows everything in balance, with no labor conflicts disturbing the happy picture. Its purpose was undoubtedly propaganda, and Kaiser's painting serves as an attractive billboard for the social benefits of modern industry.

Figure 5. E. A. Kaiser, Workers' World, 1937, oil on panel, 32.5 × 16 in. Eckhart G. Grohmann Collection, Milwaukee School of Engineering.

Klaus Türk reproduces 424 of the images from the Grohmann Collection in Man at Work: 400 Years in Paintings and Bronzes. In introducing the volume, Türk, a professor of sociology at the University of Wuppertal (located in Germany's industrial Ruhr River Valley), succinctly reviews the history of art and industry. His comments are accompanied by a timeline charting major events in the chronological progression of industry, technology, and labor.

Türk commences his review of the Grohmann Collection with the Middle Ages, a period during which "work does not appear as an independent subject" (p. 12), in part because ordinary tasks were generally embedded within a religious context. During the 15th and 16th centuries, however, Renaissance artists portrayed more secular themes, producing images of trades and artisans. By the 17th century, subjects were more readily identifiable as industrial, although they still might be given an allegorical or mythological context (for instance, forges often referenced Vulcan, while weaving and spinning were associated with Arachne and Athena). As craft and mechanical practice became codified, illustrated manuals became common. A morality of labor also emerged, as exemplified by English artist William Hogarth's paired choices in his print series, Industry and Idleness (1747).

With the beginning of the industrial revolution in the mid-18th century, artists finally engaged industry as a significant theme. Although Joseph Wright of Derby drew deeply on art historical traditions in his portrayals of blacksmiths and iron forges, his emphasis on process and his distinctive use of mysterious night lighting as a foil to the intellectual clarity of the Enlightenment meant his subjects were entirely modern in content. Türk illustrates this era with a pair of fascinating late-18th-century foundry interiors by Swedish painter Pehr Hilleström and Belgian Léonard Defrance. The author notes that Hilleström was a Swedish court painter who executed more than 100 canvases recording the king's properties. These works make a reader curious to know about what artists were doing at the same time in other countries, particularly Germany.

For the 19th century, Türk discusses the work of French artist François Bonhommé: "the first modern painter of European industry" (p. 21). He portrays the individual worker as subsumed into a context of production, depicted "as a combination of dominating technology and human labor" (p. 21). The 75 years between 1870 and 1945 coincided with the growth of modern industry, a period when artists were most attracted to industrial themes. Türk also includes Adolph Menzel's powerful Iron Rolling Mill (1872–75), which depicts a Silesian factory: "the first large-scale industrial painting in Germany to focus on the contemporary working process." Located at Königschütte in upper Silesia, Menzel's subject was a "Prussian showcase," and his canvas presents what was then "the most modern plant of its kind in Europe" (p. 214). Türk sees Iron Rolling Mill as an iconic depiction of industry and asserts that "No other painting ... had more influence on the next generation of painters." It was both "an expression of the heroic productivity of modern industry" as well as "a critical portrayal of the difficult working and living conditions of the industrial worker" (p. 215). By the 1880s, the relationship of the labor force to the industries that employed them had become uneasy, as seen in Robert Koehler's The Strike (1886) and American Thomas Anshutz's The Iron Workers' Noontime (1880–81), both reproduced in the volume.

Some paintings in the Grohmann Collection were originally commissioned by industrialists, and they represent an intriguing chapter in the history of patronage. About 1893, Swedish artist Anders Montan made six paintings for the Friedrich Krupp A.G. Steel Company, and among the studies that he made for that series was Armor-Plate Rolling Mill (see figure 6). Another artist who portrayed a Krupp factory was German painter Otto Bollhagen, described by Türk as "one of the best-known industrial painters of the first two decades of the 20th century" (p. 218).

Figure 6. Anders Montan, Armor-Plate Rolling Mill, Krupp, c. 1893, oil on cardboard, 22.5 × 17 in. Eckhart G. Grohmann Collection, Milwaukee School of Engineering.

In the 20th century, an era of increased nationalism and political upheaval, World War I linked economic production with armed conflict. The "extreme capitalism" of this period contributed to "monumental social problems, especially in the concentrated industrial centers" (p. 25). The exploitation of workers now became a more common subject for artists. Gone was (in American terms) unquestioning Progressive Era acceptance of industry and the means by which great wealth was achieved as a broad societal good. As a result, artists now received commissions from groups committed to social change. To illustrate this development, Türk uses, among others, Italian-American modernist painter Joseph Stella who was employed by the Pittsburgh Survey in 1907 to record steelworkers, many of whom were immigrants (like the artist himself).

During the 1920s and 1930s, the American Precisionists created a distinctive body of work inspired by industrial structures (Türk incorrectly characterizes these American artists as "constructionist," p. 27). Fascinated by the clean modernist character of the practical buildings that were their primary subjects, they had little interest in portraying workers. One of the leaders of this group was Charles Demuth, whose iconic My Egypt (1927) is reproduced. It was inspired by a grain elevator not far from his home in Lancaster, Pennsylvania.

Türk covers much of the 20th century quickly, and the illustrations he selects for the volume from this era compress the chronology from Regionalist Thomas Hart Benton (1930) to Fernand Léger (1950) to Roy Lichtenstein's Pop Art (1969). Given how many works are in the Grohmann Collection from this era, such sketchy coverage strains historical accuracy.

Türk concludes his compilation with a discussion of contemporary art, presenting a small group of artists (mostly German) who depicted thriving concerns as well as "the downfall of old heavy industries" (p. 33). Hans Dieter Tylle, for instance, painted industrial sites around the world for one-quarter century, and in addition to portraying Grohmann's own industrial plant, he recorded two other Wisconsin companies, Charter Steel and Kohler.⁴ Alexander Calvelli's interior scene, Blast Furnace at Thyssen Plant (1995), evokes early foundry paintings. American photographer Sidney Hurwitz provides views of Bethlehem Steel for the volume, while German painter Robert Schneider is exemplified by work inspired by industrial sites in former East Germany, Poland, and Azerbaijan.

Türk's Man at Work: 400 Years in Paintings and Bronzes is organized into eight broad sections, covering mining and metals, quarries, glass and ceramics factories, construction, timber, leather and textiles, farming, and miscellaneous production technologies. More than half the book is devoted to the metals industry, with the emphasis on processing, not extraction. Türk begins his account of the metalwork portion of the Grohmann Collection by reproducing scenes of Renaissance metalworking, which were often presented mythologically. A prominent theme was the visit of Venus to the forge of her husband Vulcan, a tale that inspired a range of spectacularly operatic paintings in which luxurious metal objects made in the foundry are presented to the scantily draped goddess. The volume reproduces paintings of other early ironworks, often portrayed within fantastical landscapes, accompanied by small biblical vignettes to convey the deeper spiritual meaning of everyday tasks. Early in the 19th century, blacksmithing forges came to be regarded with romantic nostalgia, and while artists included in the Grohmann Collection produced charming rural genre scenes that are agrarian in scale, their imagery made no reference to the growth of cities and heavy industry.

Mining, coal, oil, and gas are all included in a single section. Outstanding in this section is Viggo Langer's stunning view of Oil Rigs in Baku at Caspian Sea (1911) in Azerbaijan, which can be contrasted to depictions of West Texas oil towns (see figure 7).⁵ Langer's site is unlike any American oilfield, leaving one wondering how this unusual painting came to be made as well as desiring to know more about the artist and his travels. Most visitors to this part of world recorded exotic structures and people, rather than industrial production.

Figure 7. Viggo Langer, Oil Rigs in Baku at Caspian Sea, 1911, oil on canvas, 18 × 29 in. Eckhart G. Grohmann Collection, Milwaukee School of Engineering.

Steel mills and blast furnaces provided dramatic subjects for artists, and the Grohmann Collection includes a large number of stunning paintings of these fiery sites, vibrant with activity inside and out. In a series of strong canvases, Erich Mercker vividly captured the scale and power of these immense complexes along the Rhine River in Duisburg in the Ruhr River Valley (see figure 8).⁶

Figure 8. Erich Mercker, Industrial Ruhr District, 1966, oil on canvas, 23.5 × 31.5 in. Eckhart G. Grohmann Collection, Milwaukee School of Engineering.

Quarries also attracted the attention of artists. Among the artists whose works Türk reproduces in this section is Heinrich Bürkel, who created a charming romantic scene placed in a remote setting in his Quarry in the Mountains with Farrier (1864). Several other paintings in the section picture the large lifting wheels used to raise heavy stones from underground quarries. Türk also included some that reference art, including Anton Braith's Transport of Marble Blocks from Stone Quarries, Carrara, Italy (1900) and Friedrich Nerly the Younger's Transporting Marble to the Sculptor Thorwaldsen to Rome.

The section on construction begins with the Tower of Babel but enters the modern realm with images of highways, bridges, dams, and power plants. Türk provides works relating to timber (small mills were popular subjects for artists in the 19th century), logging, carpentry, and barrel making. He covers the leather and textile industries by including depictions of cobblers, shoemakers, silk making, spinning, weaving, tanning, and dye working.

Agricultural production is broadly grouped in a section on farming and includes scenes of sturdy oxen plowing and field workers harvesting potatoes and grain as well as making wine and pressing cider. For some endeavors, Türk's volume has only a few images. Even then, however, the images are often superb. There are several eerily beautiful interior scenes of glassblowing; other works picture lime kilns, gem polishing, goldsmiths, making musical instruments, taxidermy, net mending, mussel gathering, and even artists' studios (for art is surely labor).

Türk's account of the Eckhart G. Grohmann Collection is both a fascinating and a frustrating book. A unique visual thesaurus of works on industry and labor, it presents a wealth of raw information organized thematically. But the sheer number of images communicates neither the historical development nor the geography of specific industries. With so many examples, it is difficult for a reader (even a knowledgeable one) to make sense of it all. A more chronological structure with subthemes of process might have more effectively integrated the many different countries represented in the volume (a map would also have been helpful).

There are powerful lessons about industrial history—as connected to art, to economics, and to technology and filtered through the lens of chronology and geography—that could have been made through the wealth of imagery contained in this remarkable collection. But Türk presents so little material on the historical and cultural context of the collection's paintings and sculptures, as well as the artists who made them, that the volume fails to fully realize its promise. The short, descriptive narratives accompanying each reproduction provide little concrete information and, as a result, do not provide the reader with the full force of the extraordinary industrial archaeology represented in the volume.

Fuller accounts would have enriched the discussion in many areas. A few examples will suffice. Türk reproduces a handsome genre painting by Karl Wilhelm Hübner, The Silesian Weavers (1844). A scene depicts factory owners rejecting the more expensive handmade products of the cottage weavers, an act that led to a series of revolts. The author does not tell his readers what happened to these workers and their families as a result of this collision of modern capitalist manufacturing, capable of producing cheaper goods, with the long tradition of handcraft. Türk's discussion of this painting would have benefited by placing it in counterpoint with the work of famed German printmaker Käthe Kollwitz, who nearly one-half century later attended a performance of The Weavers, a play by Gerhart Hauptmann based on the 1844 revolt by Silesian weavers—an event preceded by the scene depicted in Hübner's painting. Recognizing the revolt's relevance for contemporary conditions, Kollwitz commenced a series of six prints, Revolt of the Weavers (1897), in which her deep empathy for the plight of exploited and powerless workers was evident.

Türk makes sweeping claims regarding the effect of certain works and artists yet fails to provide any evidence. Just how did the canvases of Swedish court painter Pehr Hilleström exert "a strong influence on the course of industrial art" (p. 19)? Who knew about him and how? In discussing Menzel's powerful Iron Rolling Mill, Türk observes that booming industry was often accompanied by worker unrest and violent strikes. Yet the painting was bought by a banker and entered the collection of the National Gallery in Berlin in 1875, demonstrating a greater unity of capitalism, art, and patronage unruffled by worker unrest than the author has suggested. Türk startlingly describes the bodies of the men who are shown outside a factory in Thomas Anshutz's The Iron Workers' Noontime as "pampered in the sun" (p. 23). Pampered, indeed! This is a factory in West Virginia, not a spa; the writer has completely ignored the large scholarly literature on this significant painting.

Although Türk discusses Joseph Stella's work in Pittsburgh, he does not mention the work of Stella's contemporary, reformist photographer Lewis Hine who also came to that city. Hine recorded the appalling working and living conditions of children in the United States for the National Child Labor Committee between 1908 and 1924, and his documentation contributed to sweeping changes in America's child labor laws. Other artists surprisingly missing are Precisionist Charles Sheeler, who was commissioned to depict the Ford Motor Company's River Rouge Plant near Detroit (his name is mentioned, but no work is reproduced), and photographer Margaret Bourke-White, who recorded international industrial sites and was a rare woman in this realm.

Absent from Türk's discussion of 1920s Germany are the Dadaists, whose ironical appropriation of mechanistic imagery provided a sharp critique of Weimar society. Nor does he acknowledge the machine age, whose aesthetic was internationally influential. The Depression, a period Türk characterizes as "Labor-Nationalism" (this is not a term that has currency in art historical scholarship), is also only summarily discussed.

The World War II era, which witnessed an immense ramping up of industrial activity, merits only four short lines, astonishing in a publication so strongly focused on German art. Yet works in the Grohmann Collection provide an excellent platform on which to base a discussion, as several paintings directly reference the German war effort, including J. Lova's Workers in the Hermann Göring Steel Plant, Austria (1941–44) and Georg Röder's Ammunitions Factory, Rheinhausen (1942) and Hamburg, Blohm und Voss, U-Boat Shipyard (1944). One is curious to know more about these artists and the circumstances under which these works were created. Postwar reconstruction is pictured in Rubble Women Reclaiming Bricks (1951) by Johvi Schulze-Görlitz, a work that features the many Trümmerfrauen who helped rebuild bombed-out German cities after World War II.

The contemporary section would have been strengthened had more artists been included.⁷ For decades, German photographers Bernd Becher and Hilla Becher have published books on industrial typologies, utilizing an extensive range of structures.⁸ The work of the Bechers is internationally famous, and I would have expected Türk to be more familiar with the history of 20th-century German photographic art.

The Grohmann Collection includes a large number of paintings of blacksmiths, the earliest from the 17th century, but Türk arranges them neither by country nor date, and those that are reproduced are accompanied by only brief text. Were all blacksmith forges alike in Denmark, Germany, England, and Sweden and, if not, how did they differ? Surely, those from the 17th, 18th, and 19th centuries cannot be identical. The iconography of the blacksmith, the star of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's famous poem, "The Village Blacksmith" (1839), had a strong cultural resonance for American writers and painters, although the Grohmann Collection's holdings suggest that the United States was not unique in its embrace of this theme.

Including a bronze by American artist Frederic Remington, The Bronco Buster, in the section on farming is truly eccentric. Breaking the wild mustang, Türk asserts, "personifies the battle of humans to tame nature in order to utilize it" (p. 371), symbolizing man's power over nature. Remington, one of the canonical artists of the American West, in portraying the archetypical image of the cowboy myth broadly references ranching, not farming.

Several artists are represented by multiple works, and longer essays on them would have highlighted their contributions. The collection has many fine works by Constantin-Emile Meunier—"unquestionably the most important nineteenth century Belgian artist dealing with the subject of work" (p. 95)—but because they are spread throughout the book, their impact is diminished. Meunier's portrayals of individual workers in bronze remain remarkable. He was also a skilled draftsman, as his handsome drawing of miners from the Borinage reveals (see figure 9). The Grohmann Collection has more than 80 works by German painter Erich Mercker (1891–1973), spanning the period between 1920 and 1969, yet there is scarcely any biographical material on this talented, self-taught artist who was a former champion speed skater with an oeuvre estimated at more than 3,000 paintings. He graduated from college in Munich in 1911 with a degree in civil engineering. By the 1920s, he had become a painter, producing impressionist landscapes inspired by his travels around Europe. When four of his large oils were shown at the World Exposition in Paris in 1937, he was awarded a gold medal. Although Mercker was neither a modernist, condemned by the Nazis as a "degenerate," nor a member of the Nazi party, he was commissioned to record the monumental construction projects of the Third Reich. There is a fascinating propaganda story in his work that needs to be told, yet Türk does not tell it. Mercker continued to paint industrial subjects after the end of the war, receiving commissions from MAN (Maschinenfabrik Augsburg-Nürnberg), Volkswagen, and Bayer. His paintings at the Milwaukee School of Engineering are among the few outside of German collections.

Figure 9. Constantin Meunier, Miners from the Borinage, charcoal on paper, 21 × 17 in. Eckhart G. Grohmann Collection, Milwaukee School of Engineering.

The title "Man at Work" is emphatically gender-specific; the volume includes only a handful of women artists, all German. Nor does Türk mention any in his historical overview, even though a significant number of women have engaged this theme. Most surprisingly absent is photographer Margaret Bourke-White. When she wanted to make pictures of steel mills in Cleveland during the 1920s, the owners were initially reluctant to permit her onsite. She overcame their doubts and became one of the most powerful portrayers of industry in the 20th century. The Grohmann Collection contains many paintings of women at work, especially in rural agriculture (harvest scenes were popular) as well as those engaged in the "quiet labor" (p. 22) of textile handcraft (spinning and weaving were typical). Türk reveals his unfamiliarity with the extensive literature on the imaging of women when he declares: "The new recognition of women represented a controversial subject" (p. 22). Further, his claim that picturing the hard work women performed was "until then an unthinkable subject in pictorial art circles" (p. 22) is simply not true. Sturdy peasant women were common subjects for late-19th-century painters in all countries, The Gleaners (1857) by Millet being the most famous example. Such themes were regularly displayed in the annual Salon in Paris, winning recognition for the male and female artists who made them.

The bibliography Türk provides numbers only 11 sources, and he seems to be completely unaware of many major publications in the field, either thematic sources or monographs on individual artists.⁹ The short index lists only names of artists, not locations. Names in captions are indicated last name first, a style that is handy for an index but does not make for a graceful caption.

Türk's Man at Work: 400 Years in Paintings and Bronzes is a volume full of visual riches, but a casual reader may find its sheer quantity of images daunting. The Milwaukee School of Engineering has since published a series of five thematic volumes also based on the Grohmann Collection: Physicians, Quacks, and Alchemists; Iron and Steel Production; Agriculture, Textiles, and Tanning; Construction; and Craftsmen. These are more focused and have greater chronological cohesion, making them excellent introductions to the specific subjects they cover. They include a greater amount of factual material, and their extended narratives convey their historical contexts more effectively. Moreover, a number of works not reproduced in Türk's Man at Work are published in these books, which also include comparative illustrations, as well as many details. In addition to being available for purchase as individual volumes, all five are available as a boxed set for $84.95 (the Grohmann Museum website indicated an introductory price of $69.95). Unfortunately, the illustration count the publishers claim for the volumes is misleading, for many of the illustrations are details or thumbnail size.

Milwaukee School of Engineering
Man at Work Series

The 17th-century images in Physicians, Quacks, and Alchemists make a reader grateful for modern industrialized medicine with its anesthesia and cleanliness. The cures pictured were generally worse than the diseases they purported to cure (fortunately bloodletting is no longer a standard medical practice). For MSOE students in nursing and related biomedical fields, these images present a stark contrast to current practice.

Iron and Steel Production is loaded with the central material of IA. New works reproduced include Cornelis Beelt's 17th-century Inside a Forge and from the 19th-century, François Bonhommé's Les Fondeurs Berrichons (1863) and Ander Montan's Pouring a Large Steel Casting in the Presence of Dignitaries, Krupp Essen Works. The Grohmann Collection has copies of some famous originals, including one from 2004 based on Adolph Menzel's The Iron Rolling Mill by Hans Dieter Tylle and a stained-glass panel by Willibald Bierl based on John Ferguson Weir's The Gun Foundry (1982).

Agriculture, Textiles, and Tanning includes a broad range of images of farming and harvest, and recent acquisitions to the Grohmann Collection reproduced here include several handsome French canvases. Julien Dupré's The Hay Harvest makes a stunning pendant to his Stacking Grain Sheaves. Poppy Threshing by Désiré-François Laugée is an unusual subject, as are Otto Piltz's several scenes of women stripping goose feathers to be used in bedding. Canvases by C. H. Hart and Piltz record the hops harvest. The haystacks by Léon-Augustin Lhermitte and Ernest Chateignon parallel those by Impressionist Claude Monet's famous series of 1890–91 (not in the Grohmann Collection).

Construction begins its chronicle in biblical times, adding Old Testament scenes of the building of Noah's Ark to those of the Tower of Babel. The collection includes British artist Charles H. Poingdestre's graceful Marble Works, Carrara (1884), which has five circular scenes summarizing production at Italy's most famous quarry in a framing oval. Other notable works reproduced in the volume are some of Erich Mercker's canvases picturing the building of 2,400 miles of the autobahn under the Nazi regime. The period photographs published in this section are particularly interesting. Also notable is a fascinating canvas by Dutch artist Jan Hillebrand Wijsmuller, who records windmill-powered sawmills from the 19th century.

Most of the Grohmann works in the volume titled Craftsmen are also found in Man at Work, but the real strength of this publication is the wealth of comparative material that it contains. Alongside reproductions from the Grohmann Collection, the editor has placed plates from early trade books to give historical resonance to artistic images of archetypal workers and their shops.

Industry in Art: Pittsburgh, 1812–1920, by Rina C. Youngner

Pittsburgh is a city synonymous with work and steel, and Rina C. Youngner's Industry in Art: Pittsburgh, 1812–1920 explores its rich visual culture. In the first quarter of the 20th century, "industrial imagery became a common subject for Pittsburgh artists" (p. 147). The city had long been famed for its smoky atmosphere, which inspired atmospheric paintings and prints. What some might regard as environmental pollution denoted work and prosperity for others. Youngner explores "the social influences that shaped the industrial images produced in Pittsburgh in the nineteenth century" (p. vii).

Youngner demonstrates how, from the start, Pittsburgh "represented a new era." Although its industrial base was diverse, "the drama, spectacle, and wealth associated with iron and steel production ... made this industry the icon for the city," which soon came to symbolize "modern industrialism to the whole world." As represented by writers and artists, "wealth and heavy smoke were two sides of the same coin," denoting simultaneously "illness and hardship" and "work and wealth" (p. 1). While graphic artists were often "publicists of the town and its industries" (p. 3), the relationship of painters to Pittsburgh was more complex. For although dependent upon patronage for their livelihood, painters were not as directly involved in publicizing local industry.

Advertising created "a pictorial vocabulary for industrial activity" (p. 7), and early engravers established an urban identity for Pittsburgh. In the city's early years, artist visitors portrayed the area's aqueducts and the steamboats that plied the city's three rivers. Their works, some depicted in Youngner's volume, were similar to the early print of Sheffield that began this essay: smoky factories are visible in the distance, but their representation was grounded in the picturesque, agrarian scale of the Hudson River School, in contrast with the muscular factory complexes at full production that would interest later artists.

City views were another means by which Pittsburgh established its industrial iconography, says Youngner. The factories, river craft, and bridges pictured in advertisements and billheads proudly conveyed a busy civic identity. The emphasis was on the "places of manufacture" (p. 40) rather than on the products made. By the Civil War, "didactic images of technical procedures" (p. 37) illustrating processes became common, but images of workers were not.

Painter David Gilmour Blythe settled in Pittsburgh in the mid-1850s, and his paintings (some of which are reproduced by Youngner in the volume) critiqued the urban problems that were a byproduct of industry rather than the industries themselves. Some of Blythe's canvasses depicted people who hoped to better themselves in a capitalist democracy, for instance, the Irish and German immigrants who were coal carriers and shore men. Others referenced the oil rush in which a few became quickly rich, while most did not. Commercial artists produced advertisements with derricks and oil vats to "signify wealth and opportunity," although the "prevailing disorder created by each man pursuing his own goal" (p. 50) actually had a destructive effect on rural life.

In 1875, Andrew Carnegie opened the Edgar Thomson Steel Works, transforming Pittsburgh from the "Iron City" into the "Steel City." Illustrators like Charles Graham, whose 1886 wood engraving of Bessemer converters was published in Harper's Weekly, created an indelible image of the city (see figure 10). As industry grew in scale, so did the workforce, comprised of cheap European immigrant labor, and with it came labor unrest. The Pittsburgh area played an important role in the Railroad Strike of 1877, the "first nationwide labor upheaval in history." Workers, who had been previously "depicted as generic figures doing their jobs," says Youngner, now were represented "as dangerous mobs," contrasted with occasional pictures of "bold working men battling the powerful" (p. 93). Youngner reproduces several depictions of the 1877 strike. With the Homestead Lockout and Strike of 1892, pro-labor imagery emerged, circulated by popular magazines to a national audience. John White Alexander, who would later do murals for the Carnegie Institute, was one of those whose work is reproduced here.

Figure 10. Charles Graham, Bessemers, 1886, wood engraving, 1 3/4 × 12 3/4 in. Harper's Weekly, 19 April 1886.

In a chapter titled "Art and Industry," Youngner considers the work of several specific artists whose images of Pittsburgh were executed at the point when "the economy of the United States consolidated into corporate capitalism" (p. 114). Scenes of the Smoky City (the title of a 1901 painting by Frits Thaulow) reference the nocturnal views of factories along the river that were favored by many artists. Both Aaron Harry Gorson and Jean-Émile Labourer, who arrived in the city in 1903 and 1904, respectively, also drew on the city's industrial atmosphere and rugged terrain. In 1904, Labourer commenced the first of two series of etchings inspired by industrial subject matter, some of which pictured the poor neighborhoods where workers lived. As the first representations "of steel making inside a plant represented as high art," says Youngner, his factory interiors are milestones (p. 120). He portrayed neither the spectacular blasts of the Bessemer converters nor the open-hearth furnaces that gradually replaced them, thereby ignoring "the central operations of the steelmaking process" (p. 124). As a result, industrial patrons bought few of his paintings. Gorson's paintings stand in contrast to Labourer's. Gorson's were popular and brought high prices. He sought to capture the "dramatic beauty" of the mills along the Monongahela River, which he used as an effective compositional device "to enhance the mills by reflecting structures, lights, smoke, colors, and sky" (p. 127).

Younger notes that specific commissions brought some artists to Pittsburgh. John White Alexander (a native of the city) was paid $175,000: "the largest sum ever paid to a single mural painter" (p. 131). Commissioned in 1905, although not completed until 1915, his mural, titled The Crowning of Labor, celebrates the philanthropic ideals of Andrew Carnegie (see figure 11). The idealized and elegant style of the European-trained Alexander suited the cultural elite who ran the Carnegie Institute. His strong, athletically handsome mill workers would seem out of place on the factory floor.

Figure 11. John White Alexander, Crowning of Labor (detail), Mill Workers, 1907, oil on canvas. The Carnegie Museum of Art.

The disjunction between the hard labor and scant rewards realized by steelworkers and the huge profits made by ruthless industrial magnates was stark. Youngner points to several artists who illustrated this in the Pittsburgh region. Joseph Stella recorded workers for the Pittsburgh Survey, an agency that "systematically attacked the myth of progressive industrialism by contrasting the success of the entrepreneurs with their failure to allow livable conditions for their workers" (p. 141). Stella's 1908 sketches (represented in the Grohmann Collection as well) graphically show this. Like the photographs of Lewis Hine, Stella's sketches documented the workers, their homes, and where they worked. When published, Hine's and Stella's images gave immigrant workers a public face by revealing their private "suffering and stoicism" (p. 145).

Born of Fire: The Valley of Work by Barbara L. Jones

The Westmoreland Museum of American Art in Greensburg, Pennsylvania, has a significant collection of industrial art, with a focus on paintings, prints, and photographs of subjects in southwestern Pennsylvania. Pittsburgh was the vibrant center of this region, but industrial activity fanned out to other counties along the three rivers that converged on the city: the Allegheny, the Monongahela, and the Ohio. Born of Fire: The Valley of Work is a remarkable book that presents a powerful narrative of one of the most significant industrial regions in the nation and in the world.¹⁰ It is an important cultural history that simultaneously covers the human side of steelmaking while documenting the region's national role in that area over the course of one and one-half centuries.

In one of the volume's chapters, "Pittsburgh's Industrial Corridors," historians Edward K. Muller and Joel A. Tarr discuss the area that "seemed to be the home of Vulcan, the Roman god of fire and metalworking," a theme portrayed in paintings in the Grohmann Collection as well. The "great energy, power, and at times destructive force of this vast industrial complex" gave it a unique identity (p. 15). By 1900, Pittsburgh and its environs had become the nation's leading iron- and steel-production district. While the region's iron and coal industry dates to the 18th century, the arrival of the railroad in the mid-19th century spurred its extraordinary industrial development. Iron and steel magnates like Henry Clay Frick and Andrew Carnegie became synonymous with Pittsburgh, capitalism, and art patronage.¹¹ The growth of iron and steel production around Pittsburgh culminated in the formation of the United States Steel Corporation in 1901, whose huge size was accompanied by a comparable expansion of a workforce comprised of skilled and unskilled labor, many of them European immigrants. Stella and Hine documented these people. Pittsburgh's most remarkable phase was between 1890 and 1920, when it played a central role in America's rise to international economic prominence. Artists "saw in the region's integrated steel mills the quintessential industrial operation and the era's archetype" (p. 29).

"The Valley of Work: Scenes of Industry," a chapter by curator Barbara L. Jones, is the book's central essay, and it possesses a compelling thematic force: "The works of art preserve the images of the Big Steel Era, when Pittsburgh was at the height of its industrial power, before these scenes essentially disappeared from the landscape" (p. 85). The earliest work depicting Pittsburgh industry is an 1851 panoramic print of Pittsburgh by Emil Bott, and as Youngner has shown, such views were common markers of civic pride and economic growth. Pennsylvania landscape painters engaged the bustling panorama of Pittsburgh's rivers lined with factories in full production.

Such development came at a sharp human cost, and labor unrest revealed the flashpoints between the workers and the industries that employed them. Martin B. Lessser's Union Depot Riot (1877), a painting published as a wood engraving in Harper's Weekly and reproduced in Born of Fire, records the strike events discussed at length by Youngner. Some artists directly sided with the workers, and the narrow lives of those on the economic margins may be seen in Thomas Hart Benton's Strike (1933).

Jones observes, "Etching was the perfect medium to illustrate the smoky, hazy atmosphere that enveloped Pittsburgh" (p. 90). The printmaker Joseph Pennell, whose Pictures of the Wonders of Work (1916) celebrated industrial scenes in America (including Pittsburgh) and Europe is well represented in the collection. Born of Fire also includes multiple views by Michael J. Gallagher, who had been inspired by the coal miners of his native Scranton, as well as Steel Valley, Pittsburgh (c. 1925) by Otto Kuhler who came from a family that owned an ironworks in the Ruhr Valley (see figure 12). He was both a painter and a printmaker. Harry Sternberg's Forest of Flame (1939) emphasizes the hellish quality of the fire and smoke of the steel mills.

Figure 12. Otto Kuhler, Steel Valley, Pittsburgh, c. 1925, oil on canvas, 45 × 50 in. Westmoreland Museum of American Art, Greensburg, Pennsylvania, gift of Richard M. Scaife (2004.2).

Jones notes that many artists "saw beauty in the industrial urban landscape," painting the mills in operation in all seasons and at all times of day (p. 87). The nighttime Bessemer blows were the most dramatic and were visible for miles. Other artists like Everett Longley Warner found inspiration in the ordinary neighborhoods where those who worked in the mills lived.

Madonna of the Mines (1949) by Mildred Young Olmes (one of several women artists in the Westmoreland collection) reminds readers that while women may not have held jobs in the coal mines and steel mills, they struggled to raise their families when tragedy took the lives of their husbands. Workers were commonly portrayed as types, Jones comments, and the portrait of Mike Kessel (c. 1938–40) by Francis Komperda is unusual in the striking individuality of its heroically scaled figure.

Aaron Harry Gorson, who lived in Pittsburgh between 1903 and 1921, was captivated by the industrial landscape of the city, establishing his reputation as the "Brush Poet of Steel" for his evocative twilight and night scenes. During the 18 years he lived in there, he was the city's "best-known painter of industrial subjects" (p. 92). Typical is his Industrial Scene of 1928, which Jones includes in her discussions (see figure 13).

Figure 13. Aaron Harry Gorson, Industrial Scene, Pittsburgh, 1928, oil on canvas, 16 × 20 in. Westmoreland Museum of American Art, Greensburg, Pennsylvania.

The photographic record is equally rich, and this volume's account of the Westmoreland collection in this area commences with the soft-focused pictorialism popular during the 1920s. Even after World War II, there was a romance in how the city looked, as seen in Selden I. Davis's Pittsburghesque (c. 1949) with the plume of smoke from a train engine set against the backdrop of a misty city. The collection also features the work of contemporary artists who have been inspired by the historical legacy that has steadily disappeared since the 1970s. Aaronel deRoy Gruber responded to the decline, and her images, including End of an Era (1998), reprinted in this volume, provide poetic visual elegy images to the dismantling of the mills that once dominated the valley of work.

Each piece in Born of Fire: The Valley of Work is reproduced as a black-and-white thumbnail in the collection catalog at the end. Although small (2 3/4 × 1 3/4 in.), the images are remarkably clear. They are also reproduced as marginal illustrations when specific works are referred to in the text. A map is included in the endpapers and conveys the historical geography of the places that inspired the artists. A two-page bibliography, strongly focused on the specific artists in the collection, will lead an interested reader to a wide range of sources. Missing, however, are standard publications on industrial art (like Francis D. Klingender's groundbreaking volume of 1948, Art and the Industrial Revolution). This intelligent and beautiful book deserves a place on everyone's industrial art bookshelf.

American Impressionism: The Beauty of Work by Susan G. Larkin

The cheerful, sunny beauties of Impressionist painting might seem incompatible with industrial imagery, but as Peter C. Sutton observes in his preface to Susan G. Larkin's American Impressionism: The Beauty of Work,

When most people think of images of American Impressionism they envision scenes of recreation and leisure, ladies in long white dresses in parks or sun-dappled meadows and figures in linen relaxing in summer-houses near the shore. However, a review of the major artists' work reveals that there are virtually as many paintings of figures working as taking their ease (p. 10).

Indeed, the French Impressionists regularly painted scenes of labor, although not always in an industrial context, and include "Edouard Manet's street pavers and barmaids, Claude Monet's stevedores unloading barges on the Seine, Edgar Degas's milliners and exhausted laundresses, Camille Pissarro's farmers and field hands, or Gustave Caillebotte's artisans stripping floors" (p. 10). Industrial archaeologists would also want to note Monet's many smoky views of the Paris train station, Gare St. Lazare.

For American Impressionists, therefore, the beauty of work was a "central and recurrent feature of their art" (p. 10). Larkin considers "the treatment of the theme of labor by a group of artists commonly associated with images of leisure" (p. 16). These painters found inspiration in scenes of manual labor—farming, shipbuilding, and bargemen on canals—rather than heavy industry. She contends that their portrayals of such subjects reflect "a national identification with the dignity of labor, the positive regard for industry, and the celebration of commerce as ideals befitting a self-reliant, independent, and hard-working young country" (p. 10).

Larkin presents an excellent survey of earlier American representations of the subject. Precedents are varied and range from John Singleton Copley's portrait of Paul Revere (1768) as an artisan silversmith to John Neagle's Pat Lyon at the Forge (1826–27), showing his now-prosperous subject as the blacksmith he once was. Nineteenth-century genre painters portrayed harvest scenes of distinctly American agricultural products: corn, cranberries, and maple sugar. Some of the haying scenes depicted in Larkin's book have intriguing resonances with similar ones discussed by Barringer and Türk.

John Ferguson Weir's pair of heroic paintings of the West Point Foundry—The Gun Foundry and Forging the Shaft—celebrates labor and process. By the 1880s, Larkin says, the view had shifted, as exemplified in The Ironworkers' Noontime (1880) by Thomas Anshutz and The Strike (1886) by Robert Koehler. Türk references these paintings as well, but here the analysis is supported by Larkin's first-class scholarship.

Expatriate American Impressionist artists sought picturesque rural labor subjects amongst French and Dutch peasants. Expatriate John Singer Sargent's two paintings, Oyster Gatherers of Cancale (1878) and Bringing down Marble from the Quarries to Carrara (1911), and Charles Frederick Ulrich's Glass Blowers of Murano (1886), among those reproduced by Larkin to illustrate this discussion, resonate with comparable scenes in the Grohmann Collection. As a group, these works chart "the transition from an agricultural to an industrial economy" (p. 35).

In the chapter "Cosmopolitan Sources," the author considers the "artists who developed the iconography on which the American Impressionists drew" (p. 17). The influences on post-Civil War American art are broad, she argues, and include 17th-century Dutch genre, 19th-century English landscape, French Barbizon peasant subjects, and Japanese prints. John Constable's Hay Wain (1821) and Jean-François Millet's The Gleaners (1857) are typical of these influences. Similarly, Claude Monet painted coal barges as well as his famous haystacks near his Giverny home. As a result of their European art training, American artists were highly sophisticated during this period, and Larkin believes their work compares strongly with that of their European counterparts.

Late 19th-century American artists searched for distinctive national themes, and Larkin analyzes "how the demand for specifically American subject matter encouraged the American Impressionists to embrace the theme of labor" (p. 17). J. Alden Weir, half-brother of John Ferguson Weir, for instance, painted both farming and factories. Although these artists worked "during a period of sweeping socioeconomic change" (p. 57), Larkin notes, they nevertheless "reconciled the labor themes with the bright outlook associated with their chosen style," distancing themselves from "the unattractive aspects of a working landscape" (p. 56). Many of the scenes they portrayed were preindustrial and unmechanized, yet the representation of ordinary aspects of contemporary life was an act of modernity.

In the portion of the book devoted to catalog entries, Larkin organizes the material thematically, grouped by the type of labor portrayed by these artists and where it took place in America and France. In "The City," the works illustrate rapid urban growth. In some scenes, bricklayers steadily lay the courses that become buildings, and Ernest Lawson's Excavation—Penn Station (c. 1906) presents the construction of New York's most famous terminus.

The slower pace of life illustrated in the section titled "The Countryside" is exemplified by Theodore Robinson's placid panoramic rendition of the Port Ben, Delaware and Hudson Canal (1893) (see figure 14). Rural labor may be seen in Potato Diggers by Ernest Lawson as well in scenes of spring plowing and winter ice cutting. Theodore Robinson's Giverny Haystacks (contemporaneous with those of Monet) is illustrative of the substantial American art colony in Brittany and Normandy.

Figure 14. Theodore Robinson, Port Ben, Delaware and Hudson Canal, 1893, oil on canvas, 18 1/4 × 22 1/4 in. Sheldon Memorial Art Gallery and Sculpture Garden, University of Nebraska-Lincoln.

"The Waterfront" section includes scenes of river life, from shipbuilding to clam digging. Everett Longley Warner's Along the River Front, New York (1912), for example, records a bustling commercial neighborhood in lower Manhattan, two blocks from the Brooklyn Bridge. The stars of Larkin's thematic section on "Factories, Mills, and Quarries" are four paintings by Julian Alden Weir, portraying the textile mills that were operated by the Willimantic Linen Company and painted during the decade between 1893 and 1903.¹² The Connecticut town that inspired them was known as "Thread City." They are reproduced in a handsome double foldout, so they can be viewed together. One of the strongest images is Factory Village (1897) (see figure 15). In Pennsylvania, New Hope artists, including Daniel Garber and Robert Spencer, muted the industrial life along rivers in contrast to portrayals of Pittsburgh.

Figure 15. Julian Alden Weir, Factory Village, 1897, oil on canvas, 29 × 38 in. Metropolitan Museum of Art.

The last section of American Impressionism is focused on "The Home." Industrialization revolutionized work in the house, but the women shown engaged in domestic chores in this section appear to have benefited little from it in their mundane daily tasks of laundry and needlework. The only women artists to be included in the exhibition on which American Impressionism was based are found in this section: Ellen Day Hale and Ada Walter Shulz.

In portraying scenes of "the dignity of honest toil," the American Impressionists created handsome canvases at the turn of the 20th century. In them, they "endeavored not only to make a work of art but to make an art of work" (p. 17).

Railroads and the American Industrial Landscape by Curtis L. Carter and Jeff Brouws

The work of a single artist—Ted Rose (1940–2002)—is the subject of Railroads and the American Industrial Landscape: Ted Rose Paintings and Photographs.¹³ The book is based on an exhibition of Rose's work organized jointly by the Haggerty Museum of Art at Marquette University in Rose's native Milwaukee and the Center for Railroad Photography and Art, based in Madison, Wisconsin. By the time Rose was born in 1940, "Milwaukee had become the most industrialized city in the United States" (p. 10). Rose was drawn to "the culture of railroads" that was such a prominent feature of that city, and trains, as well as the people and structures associated with them, became his chief subject.

In the first of the catalog's two essays, "Railroads and the American Industrial Landscape: Ted Rose Paintings and Photographs," Curtis L. Carter contextualizes Rose's portrayal of "the new industrial landscape" (p. 9). The artist began his career at the tag end of the heyday of railroads, when they were still important visual facts in the Midwest. He earned a BFA in painting from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 1962 and, while still a student, worked for the Kalmbach Publishing Company in Milwaukee as a layout designer for its railroad books (the company still publishes Trains, Classic Trains, and Model Railroader). After a stint in the Army and assorted travels, he moved to New Mexico in 1965 and spent nearly 20 years as a graphic designer. He would not return to painting until 1983, at age 43. Trains remained his subject for the rest of his life until his death in 2002, says Carter. Using the evanescent medium of watercolor, he portrayed these American icons. His late painting of a coaling tower in Altoona, Pennsylvania, is typical in its positioning of trains against the structures of modern industry (see figure 16).

Figure 16. Ted Rose, Coaling Tower, Altoona, Pennsylvania, 2002, watercolor, 14 × 20 in. Collection of Ted Rose Studio.

In "Keenly Observed, Poignantly Rendered: The Railroad Photography of Ted Rose," Jeff Brouws explores the artist's role as "a visual archeologist interested in America's railroad history and heritage" (p. 19). Hopping freight trains, Rose rode the rails, shooting with a 35mm camera, fascinated by the stories he heard enroute. His earliest works were photographs that he took during his high school and college years (1956–62) between the ages of 16 and 22. Except for a course during his senior year in college, Rose was self-taught in photography. He eventually made 2,000 images in the United States, Canada, Mexico, and Guatemala, all of which display his excellent eye for composition. Brouws points out that Rose always remained more interested in the milieu of the railroad rather than in specific locomotives or trains. His photograph of the inside of a roundhouse in Carbondale, Illinois, is beautifully suffused with light, balanced to the right by the heavy locomotive whose front portion only is visible (see figure 17).

Figure 17. Ted Rose, Illinois Central Roundhouse, Carbondale, Illinois, 1967, photograph, 7 1/2 × 8 5/8 in. Center for Railroad Photography and Art, Madison, Wisconsin (by permission of the Ted Rose Studio).

The Art of American Industry

Collectively, these 11 volumes comprise a virtual seminar on the topic of art and industry and suggest intriguing directions for future research.

Notes

¹� Tim Barringer, Men at Work: Art and Labour in Victorian Britain (New Haven, Conn.: Yale Univ. Press, 2005), 187, 188. [Published for The Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art.]

²� Florence Claxton's painting, Women's Work: A Medley (1861), presents an alternative to Brown's masculinist view of labor. By showing "women's unrecognized work in servicing men," she campaigns "to widen the scope of women's work." Claxton's work critiques Brown's canvas, which "had shown men's physical labour as representing all the work of humanity." See Catherine King, "Florence Claxton," in Dictionary of Women Artists, ed. Delia Gaze (London, England: Fitzroy Dearborn Publishers, 1997), vol. 1: 405.

³� Only the Steidle Collection at the College of Earth and Mineral Sciences at Pennsylvania State University (once the School of Mineral Industries) shares a similar theme. Established by Edward Steidle (1887–1977), the school's dean between 1928 and 1953, its focus on American industrial art from the 1930s and 1940s makes it also unique within the history of American collecting. Concentrated on the industrial geography of Pennsylvania, more than 230 works by 136 artists portray the mining and metallurgy (especially steel) central to the college's educational mission. While the emphases are distinct, the Grohmann and Steidle collections are linked in their pedagogical purpose and industrial focus. See Eric Jon Schruers, "Industrialism in Early Twentieth Century American Art: A Catalogue Raisonné of the Edward Steidle Collection at the College of Earth and Mineral Sciences, The Pennsylvania State University," PhD dissertation, Pennsylvania State University, 1996.

⁴� See H. D. Tylle: An Artist Painting Today's Industry (Fuldatal, Germany: Libelli Ars, 2005).

⁵� See Francine Carraro, Oil Patch Dreams: Images of the Petroleum Industry in American Art (Beaumont: Art Museum of Southwest Texas, 1998).

⁶� Once Germany's main industrial region, it has undergone an economic transformation similar to what happened in Pittsburgh. The North Duisburg Landscape Park was established on the site of a former mill once operated by the Thyssen family. After it closed in 1985, the area was rehabilitated as a park between 1990 and 1999. The Sloss Furnace in Birmingham, Alabama, designated a National Historic Landmark in 1981, opened as a museum in 1983. See the European Route of Industrial Heritage (ERIH), which presents 670 sites from 29 European countries <http://en.erih.net/>.

⁷� Joseph E. B. Elliott, a photographer at Muhlenberg College in Allentown, Pennsylvania, has produced several series on industry, including one on Bethlehem Steel in the mid 1880s ("The Steel"). His most recent series, "Palazzos of Power," undertaken for the Historic American Buildings Survey, documents the generating stations of the Philadelphia Electric Company (1900–30).

⁸� See Susanne Lange, Bernd and Hilla Becher: Life and Work (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2007). With MIT Press, the Bechers have published a series of books: Grain Elevators (2006), Cooling Towers (2005), Typologies (2004), Mineheads (1997), Industrial Facades (1995), Gas Tanks (1993), Blast Furnaces (1990), and Water Towers(1988). See also Basic Forms of Industrial Buildings (Göteborg: Hasselblad Center and Munich: Schirmer/Mosel, 2004) and Pennsylvania Coal Mine Tipples (New York: Dia Center for the Arts, 1991). Their work has been extensively published in German language imprints. The Bechers' affinity for cataloging may also be seen in the work of another German photographer August Sander (1876–1964). Based near Cologne, his documentary project, "Man of the Twentieth Century," included more than 600 photographs of people and their professions to create a fascinating typology of labor and character. Because their uncanny individuality did not conform to their ideal Aryan values, the Nazis banned his portraits.

⁹� Türk refers readers to his Bilder der Arbeit: Eine Ikonografische Anthology (2000), which reproduces about 1,400 works and has 1,000 references.

¹⁰� Only the book is reviewed here. The museum also produced a music CD (Born of Fire: Songs of Steel and Industry) by the NewLanders, a southwestern Pennsylvania folk music group, which presents songs of the Big Steel Era. With Bill Mosher, the museum also produced a documentary film (Born of Fire: How Pittsburgh Built a Nation) "that features visits to operating steel mills, views of the southwestern Pennsylvania region, interviews with historians, art historians and former steelworkers, the artwork and galleries of The Westmoreland, and the NewLanders in the studio." See <http://www.bornoffire.org/>. Eleven songs are featured on the CD: "Twenty-Inch Mill/Celebrated Working Man," "Where the Old Allegheny and Monongahela Flow," "Altoona Freight Wreck," "Draglines," "Spike Crain," "Hard Travelin'," "Coal Diggin' Blues," "Bread and Roses," "I Lie in the American Land," "Two Cent Coal," and "Soho on Saturday Night." The song lyrics are on the website. Movie clips from the DVD are also available on the website.

¹¹� Also from Pittsburgh were banker Andrew W. Mellon and collector Duncan Phillips. Phillips's grandfather had been a cofounder of the Jones and Laughlin Steel Company. The Phillips Collection opened in 1921 in Washington, DC. In 1937, Mellon donated funds and his collection to establish the National Gallery of Art.

¹²� For an interesting recent study, see Julia B. Rosenbaum, Visions of Belonging: New England Art and the Making of American Identity (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell Univ. Press, 2006). Julian Alden Weir's factory paintings are among the works discussed.

¹³� For more information on the artist, see In the Traces: Railroad Paintings of Ted Rose (Bloomington, Ind.: Indiana Univ. Press, 2000).

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