The paintings by Diego Rivera and Charles Sheeler depict a bright future for America. Rivera uses bright colors to represent different cultures while Sheeler uses clarity and bland colors to support his view on the growing nation. Both Classic Landscape and The North Wall relate to Art Across the Border in many ways and support a theme, America being the land of freedom and opportunity.
The son of a streamer-line executive in Philadelphia, Charles Sheeler (1883-1965) took his first art classes under William Merritt Chase at the Pennsylvania Academy in 1903, and in the "Now Familiar pattern of other American modernists-to-be he experienced his conversion to Cézanne, Picasso, Braque, and Matisse during a trip to Paris in 1908" Shortly after the Armory Show, Sheeler abandoned his fauvist manner in order to experiment with cubism. Sheeler is considered the archetypal Precisionist. He had an affinity for high-definition photography and at the same time avoided figures in favor of near abstract geometric subjects. His concept hinged on his belief in the "unseen soul" of the inanimate object, whether old barn or new industrial plant. In such works as Classic Landscape, the American industrial landscape is aseptic, sterile, and functionally perfect. Yet, images seem isolated and completely insulated from the effects of environmental corrosion. In the way Sheeler incorporates the industrial sublime with puritanical utility. Classic Landscape exhibits good qualities as well. Classic Landscape depicts a scene from the Ford Motor Company's River Rouge Plant near Detroit, which the artist had visited in 1927 on a photographic commission from the company. Sheeler called the subject "incomparably the most thrilling I have had to work with" and went on to produce several watercolor and oil paintings inspired by the River Rouge Plant. Classic Landscape is the best known of these and has been exhibited widely. It is a painting with remarkable clarity and order, with details suppressed and the forms of buildings and other structures expressed as boldly simplified geometric forms. To Sheeler, this industrial scene was comparable to the highest architectural achievements of the classical past. The painting that expressed his feelings about big industry is American Landscape, 1930. It holds no nature at all, except for the sky (into which a plume of effluents rises from a tall smokestack) and the water of a dead canal. Whatever can be seen is man-made, and the view has a curious and serenity, produced by the regular cylinders of silos and smokestack and the dark, mummified authoritarian arms of the loading machinery to the right. The sphere, the cube, and the “cylinder are no longer things to be found in nature, as Cezanne had once recommended: in the mighty abstraction of process and product, they have replaced nature altogether” (www.bookrags.com). The ancient tension between nature and culture is over. Culture has won. It has colonized all the space in the American imagination that nature once claimed. One human figure remains, and you can hardly see him, or it, at first: a tiny, scurrying ant, on the tracks by the canal, between the uncoupled boxcars."
In the early years of this century, the major manufacturing cities of the American Midwest, such as Chicago or Cleveland or Pittsburgh, were eager to show that they were not just grey industrial centers. As part of the so-called City Beautiful Movement, the local captains of industry used some of their profits to build impressive and conspicuous art galleries and museums, filling them with European masterpieces of art. The great car-making centre of Detroit was no exception. However, in 1930 the Detroit Institute of Arts' director, William Valentiner, decided to give the DIA a more “local focus by commissioning a mural celebrating the city's industrial achievements” (www.bookrags.com).
By the 1920s, Detroit was already world famous as the home of the moving assembly-line. Pioneered by local industrialist Henry Ford, mass production was regarded as proof of the dynamic inventiveness of the free enterprise system. However, the `Detroit Industry' (1933) frescoes which celebrated this triumph of Yankee ingenuity were not the work of an American artist but of a Mexican Communist, Diego Rivera. As recently as 1927, Rivera's political beliefs had prompted him to Ford, John D. Rockefeller and J. P. Morgan in his Mexican mural `Wall Street Banquet'. He would later become aware of the tension between “industrial and finance capitalism that made Ford's inclusion in this trio incongruous” (Hamrill 23). But more importantly, he, like Lenin, and Hitler for that matter, was predisposed to view Ford's technological achievements positively. To celebrate this automotive production, Rivera initially had the expanse of the two long north and south walls of the rectangular Garden Court at the centre of the institute. However, inspired by the “River Rouge complex, which combined every phase of production from raw material to finished car, he devised a complex design of symbols and images that required the use of the east and west walls” (Hamrill 45) as well to capture his romantic vision of a creative unity between Nature, Technology and Humankind. Symbolic female figures of natural productivity in the upper eastern panels were counterpoised by masculine images of war and power on the western wall. Similarly, above the main automotive panels of the north and south walls Rivera depicted the races of people and the mineral wealth that constituted the raw materials of Fordist mass production.
The small panel on the north wall, shows the controversial scene, which caused quite a stir at the murals' opening. Rivera uses bright colors giving the panel more dynamic. The clergy of Detroit saw it as depicting secularism's triumph over God and took it as an offensive allusion to the traditional Nativity scene. Despite the resemblance, Rivera's motivation was not simply religious. The animals “illustrated were those from whose blood scientists had developed the vaccination serum” (Hamrill 47). Continuing along the north wall, one sees huge hands coming out of the ground eagerly clasping rocks to denote the mineral wealth of the earth. The giant male nudes on either side, symbolizing the Native American and Black races, are earth fathers blending into the land itself. A smaller panel to the left depicts a disturbing modern scene of workers in protective overalls and elaborate gas-masks making some decidedly weapon-like object. This contrasts with the lifesaving use of technology shown in the inoculation panel. The main central panel of the north wall shows men of different races working together in small, rhythmic, well-orchestrated groups. Each group seems to be in control of its share of the shiny, robot-like machines and of the large and small components, which will eventually make a V8 engine. There is richness to this panel, a real “enthusiasm for what Rivera regarded as the greatest example of the modern” (Hamrill 56) world's industrial technology. There is, however, little immediate sense of the contemporary struggles for better working conditions and higher pay that one might expect from a man who called himself a `revolutionary painter
After viewing these paintings, one should realize that both artists are depicting the Ford factory in Detroit. Rivera had a mentality of people working together being the future for America. Sheeler had a mentality of factories being the future for America. Though both had different mentalities about the future, in their art, they both believed that America was a successful industrial nation. Aside from their views of the future, River and Sheeler’s art relate to Art Across the Border. The reason why these two paintings relate to Art Across the Border is, both of the artists appreciate the American society and culture. Rivera’s interest in American society is particularly interesting because he is Mexican and a communist. One would think Rivera would possess an opposing view. Rivera observed and realized the beauty and opportunity America offered. He effectively expressed his views in his beautiful masterpiece. Sheeler had a different view of America. He repeatedly painted factories and made the backgrounds look dark and dreary. The repetition was Sheeler expressing the large amount of factories in America. This also represents the wealth America has. In the Classic Landscape, the factory was just another factory to Sheeler.
