Industry
Factories, forges, mills, docks and mines as subjects for painting and photography.
No works indexed yet · 10 related artists
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About
Industry entered art as spectacle. Joseph Wright of Derby painted glowing metal and straining workmen in An Iron Forge (1772), and Philip James de Loutherbourg's Coalbrookdale by Night (1801) turned Shropshire furnaces into an inferno under the moon. Adolph Menzel's The Iron Rolling Mill (1872–75) went inside a Silesian works to show heat, labour and a change of shift in convincing detail.
The 20th century celebrated and questioned the factory. Charles Sheeler photographed and painted Ford's River Rouge plant in Michigan as a clean geometry of stacks and conveyors, and Diego Rivera's Detroit Industry murals (1932–33) honour the same car industry's workers in a roaring cycle. In Buenos Aires, Benito Quinquela Martín painted the smoky docks of La Boca. From the late 1950s Bernd and Hilla Becher photographed blast furnaces, winding towers and water towers in strict, frontal series, preserving the look of a vanishing industrial age.
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