(jazzy piano music)
- [Steven] We're in the Crystal Bridges Museum
of American Art, looking at a painting by Elsie Driggs
called "Blast Furnaces," and it dates to 1927.
This is a painting that was made from sketches
made in Pittsburgh, the heart of American industry,
the heart of American steel.
This was the moment of American industry.
- [Jen] The site is the Jones & Laughlin
Steel Company factory, which the artist first saw
when she was a young girl,
when she was traveling by train in Pennsylvania.
She recounted that her father woke her up on this train ride
and she looked outside and saw the Bessemer furnaces
and was just completely taken by this vision of industry.
When she visited much later,
the plant was no longer using the Bessemer process,
so she went and discovered a very different scene,
and depicted it in this painting.
- [Steven] The production of steel
couldn't have been more important
to the development of the United States at this moment.
The steel that's being produced in Pittsburgh at this time
is being used in the burgeoning automobile industry,
for the bridges that are being built,
and for the skyscrapers that are being erected,
especially in Manhattan.
- [Jen] Also, railroad tracks and all of the infrastructure
needed for the rail system would've been formed
from the steel made in plants such as this.
- [Steven] But Driggs is not representing
a locomotive within a beautiful landscape,
or the soaring skyscrapers of lower Manhattan.
Instead, she's representing something
that most people wouldn't find beautiful.
She's finding beauty in a factory.
- [Jen] This choice of subject became popular in the 1920s,
and for Driggs it was about looking at
the beauty of these forms, and connecting it back
to the beauty of classical art.
- [Steven] And that seems at first to be a bit of a jump.
How can you go from the steel mills of Pittsburgh
to the pristine marbles of Ancient Greece and Rome?
How can we talk about those two things in one breath?
I think, for Driggs, it's not so much the subject matter
as a kind of formal beauty.
It has to do with order and symmetry,
and emphasis on geometry.
- [Jen] The repeated geometries
and pattern within the painting are so crucial.
We have those four large cylindrical forms in the center,
but then you have the echoed pairings
of these different smokestacks in the back,
from the four darker vertical portions
to those three brown smokestacks
that are in the far distance,
so you get that sense of an underlying order.
- [Steven] But I'm especially fond
of the way that she interrupts that order.
You have those four massive cylinders
that anchor the painting.
But then, in front of that, you have this piping
that seems more organic.
- [Jen] You also have the scaffolding,
which creates this fine, lacy detailing
that makes an interesting contrast
to the large, flat planes of those cylinders.
- [Steven] And also gives us a sense
of the scale of these monumental structures.
I can just imagine that if I was standing
on one of those walkways, the top railing would come
just a little higher than my waist.
This is a dark painting.
Even the sky, which is the brightest part
of this painting, is dark.
It's grays, yellows, and tans.
- [Jen] This seems like a place that's so out of scale,
and so inhospitable to human presence
that you wonder what is the relationship
between the human and industry
that in some ways, these forms that humans have created
have taken on a life of their own
that seems to be completely outside
of the everyday world of human experience.
- [Steven] Well it makes sense to me
that there is that kind of ambivalence.
Because Pittsburgh had been the site
of some of the most violent labor riots
in the United States.
It was a place that had witnessed
terrible industrial accidents and loss of human life,
and so that ambivalence makes sense to me.
There's a cost to this industry.
- [Jen] Even the viewpoint slightly distances you
from a human experience.
The way that she crops the painting
on the bottom and at that top
gives you the sense that you're almost floating
and disembodied, so in the viewpoint itself,
Driggs is playing with that question,
of what is the relationship
between human scale and industry?
- [Steven] And it's worth noting
that only two years after this painting was completed,
Wall Street will crash, and American industry
will grind to a halt.
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