Industry

This maquette is the only surviving version of a seven-by-twelve foot photographic mural created by Charles Sheeler for an exhibition on mural art at New York’s Museum of Modern Art. Murals, promoted in the Americas and Europe in the 1930s, created a vast new space of display for painters and photographers, who, like Sheeler, freely crossed media boundaries to make the giant compositions. The multiple source photographs in this maquette, all taken by Sheeler, depict the Ford Motor Company’s plant in River Rouge, near Detroit, where the artist traveled in 1927 as part of a commission to make publicity pictures for the company. The left and right sections of the triptych are halves of a single photograph, while the central portion represents a montage of three other pictures taken at the plant. The bold leaps in scale and subject are what made murals of the 1930s—both painted and photographic—impressive in their dynamism.