Ball Bearings and Winches: How Industrial Civilization Permeated the Arts

The 18th century Enlightenment was characterized by a fascination with scientific experiments and technical inventions. The resulting discoveries were being harnessed to enable manufacturing, and thus applied science emerged. Later, the combination of experimentation and industrial applications became a model of progress. At least part of the stylistic experimentation in the arts, rife at the beginning of the 20th century, was inspired by the examples from science.

Cubism, which emerged just before World War I, was perhaps the most visible of such experiments. It was a new way of seeing initiated by Braque and Picasso (1) and subsequently gained followers who included Fernand Legér, Albert Gleizes, Jean Metzinger, and Juan Gris.

In the 1920s, however, Cubism started to be criticized for its decorativeness. This happened in the context of the general trend of “return to order,” to simpler art forms. This brought in a rational esthetic, purism, which was founded by two people who painted but also had architectural backgrounds, Amédée Ozenfant (1886–1966) and Charles-Edouard Jeanneret (1887–1965). Jeanneret, later known as Le Corbusier, became an iconic modernist architect. The architecture-conditioned draftsmanship of Ozenfant and Le Corbusier provided a background for applicative thought, quite unique in the arts at the time. Ozenfant met Le Corbusier in 1917 and they defined their concepts in a book, Aprés le cubisme (After Cubism), published in 1918. In 1920–1925 they edited the journal L'Esprit Nouveau (The New Spirit) (2, 3).

The purists maintained that art, in its highest form, should comply with universal principles of simplicity and harmony. That presupposed—in analogy to the scientific laws—the existence of universal rules and thus the existence of a universal language of art. They maintained that “logic corrects the sometimes capricious march of intuition” (2) and saw art as a combination of mathematical principles and emotional response. They criticized Cubism for its arbitrary forms and said that the paintings need to become simpler, and architecture more functional.

Industrial production generated a wide array of new objects and forms, and most of all there was an ever-increasing number of machines (4, 5). Machines such as cars started to affect the individual way of life. The insertion of machine-manufactured objects and mechanisms in paintings contributed to their emerging symbolic value, dominated by the complexity of the production processes and the precise incessant performance. Such influence of technology led to what became known as the machine aesthetic: a key concept in bringing industrial design into the wide definition of the arts (6, 7).

Machine aesthetic is particularly visible in the works of Fernand Legér (1881–1955) (8). Legér was born in Normandy. He worked as an architect's draughtsman in Caen and from 1900 onward was based in Paris, where he attended the Ecole des Arts Décoratifs (the School of Decorative Arts). In 1924 he opened a teaching studio with Ozenfant in Paris. In 1925 he created a mural at Le Corbusier's pavilion L'Esprit Nouveau at the Exposition Internationale des Arts Décoratifs (International Exhibition of Decorative Arts). Legér's art was influenced by Cézanne and in the early stages he was one of the main proponents of Cubism. Legér was in the military in World War I. The “mechanical” period in his painting started in 1917. He also became involved in films and ballet. Purism became his inspiration. Legér first visited the US in 1931 and lived there from 1940 to 1945. During that period his forms became more fluid and organic. He later returned to France.

Legér painted industrial objects such as ball bearings, perforated plates, and winches, much like others painted still life, treating them as everyday objects. The lines in his paintings are straight and the shapes geometric. It all clearly reminds one of technical drawings. There is no ornamentation and only interconnections of geometrical parts. And yet, when one looks at Fig. 1, the wavy line and volume reminiscent of a human shape complement and soften the technical aura.

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Fig. 1. Fernand Legér.

©2013 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/ADAGP, Paris and Tate, London 2013. Reproduced with permission.

The place of celebration of Legér's life work, Musée National Fernand Legér, is located in Biot in Provence, not far from Nice, in a typical simple modernist building (9). It perhaps makes—similar to the soft line mentioned above—the often forgotten point that the modernist, technology-inspired forms were often placed within organic shapes of nature, and many projects included nature as their integral component. In these cases, the simplicity of the machine aesthetic was complementary to nature rather than freestanding. It is only later that the isolated, sterile, and forbidding environments emerged. The message I suppose, as it is so often in life, is one of maintaining the right balance.

• © 2013 The American Association for Clinical Chemistry