ART3010  American  Art  History  

Week  4,  Assignment  1:  Discussion  2  

By Michael Galligan

With their increased population at the turn of the twentieth century, large metropolitan cities
such as New York became favored subjects of artists. Examine the photograph by Edward
Steichen available at the following link and consider the effect he is trying to produce:

 
Edward Steichen, The Flatiron (1905)

Compare this image with the 1931 Grant Wood painting titled Fall Plowing. How legible are the
foreground, middle ground, and background of the photograph and the painting? How are
viewers meant to locate themselves vis-à-vis the spaces represented? Do you think that the artists
made assumptions about the backgrounds of the viewers? For example, are both meant to
address a city dweller? Why, or why not?

 
Fall Plowing, by Grant Wood (1931)

These two images could not seemingly be more different upon first glance. Steichen photograph
is shot from ground level angling upwards to capture what looks like Daniel Burnham’s 1902
Flatiron Building in New York City. What really makes this an interesting shot is the organic
lattice of several barren trees, which add to the unnatural coldness of the shot and building. The
inclusion of silhouette’s of people walking by help define the shot at ground level. More
importantly they help translate the scale between the foreground trees and limbs with the
concrete shape rising in the background.

Grant Wood’s work is a landscape painting that seems to replace reality with symbolic
depictions of the trappings what might be seen overlooking farmland. For example the trees are
not painted to look real so much as symbolic representations formed with deference to filling
form within the planar space. Wood’s work places the viewer close the plow in the foreground as
if standing upon a point higher on the rolling hill. There is a farm and stand of trees surrounding
near the upper left of the painting that is unrealistically sharp in focus. In some respects this
painting seems as if photographed in F-64, the smallest aperture of a camera used to produce the
best depth of field.

I believe Steichen’s photograph celebrates the triumph of the Flatiron building in a way that says
nature and man are necessary for its existence. It is the people walking through a forested area
near the Flatiron building that suggests permanence with a sense of timelessness. I believe both
city dwellers and rural individuals would see the beauty of this scene and want to walk near its
strong presence.

Grant Wood’s painting seems to make beautiful the common farm set idyllically for both the city
dweller and people of the Midwest. By painting the farm in such a loving and controlled manner,
Wood’s suggested the need of such places to sustain the city dweller that ate the foods produced
within (Pohl 431). To the Midwesterner it made beautiful their profession and lands during a
time of crisis generated by both economic and natural disasters of the Great Depression and Dust
Bowl; a time when farming was anything but idyllic.

Work Cited

1. Pohl, Frances K. Framing America: A Social History of American Art. 2nd Edition. New
York, New York: Thames and Hudson, 2008.