What a beautiful world it would be...

p. 106

"His [William Carlos Williams] poem 'Classic Scene', written in 1937, addresses the pervasive industrial ambience of the poet's own milieu in the north-east.



A power-house
in the shape of a red brick chair
90 feet high

on the seat of which
sit the figures
of two metal
stacks - aluminum

commanding an area
of squalid shacks
side by side -
from one of which

buff smoke streams while under
a grey sky
the other remains

passive today -


..."

p. 107

"...But a vaguely unsettling conflict exists in 'Classic Scene' between the unsightly shacks and the assertive power plant, between the active and the passive aluminium stacks.  As with Sheeler's industrial scenes, we struggle to assess this seemingly straightforward description.  In the detached, objective language, an understated voice proclaims a dissonant message about a world totally dominated by industry.  The realm it commands is eerie, squalid, and deathly still.

Indeed, William's 1954 essay on Sheeler's work interjects a surprisingly pessimistic note with regard to the industrial subject.  He describes the power of Classic Landscape as resulting from 'a realization on the part of the artist of man's pitiful weakness and at the same time his fate in the world'.
Finally, we glimpse what the 'contemporary dilemma' meant to Williams.  The creative individual's fate -- especially in America -- is to live in a mechanical age, a fact that cannot be denied.  The artist must address this in his art, but in doing so, he finds that the machine remains alien and aloof; humanity is pitifully weak in its domain.  Williams apparently maintained faith in the artist's ability to create vital expressions in the face of such challenges, however, because he concluded the essay with a more positive, if incongruous , thought: 'These are the themes which under cover of his art Sheeler has celebrated.'

Sheeler, when asked to explain the diminished human presence in his industrial scenes, advanced yet another, possibly ironic, explanation: 'Well, it's my illustration of what a beautiful world it would be if there were no people in it.'"


from "Charles Sheeler and the Cult of the Machine" by Karen Lucic, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Mass 1991