The Industrial Sublime: Mythmaking in Soviet and American Interwar Art

This paper explores the intellectual and ideological underpinnings of industrial paintings in the USSR and the USA during the interwar period, arguing that these artworks served as powerful tools for crafting national identity and projecting visions of modernity. While the two countries are usually perceived as ideological opposites, their artists - Soviet groups like AKHRR and OST, and American Precisionists such as Charles Sheeler or Elsie Driggs - engaged with industrial themes in a similar way, taking on an ambitious goal of creating an image of an idealized machine-age future. This study critically examines how two “big” concepts, influential for the early 20th century, served as intellectual sources for both Soviet and American industrial paintings: the ideas of “Ideal City” and of a “New Man”. Drawing on urban-planning theories by Howard and Garnier, the artists merged modernist art styles with classical temples, designing an appealing background for a worker in a progressive industrial state, who oscillates between a mechanized and anonymous Taylorist figure and a Renaissance-like being, mastering and embodying modern industry. By employing methodologies from art history, intellectual history, and critical theory (Walter Benjamin, Jean Baudrillard, Boris Groys), the study reveals how these paintings mediated between reality and ideology, often masking the harshness of industrialization with idealized imagery. Combining formal analysis with intellectual and archival sources, this paper argues that industrial painting was not a peripheral genre, but a visual arena in which artists worked to reconcile modernist form, ideological content, and the aesthetics of the machine age.