Part Seven: - One Hundred Years of Michigan Work in Art: 1850 to 1950

Michigan Workscapes

“Cliff Mine, Lake Superior, 1848” oil on canvas, Robert Duncanson.

Workscapes can glorify manufacturing  (as in Charles Sheeler’s luminous River Rouge Plant paintings that “repressed the human dimension of manufacturing work and focused instead on the factory as a paradigm of modern rationality and order”)^[i] or operate as metaphors for the insignificance of the individual human laborer. Two that illustrate this particularly well are Robert Duncanson’s “Cliff Mine, Lake Superior, 1848” and Zoltan Sepeshy’s oil painting “Steel Mill—Zug Island” (ca 1928)[ii].

The entire Upper Peninsula mining community in Duncanson’s painting is dwarfed by a “foreboding sublime presence”[iii] –a hulking, 800-foot cliff that looms over the tiny mine buildings and tinier human figures. Still raw and unpainted, the buildings are too new to have been discolored by weather or mine tailings. They sit in a barren landscape that begs the question of what this Lilliputian community will do for food and fuel in the coming Keweenaw winter, where surviving is its own full-time job.

Duncanson’s hulking cliff is replaced by the hulking furnaces of Zug Island in Sepeshy’s dreary industrial workscape. The limited palette of browns, tans, and blacks paints the steel foundry “as a dirty angular world... a unified complexity that has inherent in it aspects of chaos.”[iv] There appears to be no sky, just a dirty ceiling. Humans are so insignificant in this setting it is hard to determine if the shapes are workers or only some other raw material for the foundry to consume.

“Steel Mill—Zug Island” (ca 1928), oil on canvas, Zoltan L. Sepeshy.

The workscape seems kinder, or at least more manageable, in two naïve winter scenes, created one hundred years apart: Celestia Young’s “Adam’s Mill in Plymouth, Michigan, January 19, 1856”[v] and Ben Plourde’s circa 1960 “Logging Scene.”[vi] An uncomplicated nostalgia for a childhood spent in the lumber camps of the Upper Peninsula pervades the latter work, which is pleasantly crowded with draft horses, axes, anvils, oxen, shacks, and sleighs and is utterly untroubled by the rules of perspective. Similarly, the ordered and peaceful sawmill yard in Young’s painting—done when she was a “schoolgirl”—shows rows of cut logs, lying under a soft covering of snow, more reminiscent of a quiet churchyard than a business whose soundtrack was a screeching muley saw.

“Adams Mill,” January 19, 1856, oil on canvas, Celestia Young. Image: The Henry Ford.

Part Eight of this series will continue with “Michigan’s Song of Work.”

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[i] Sheeler saw the sprawling manufacturing facilities as “the contemporary equivalent of the cathedral, ‘our substitute,’ he said, ‘for religious experience.’ “Charles Sheeler/River Rouge Plant/1932,” Whitney.org.

[ii] Hall, 103.

[iii] Joseph D. Ketner, The Emergence of the African-American Artist: Robert S. Duncanson, 1821-1872 (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1994), 28.

[iv]Omoto, 98-99.

[v] Marsha MacDowell and C. Kurt Dewhurst, Michigan Folk Art: Its Beginning to 1941 (East Lansing, MI: Kresge Art Gallery, 1976), 28.

[vi] C. Kurt Dewhurst and Marsha MacDowell. Rainbows in the Sky: The Folk Art of Michigan in the Twentieth Century (East Lansing, MI: Kresge Art Museum, 1978),44.