Sunrise

Sunset

A 30-second online art project:

Peter Burr, Sunshine Monument

Learn more

Learn more at whitney.org/artport

Skip to main content

Charles Sheeler

River Rouge Plant
1932

On view
Floor 7

Date
1932

Classification
Paintings

Medium
Oil and pencil on canvas

Dimensions
Overall: 20 7/16 × 24 3/8in. (51.9 × 61.9 cm)

Accession number
32.43

Credit line
Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; purchase

Rights and reproductions
© artist or artist’s estate

API
artworks/1480

In 1927, an advertising agency hired Charles Sheeler to photograph the Ford Motor Company’s new River Rouge plant, a vast complex ten miles outside Detroit, Michigan. Covering 2,000 acres and employing 75,000 people, River Rouge was the world’s largest factory and the first to fully manufacture cars on site. After finishing the photography assignment, Sheeler produced a series of paintings of the factory complex, including River Rouge Plant. Here, Sheeler depicted the plant’s coal processing and storage facility, set on the serene waters of a boat slip, using the crisp lines and hard-edge geometries of Precisionism. Although the plant had experienced severe labor disputes in the early years of the Depression, Sheeler repressed the human dimension of manufacturing work and focused instead on the factory as a paradigm of modern rationality and order. For Sheeler, American factories were the contemporary equivalent of the cathedral, “our substitute,” he said, “for religious experience.”





Have feedback about the Whitney's online collection? Send us a message.