Charles Sheeler (American, 1883–1965)
Suspended Power, 1939
Oil on canvas
Gift of Edmund J. Kahn, 1985.143

In 1938 Fortune magazine commissioned Sheeler to create a series of six paintings on the theme of power as a showcase of America’s technological advances. Sheeler’s paintings, illustrated in the December 1940 issue of the magazine, delivered a clarion call to its readers that America’s industrial strength would be a new source of might in the post–World War II era. Sheeler chose six subjects: the railroad (Rolling Power), the airplane (Yankee Clipper), a steam engine (Steam Turbine), the Hoover Dam (Conversation —Sky and Earth), a hydroelectric turbine (Suspended Power), and curiously, a 19th-century waterwheel (Primitive Power). He spent a year traveling to the sites that would represent his themes, photographing them in preparation for his paintings.

Suspended Power depicts a new hydroelectric turbine being lowered into place at the Tennessee Valley Authority dam in Guntersville, Alabama. Sheeler humanized the impersonal machine by rendering its hard, metallic surfaces in a palette of warm, flesh tones, humanizing the impersonal machine. The artist’s own feelings about mechanization were mixed: far from embracing industrialization with untempered approval, he expresses a tension in the precarious position of the turbine looming over the workers below. In contrast, Sheeler’s rendering of a waterwheel in Primitive Power (The Regis Collection, Minneapolis), testimony to the lasting power of 19th-century innovation, seems a deliberate counterpoint to the enormous machine that will now provide the same service.

The title Suspended Power alludes to the actual suspension of the machine as it is lowered into place, and to the status of the dam until the turbine begins generating power. Sheeler’s workmen are not actively engaged in the installation and seem to be remote observers. Their attitudes recall paintings from the previous century in which viewers perched on the rim of Niagara Falls—a symbol of America’s might linked to nature, witnessed what was then the most powerful source of hydroelectric power.