I grew up in the Buffalo, New York region, in a semi-rural exurban town. I have oft written about that setting: how as a boy I wandered in nearby fields, climbed poplar trees, contemplated redwing blackbirds, picked cherries in a next door, run-down orchard. For a grade school project, I once asked my father to find the deed for our property, and I discovered that our land had originally been owned by Indians, as we said in those days. That information was inscribed on our deed, which I could hold in my hand! Innocent child that I was, I romanticized that egregious fact.
Back then, I also tended to romanticize – so I was taught – the city of nearby Buffalo as a hub of busy commerce. Along with this, as a schoolboy, I was also imbued with the then commonplace romance of the Erie Canal. Never for a moment did I ponder all the human and animal labors that it took to excavate and then to operate that passageway. Later, with many others of my generation, I also came to treasure, in a much more sober way, the old song that had been revived so forcefully by Bruce Springstein, “I’ve got a mule and her name is Sal, Fifteen miles on the Erie Canal….”
Then there were the great grain silos of Buffalo! My sixth-grade class once toured in and around several of those massive structures. To this day, I remember standing next to one of them awestruck. So of course, when, some years ago, I first came upon Charles Demuth’s powerful 1927 oil painting, My Egypt, in the Whitney Museum, I couldn’t take my eyes off it. Hence I resonate with a later popular, but still astute reading of that work:
His depictions of warehouses, factories and row houses imbue these ordinary structures (sometimes ironically) with a grandeur and glamor normally associated with cathedrals, palaces and temples. For example, his image of two Lancaster grain silos, titled My Egypt (1927), invites the viewer to compare the massive volumetric forms to pharaonic monuments like the pyramids.
I will resist the temptation to speculate here about whether that title was intended to suggest that Demuth longed to be delivered from what he may have perceived to have been the oppression of the “civilization” of his own times.
Rather, I want to commend the counter-intuition suggested to me by the painting itself, which will probably be considered obvious by some: that creations of human civilization can sometimes be magnificent in themselves and that we should therefore resist the Thoreauvian temptation to think that only “the natural” can be beautiful or even sublime.
Hence, as a matter of course, I do revel in Demuth’s “grain silos.” Such structures, thus envisioned, might be viewed as our cathedrals. I invite you to join me in this joy, if you’re not already there. Sing a song of praise for the great grain silos! Tell your Church friends, too, if they need to be told, that by no means do they have to feel guilty about this kind of unabashed aesthetic joy in magnificent creations of human civilization such as these.
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