Breaking Frame

In this incisive, abundantly illustrated study, Julie Wosk explores for the first time how the visual arts reflected the explosive psychological impact of the Industrial Revolution on English and American society. Wosk reveals the ways artists and designers responded to the hopes and fears for the first industrial age, and how their work continues to illuminate our own visions of technology and culture. Wosk also reveals the striking ability of artists to capture the drama and the dangers of the new technologies, seen in their images of factories spewing smoke, steam boilers bursting, trains crashing, and satiric views of people-turned-automatons. Their art dramatically mirrored widespread feelings of disorientation - the phenomenon sociologists have called "breaking frame.". Wosk demonstrates the startling impact of new technologies on the decorative arts and industrial design. Working with manufacturers, artists added ornamentation to machinery and helped fulfill the middle-class demand for factory-made copies of decorative objects, even as art critics debated the aesthetic and social consequences of these imitative versions of original works of art. She also highlights how artists' responses to a world newly transformed by technology prefigure the fear and pride, resistance and accommodation to technological achievement that are still felt over a century later.