Chosen To Represent The Foundry Industry in A Mural
Winold Reiss was contracted to produce murals depicting workers in Cincinnati industries, for the new Cincinnati Union Terminal. To depict the foundry industry, he visited the Modern Foundry to get ideas and set a scene for one of the murals called Foundry and Machine Shop Products. In this mural a man (modeled by Joseph Schwope, 1898–1980) is skimming a ladle of iron, while an iron pourer (modeled by Bill Rengering, 1901–1985) pours a mold. A metallurgist (modeled by Emil Weston, 1900–1990) measures the metal temperature using an optical pyrometer. In the background a cupola tender (Bill Ennix, 1886–1944) watches over the work. One source credits the model for the cupola tender as being Howard Fredericks.
A copy of the original photograph is shown in the book "They Built a City:150 Years of Industrial Cincinnati".
After visiting the Modern Foundry for a couple days, and after everything was arranged as Reiss wanted to capture the depiction of the foundry industry, the photograph was taken during the pouring of a mold. Reiss then made a sketch of the elements he wanted to include from the photograph, simplyfying the elements he wanted to include in his depiction. This sketch was submitted to the Ravenna Mosaic Company of Italy for production into the tesserae medium of the mosaic. The glass tesserae pieces were attached to paper which were shipped to Cincinnati Union Terminal. The paper backed pieces were pressed into the plaster on the terminal wall and any interstitial places were filled with colored mortar. In 1973, when the terminal concourse was to be torn down, this mural with 13 others were carefully removed and transported to Cincinnati/Northern Kentucky International Airport.
Read more about this topic: Foundry Products Operations (Cincinnati Milling Machine)
Famous quotes containing the words chosen, represent, industry and/or mural:
“Our housekeeping is mendicant, our arts, our occupations, our marriages, our religion we have not chosen, but society has chosen for us. We are parlor soldiers. We shun the ragged battle of fate, where strength is born.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“What have Massachusetts and the North sent a few sane representatives to Congress for, of late years?... All their speeches put together and boiled down ... do not match for manly directness and force, and for simple truth, the few casual remarks of crazy John Brown on the floor of the Harper’s Ferry engine-house,—that man whom you are about to hang, to send to the other world, though not to represent you there.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“For almost seventy years the life insurance industry has been a smug sacred cow feeding the public a steady line of sacred bull.”
—Ralph Nader (b. 1934)
“And each of the huge white creatures was huger than fourscore men;
The tops of their ears were feathered, their hands were the claws of birds,
And, shaking the plumes of the grasses and the leaves of the mural glen,
The breathing came from those bodies, long warless, grown whiter than curds.”
—William Butler Yeats (1865–1939)