Married To The Machine

"War Bride", In 1940, Clarence Holbrook Carter produced a painting that disturbed him. In fact, War Bride (figure 1)was so unlike his previous work that he was reluctant to exhibit it. As the artist recalled, after receiving F.B.I. clearance, he had gone on an official tour of a Pittsburgh steel mill with the City Solicitor: “The mills were going full blast and it made a great impact on us.” That night he had a “very vivid” dream in which he painted a picture of the mill. When he told his wife about his dream the next morning, she suggested that he paint it. At the same time, some of the “girls” in Carter’s senior painting class at the Carnegie Institute of Technology were “getting married before the boys would be leaving to go into the coming war,” and the artist later claimed that this reality “got mixed” into his dream about the steel mill, which had now become a wedding “sanctuary”
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