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98 CHANGINGSET-UP
history of art shows us how and when new spheres of reality are opened up to art, become presentable as it were. For instance, not every kind of human labour is as old a theme of art as is agricultural work. In the tilling of the soil men have felt from time immemorial the unobjectivized relationship of man to his occupation! It has ever been natural and reasonable, like the suckling of a child — it is what men live by. But factory work was for a long time outside the sphere of poetry and art and its transition to the dignity of artistic theme is still difficult, because for a long time it had no human physiognomy, was not imbued with a human soul. It appeared inhuman, mechanical, forced, unnatural labour; to use Marx's classic expression, it seemed objectivized action, because man was only a part of the machine and his human individuality had no opportunity to find expression. For this reason man's humanity did not radiate into the machine and therefore it was no thing of beauty, no subject for art.
THE WORKER AND THE PHYSIOGNOMY OF THE MACHINE
By this attitude to the machine, art again expressed a real situation, even though only a negative one. With the growth of the revolutionary consciousness of the working-class the great human significance and dignity of industrial labour also became recognized. In Meunier's miners, in Frank Brangwyn's etchings, and many other works of great artists the industrial worker and his labour appear as artistic themes.
What had happened? Had industrial labour, which had been ugly, now suddenly become beautiful? No. But in the light of the increasingly revolutionary consciousness of the workers, the workers themselves acquired a defiant dignity and a changed physiognomy. And it was their rebellious anger which lent the tormenting, exploiting, inhuman machine a hateful, diabolically animated physiognomy. Thus it was that the factory came to be a subject for artistic presentation, especially of film presentation. It provided no idyllic features, like the life of the ploughman and shepherd. A modern, revolutionary, realistic art showed in the film with increasing