Picturing a Crude Past: Primitivism, Public Art, and Corporate Oil Promotion in the United States

Abstract

This essay examines the first monument dedicated to the US oil industry, the Drake Memorial in Titusville, Pennsylvania (1899–1901), as an influential project of corporate self-representation. Commissioned by Standard Oil, the memorial shaped a public image for the petroleum industry that addressed concerns about the sustainability and social effects of oil capitalism, and established the key terms for a promotional discourse that would circulate throughout the twentieth century. This discourse, which I call “petro-primitivism,” reimagined the ultramodern oil industry as an extension of timeless practices rooted in an imagined archaic past. By shaping a primitivist spectacle that figured oil as an eternal component of the natural world and a primordial object of “human” endeavor, I argue, the Drake Memorial encouraged audiences to take the long view on oil: to adopt an expansive perspective that reconceived oil as a timelessly abundant element, and the boom-and-bust oil industry as an age-old venture. These tropes proved useful to the industry throughout the crises of the early twentieth century, reappearing in corporate displays and filtering into the rhetoric of industry advertising and publicity. Accordingly, I examine two later projects that appropriated the themes of petro-primitivism: the Sinclair Oil exhibit at the 1933–34 World's Fair, and Sun Oil's exhibit Oil Serves America at the Franklin Institute in Philadelphia (1953–c.1962). Echoing the earlier Drake Memorial, these displays employed strategies drawn from public art and civic architecture to organize collective experiences around the image of oil. By examining these popular exhibits alongside the Drake Memorial, I aim to offer a new account of the promotional culture of the early petroleum industry that explores the intersections between the traditional arts and industry publicity and illuminates the vital role that cultural representations played in accommodating twentieth-century Americans to the dynamic structures of petro-capitalism.