Charles Sheeler

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(b Philadelphia, PA, 16 July 1883; d Dobbs Ferry, NY, 7 May 1965). American painter and photographer. He studied at the Philadelphia School of Industrial Design from 1900 to 1903, and then with William Merritt Chase at Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts (1903-6). In 1906 he exhibited in a group exhibition at the National Academy of Design, New York. From 1908 to 1909, while visiting Europe, Sheeler and Morton Schamberg discovered the architectonic painting structure in the frescoes of Piero della Francesca at Arezzo, in the work of Paul C?zanne and in works by Henri Matisse and Georges Braque; Sheeler exhibited paintings influenced by C?zanne and by Synchromist colour abstraction at the 1913 Armory Show.

See the Abbreviations for further details.

The work of American painter Charles Sheeler (1883-1965) is, in its pragmatic association with the American scene and its consistently lucid technique, central to the precisionist style. His techniques varied from photographic realism to modified abstraction.

Born in Philadelphia, Charles Sheeler attended the School of Industrial Art (1900-1903) and the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts (1903-1906), studying with the William Merritt Chase. With a fellow student, Morton Schamberg, Sheeler set up a studio in Philadelphia in 1908. In Europe the next year, he and Schamberg were impressed by the elegant formalism of the Italian Renaissance painters. In Paris they experienced some of the ferment of modernism and saw the radical manifestations of Pablo Picasso's and Georges Braque's analytical cubism and the Fauve expressionism of Henri Matisse's painting. After this trip Sheeler devoted himself to working in essentially analytical styles.

In 1910 Sheeler and Schamberg rented a farmhouse in Bucks County, Pa., where they sketched on weekends. Sheeler worked as a commercial photographer and did commissions for local architects. Although he always regarded photography as subordinate to his painting, it became an important means of research for his paintings. He is regarded as one of the pioneers of innovative American camera work.

Sheeler exhibited in the 1913 Armory Show, which dramatically introduced the spectrum of European modernism to America. The exhibition's French section led Sheeler into stronger abstraction; in Landscape (1915) he applied the standard cubist devices of flattened, overlapping, and quasi-transparent planes to build an analytical composition.

The cubist clarity never left Sheeler's painting, although by the mid-1920s he had divested himself of its stylistic mannerisms. (He returned to these in later works.) Church Street El (1920), a dramatic cityscape, brilliantly applies cubist formalism to the American urban scene. In Bucks County Barn (1923) he applied the cubist doctrine to an American countryside subject. Sheeler equated the austere functionalism of anonymous rural American architecture with the complex technical efficiency of present-day industry and alternated between these themes, representing each with objectivity.

Sheeler sought inherently abstract subjects, which he further simplified. Upper Deck (1929), a portrayal of shipboard architecture, is a study of geometric metal shapes. It illustrates the relationship between Sheeler's photographic studies and paintings so pronounced throughout his mid-1920s and 1930s work, evident in the series of photographs and paintings of stairway themes. Sheeler's black-and-white Conté drawings, selectively based on his photography, are particularly strong. Although he used color sensitively, his paintings remain essentially value studies in dark and light. His Bucks County Conté-crayon drawings, such as Interior with Stove (1932), are among his most authoritative. View of New York (1931), an eloquently simple study, consists of shapes floated on a vertical-horizontal grid; a photographer's table, chair, and lamp, seen against a window, are treated as pure abstract elements.

A 1927 photographic assignment from the Ford Motor Company led to such literal works as City Interior (1936), a one-point perspectival view of an industrial street spanned by complex heavy pipes and trusses; tiny figures of workers are isolated in this overwhelming environment. (This is one of the few works in which human figures appear.)

In Sheeler's art all components of the industrial environment were regarded with the same dispassion; he gave as much attention to a wraith of factory smoke as to a gigantic turbine. During the 1940s he moved toward modified abstraction, his paintings more and more rigorously controlled. Devices derived from photography, such as double exposure, provided new sources of abstract forms. These are the basis of such works as Continuity (1957), a factory scene. In his midwestern barn paintings of this period, realistically detailed elements of landscape and rural architecture are prismatically juxtaposed and fused with anonymous shapes derived from surrounding trees, buildings, and clouds. Some compositions of the 1950s combine elements of several sites.

A strongly moralistic attitude characterized Sheeler's choice of subjects; in his paintings, American functionalism merged with technological perfection. He painted a universe whose elements relate in perfect harmony. No storm clouds appear in his blue skies; no sign of deterioration is permitted; old barns avoid picturesque sentimentalism; every field is green. The time is the idealized present. Yet for all his seemingly detached concern with the abstract purity of American rural architecture and the industrial environment, Sheeler remained a highly introspective, lyrical painter.

Further Reading

The most comprehensive work on Sheeler is the National Collection of Fine Arts catalog, Charles Sheeler (1969), which includes essays by Martin Friedman, Bartlett Hayes, and Charles Millard and a complete chronological table of Sheeler's life and paintings. Sheeler's relevance to precisionism is illustrated by Martin Friedman in the Walker Art Center catalog, The Precisionist View in American Art (1960). See also Constance M. Rourke, Charles Sheeler (1938), and William Carlos Williams's introduction to the Museum of Modern Art catalog, Charles Sheeler (1939).

Additional Sources

Sheeler, Charles, Charles Sheeler, New York: Watson-Guptill Publications, 1975.

Sheeler, Charles (1883-1965), American painter and photographer. Better known for his paintings, perhaps, Sheeler was nevertheless one of the most innovative photographers of the early 20th century. He studied at Philadelphia's School of Industrial Art, then with William Merritt Chase at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts (1903-6). However, recognition of the importance of a kind of structural design and order in the work of the painters of the Italian Renaissance eventually led him away from the Chase school of representational painting. He learned photography initially to support himself and landed a commission to document the Ford Motor Company's River Rouge plant (1927-8). The resulting images, and his photographs of Shaker architecture, New York buildings, and Chartres cathedral are perhaps his best-known work. Charles Millard wrote in 1968: ‘Sheeler's “straight”, unsentimentalized, sharply focused pictures of urban and industrial life, so remarkable in an era steeped in pictorialism, helped shape the vision on which almost all the best contemporary photography is based.’ Sheeler continued to use photography in support of his painting throughout his life.

— Tim Troy

Bibliography

• Freedman, M., Charles Sheeler (1975)

Charles Sheeler
Charles Sheeler standing next to a window. c. 1910.
Born	July 16, 1883(1883-07-16)
Died	May 7, 1965 (aged 81)
Nationality	American
Field	Modern art, Photography
Movement	Precisionism

Charles Sheeler (July 16, 1883 – May 7, 1965) is recognized as one of the founders of American modernism and one of the master photographers of the 20th century.

Born in Philadelphia, he attended the Pennsylvania Museum School of Industrial Art, now the University of the Arts (Philadelphia), from 1900-1903, and then the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, where he studied under William Merritt Chase. He found early success as a painter and exhibited at the Macbeth Gallery in 1908.^[1] In 1909, he went to Paris, just when the popularity of Cubism was skyrocketing. Returning to the United States, he realized that he would not be able to make a living with Modernist painting. Instead, he took up commercial photography, focusing particularly on architectural subjects. He was a self-taught photographer, learning his trade on a five dollar Brownie.

Sheeler owned a farmhouse in Doylestown, Pennsylvania, about 39 miles outside of Philadelphia. He shared it with artist Morton Schamberg. He was so fond of the home's 19th century stove that he called it his "companion" and made it a subject of his photographs. The farmhouse serves a prominent role in many of his photographs, including shots of the bedroom and kitchen and stairway.. At one point he was quoted as calling it "my cloister."

Sheeler painted using a technique that complemented his photography. He was a self-proclaimed Precisionist, a term that emphasized the linear precision he employed in his depictions. As in his photographic works, his subjects were generally material things such as machinery and structures. He was hired by the Ford Motor Co. to photograph and make paintings of their factories.

Contents 1 Photography and film work 1.1 Films 1.2 Photographic works 2 Paintings 2.1 Early Works 2.2 Power series 2.3 Later works 3 Exhibitions 4 References 5 Other links 6 External links 7 Notes 8 Further reading

Photography and film work

Films

• 1920 Manhatta with Paul Strand

Photographic works

• 1917 Doylestown House: Stairs from Below (Metropolitan Museum of Art)
• 1927 Criss-Crossed Conveyors, River Rouge Plant, Ford Motor Company (Metropolitan Museum of Art)

Paintings

Early Works

• 1920 Church Street El, (Cleveland Museum of Art).
• 1925 Still Life.
• 1925 Lady of the Sixties, (Boston Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, MA).
• 1929 Upper Deck, (Fogg Art Museum, Cambridge, MA).
• 1930 American Landscape (Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY).
• 1931 Americana (Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY).
• 1931 Classic Landscape, (Mr and Mrs Barney A Ebsworth Foundation).
• 1931 View of New York, (Boston Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, MA).
• 1932 Classic Landscape, (National Gallery, Washington, D.C.).
• 1932 Interior with Stove, (National Gallery, Washington, D.C.).
• 1933 River Rouge Plant (Whitney Museum, New York, NY).
• 1934 American Interior, (Yale University Gallery, New Haven, CT).
• 1936 City Interior (Worcester Art Museum, Worcester, MA).

Charles Sheeler, Amoskeag Canal 1948, Currier Museum of Art

Power series

In 1940, [Fortune (magazine)|Fortune Magazine] published a series of six paintings of commissioned of Sheeler. To prepare for the series, Sheeler spent a year traveling and taking photographs. Fortune editors aimed to “reflect life through forms…[that] trace the firm pattern of the human mind” and Sheeler chose six subjects to fulfill this theme: a water wheel (Primitive Power), a steam turbine (Steam Turbine), the railroad (Rolling Power), a hydroelectric turbine (Suspended Power), an airplane (Yankee Clipper) and a dam (Conversation: Sky and Earth) ^[1].

• 1939 Conversation: Sky and Earth, (Curtis Galleries, Minneapolis, MN).
• 1939 Primitive Power, (The Regis Collection, Minneapolis, MN).
• 1939 [2], (Smith College Museum of Art, Northampton, MA).
• 1939 Steam Turbine, (Butler Institute of American Art, Youngstown, OH).
• 1939 Suspended Power, (Dallas Museum of Art, Dallas, TX).
• 1939 Yankee Clipper, (Rhode Island School of Design, Providence, RI).

Later works

• 1940 Interior (National Gallery, Washington, D.C.).
• 1940 Fugue, (Boston Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, MA).
• 1948 Amoskeag Canal, (Currier Museum of Art, Manchester, NH).
• c.1952 Windows, (Hirschl and Adler Galleries, New York, NY).
• 1953 New England Irrelevancies, (Boston Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, MA).
• 1953 Ore Into Iron, (Boston Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, MA).
• 1954 Stacks in Celebration, (Dayton Art Institute, Dayton, OH)
• 1954 Architectural Cadences Number 4
• 1955 Golden Gate, (Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY).
• 1956 On a Shaker Theme, (Boston Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, MA).
• 1957 Red Against White, (Boston Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, MA).
• 1958 Composition Around Red, Pennsylvania (Montgomery Museum of Fine Arts, Montgomery, Alabama)

Exhibitions

• The National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC organized Charles Sheeler: Across Media, also at the Art Institute of Chicago from October 7, 2006 - January 7, 2007
• The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston organized The Photography of Charles Sheeler: American Modernist, which appeared at various museums between 2003 and 2005, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Detroit Institute of Arts, and the Georgia O'Keeffe Museum.

References

1. ^ Borland, Jennifer. Finding Aid to the Charles Sheeler Papers, circa 1840s-1966, bulk 1923-1965. Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution.

Other links

• 1958 interview with Charles Sheeler from the Smithsonian Archives of American Art
• 1959 interview with Charles Sheeler from the Smithsonian Archives of American Art

External links

• Charles Sheeler: Across Media, The National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC
• Ten Dreams Galleries
• Charles Sheeler Art Gallery

Notes

^  “Power: A portfolio by Charles Sheeler”, in Fortune. Chicago: Time Inc., Volume XXII, Number 6, December 1940.

Further reading

• Brock, Charles. Charles Sheeler: Across Media. Washington, D.C.: National Gallery of Art, in association with University of California Press, Berkeley, 2006.
• Friedman, Martin. Charles Sheeler. New York: Watson/Guptill Publications, 1975.
• Harnsberger, R. Scott. Ten Precisionist Artists: Annotated Bibliographies. Westport: Greenwood Press, 1992.
• Lucic, Karen. Charles Sheeler and the Cult of the Machine. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1991.

Mark Rawlinson, 'Charles Sheeler: Modernism, Precisionism and the Borders of Abstraction.' London: IB Tauris, 2007

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