Introduction
Charles Sheeler (July 16, 1883 – May 7, 1965) was an American painter and commercial photographer. He is recognized as one of the founders of American modernism, developing a "quasi-photographic" style of painting known as Precisionism and becoming one of the master photographers of the 20th century.
Sheeler created a body of work that explored the
balance between abstraction and representation, photography and painting.
Sheeler denied affiliation with either cubism or surrealism, and yet his realization that “a picture could have incorporated in it the structural design implied in abstraction and be presented in a wholly realistic manner” clearly demonstrates the influence of these artistic movements.
Works
Painting
Charles Sheeler, American Landscape, 1930
Although the title American Landscape may evoke a rural
scene, Sheeler's subject here is the Ford Motor Company plant on the River
Rouge near Detroit, Michigan. In 1927 he had photographed the plant
extensively, and he would go on to examine it in works in a number of mediums.
While these works experiment with arrangements of hard–edged forms and shifting
planes, they also make clear how innovative American industry was during these
years, how it was generating a radically new American landscape and experience.
The River Rouge project allowed Sheeler to consider further the relationship between the exactitude of photography and the layered, re-created perceptions of painting or drawing. At the close of the 1920s, Sheeler felt that his artistic goals had coalesced in a painting titled Upper Deck (1929; Fogg Art Museum, Harvard University). Of this work, which he based on his earlier photograph of the German steamship S.S. Majestic (2005.100.155), he wrote,
“I had come to feel that a picture could have incorporated in it the structural design implied in abstraction and be presented in a wholly realistic manner.”
Charles Sheeler, Upper Deck, 1929, oil on cavas
Combining elements of cubism with the simplified forms of the ocean liner’s motors, ventilator stacks,
and exhaust fans, Upper Deck is a good example of the American
Precisionist movement. This machine age–inspired painting streamlines the heightened realism of Sheeler’s photograph that was its source. In the
painting, the artist has stripped away every detail that would situate the scene
in the working world, erasing the rivets, workers, steam, even the orientation
of a horizon line.
Photography
Charles Sheeler, Criss-Crossed Conveyors, River Rouge Plant,
Ford Motor company, 1927, Gelatin silver print/photograph
Sheeler's series of photographs of the Ford plant near Detroit
was commissioned by the company through an advertising agency.
Widely reproduced in Europe and America in the 1920s, this commanding image of
technological utopia became a monument to the power of industrial
production in the early modern age.
Charles Sheeler, Doylestown House, The Stove, 1917, gelatin silver print/photograph
This photograph was made at the Bucks County, Pennsylvania, home that Charles Sheeler shared with fellow painter and photographer Morton Schamberg. The spare geometry of the eighteenth-century Doylestown farmhouse proved an irresistible subject for an artist eager to explore with a camera the radical formal ideas that had impressed him in the paintings of Cézanne, Picasso, and Bracque. The photograph is a testament to Sheeler's clarity of vision..
Conclusions and relevance to my practice
Sheeler managed to distill a scene to its very essence. He pared down the lines, used hard edged forms , planes and space to create balanced, harmonious works in different media. He created tension between abstraction and representation and elevated it to an exciting level.
In my own work I can build on his ideas of line, form and space. I can introduce structured compositional design and use cropping and sharply angled views to accentuate elements of robust, industrial architecture.
The relationship with abstraction is important, especially when working on a large scale. It is impossible and undesirable to paint everything in detail. Therefore to be able to distill a scene into its key components, forms and shapes, adds value to a work.
https://www.moma.org/collection/works/79032
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