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Charles Sheeler CHARLES SHEELER PHOTOGRAPHER AT THE METROPOLITAN MUSEUM OF ART NEW YORK 1982 1 The photographs were printed from Charles Sheeler's original negatives by Alan B. Newman on Strathmore drawing paper, hand coated with light-sensitive salts of platinum and palladium; Mr. Newman coordinated production for the project. The design and letterpress printing, on Rives BFK (France), are by Carol J. Blinn, who also designed the portfolio case in the Dutch linens Brillianta and Halflinnen. Typesetting in Dante monotype is by Michael and Winifred Bixler. The case was manufactured by Lisa Callaway. This portfolio is limited to an edition of two hundred fifty, numbered 1/250 through 250/250, and twenty-five artist's proofs. Photographs and text copyright © 1982 by The Metropolitan Museum of Art Title page photograph by Charles Sheeler for the Metropolitan Museum of Art Annual Report, 1942. * "0 5 FOREWORD THIS GROUP OF PHOTOGRAPHS by Charles Sheeler focuses our attention on the distinction between photography as art and art as photography. Sheeler was not the first to note this de- markation. The earliest American, British, and French photographers looked to painting and sculpture as the starting points for their own creativity. Our 1840s South worth and Hawes portrait of an unidentified girl standing beside a portrait of George Washington (37.14.53) is an early example of the photographer using traditional art as a starting point. Remarkable as it may sound, works of art are experienced by more people through photo­ graphs and reproductions of photographs than they are by people standing in front of objects or paintings and observing them with their own eyes. The photograph is often confused with the thing itself, and only occasionally is that image, in the form of an original silver or platinum print, also a work of art. Often overlooked is the fact that the photograph is, like all other pictures, simply a translation of a subject into light and dark, foreground and background, surface and texture. In the handling of these pictorial building blocks the master photographer is distinguished from the journeyman. Photography is not a replacement for actuality; photography is photography, a medium of expression with its own inner necessities and supple beauties. In every photograph we see as much of the eye, hand, and intelligence of the person operating the machine as we do of the subject represented. Sheeler's photographs of works of art are a case often repeated of art being about art. "Photography is a marvelous discovery, a science that has attracted the greatest intellects, an art that excites the most astute minds, and one that can be practiced by any imbecile," wrote Félix Nadar in 1856. This statement helps to explain why the role of the museum photographer is so important. His work deeply affects the way a work of art will be seen out­ side its home ; the risks of misinterpretation through insensitivity, ignorance, or ineptitude by the photographer are thus enormous. The Museum decided to employ Sheeler from the very liberal perception that all photog­ raphy involves interpretation and that the person best qualified to be given this responsi­ bility was one who was not only a photographer, but also a painter. It was expected that Sheeler's images would deliver the unexpected, and they did. Like any good guide, he points us to what he wishes us to see, sometimes with humor, sometimes in awe, but never with total objectivity. Alan Newman has become a Boswell to Sheeler by creating what will surely be considered the standard edition from an otherwise lost body of work. Sheeler's photographs at the Met­ ropolitan Museum were used by his employer not for display on the walls as we would expect his work to be seen today. As far as can be ascertained, Sheeler himself made only a handful of exhibition-quality prints from the Museum negatives. Through the years they were printed by technicians for distribution to photoengravers, authors, and publishers, without the fastid­ ious treatment required for the negatives to yield their most subtle nuances. Newman has devoted to another person's creativity the degree of self-critical craftsmanship normally reserved for one's own work. The process began by making proofs in both silver and platinum to ascertain which of these methods best suited the negatives. After concluding that platinum yielded results closer to Sheeler's own prints than currently available gelatin-silver materials, Newman began col­ lecting rag-content papers from many manufacturers. These were hand-sensitized with platinum salts and tested in order to single out a sheet that, when printed, would best approx­ imate the quality of Sheeler's own prints. The goal was to find a paper that could reproduce a scale of tones from silvery gray to near black, one with luminosity and subtle surface gloss that resembles the gelatin-silver papers Sheeler most frequently used in the 1940s, and one that supplies the proper background tone. All of this took an uncommon attention to details by Newman that typified Sheeler's own working procedure. The result of this commitment is a set of prints that Sheeler himself would have been challenged to equal. Newman has used his judgment in deciding on the trim size and tonal balance of each print. In this way he has become a collaborator with Sheeler and has deservedly initialed each print. Weston J. Naef CURATOR Department of Prints and Photographs Like any important archaeological undertaking, the rediscovery of Sheeler at the Metropolitan Museum involved many hands. Phyllis Dearborn Massar, motivated by an unyielding belief that Sheeler's work in and of itself was uncommonly inter­ esting, first charted the boundaries of the project. Wendy Belser, a former staff member and graduate student, systematically sifted through bureaucratic soil to compile the most extensive list of Sheeler s Museum negatives yet prepared and to write an unpublished monograph on the subject, which forms the underpinnings of the essay printed here. Mark Cooper unlocked the gates to the negative files and broke precedent by releasing negatives for Alan Newman to print in his own studio. Daniel Berger of the Publications Department recognised the beauty and value of reprinting Sheeler's negatives for circulation to an audience of art lovers who would otherwise be denied the pleasure. CHARLES SHEELER í venture to define art as the perception through our sensibilities, more or less guided by intellect, of universal order and its expression in terms more directly appealing to some particular phase of our sensibilities. The highest phase of spiritual life has always in one form or another implied a consciousness of, and, in its greatest moments, a contact with, what we feel to be the profound scheme, system or order underlying the universe.1 Charles Sheeler, one of America's most distinguished painters and an accomplished photog­ rapher, had a reverence for art that was fundamentally spiritual in nature. He believed in the enduring power of form and made a lifelong study of works in the galleries of Europe and America, seeking formal affinities between the art of the past and the present. He responded to an astonishing range of art forms, rejecting nothing that served his purposes either concep­ tually or formally. "Good art has got to be in the thread of the great tradition," he asserted. "All the arts we revere come out of the main trunk. An underlying current goes through all the way to Renaissance, Egyptian, Chinese, back to cave painting."2 From July 1942 to July 1945, Sheeler was consultant in photography at The Metropolitan Museum of Art. During this three-year period, he made several hundred photographs, many of which have never been published, of the Museum and of art in its collections. Sheeler brought to his work a visual sophistication and a pragmatic attitude that is reflected in his images. His subjects spanned the encyclopedic collections of the Museum: Assyrian reliefs, Egyptian statuettes, Chinese bronzes, medieval architecture, Renaissance tapestries, old- master paintings, and American sculpture, to name but some. Nearly three hundred of Sheeler's negatives were placed on file in the Museum's Photograph Studio. They form a valu­ able body of work both for their expansion of our knowledge of Sheeler's photographic oeuvre and for the exceptional strength and beauty of many of the images preserved. Fifty-nine years old when he began his work for the Museum, Sheeler had long relied on his skill as a photographer for an assured source of income. The onset of World War II and the resulting insecurity of the art market encouraged him to accept what was to be his last pro­ fessional photographic undertaking, an assignment that was the culmination of a long-standing interest in works of art as subjects. After an early stint as a photographer for architectural firms in Philadelphia, Sheeler moved on, in about 1914, to the more lucrative field of photo­ graphing works of art for New York dealers and private collectors. A limited-edition portfolio of photographs of African wood sculpture from the collection of Marius de Zayas,3 stressing the formal qualities of a then little-recognized art form, was published in 1918. In the two succeeding decades, Sheeler continued to photograph art—particularly contemporary sculpture, providing illustrations for monographs on Jacob Epstein, Gaston Lachaise, and William Zorach and for an article on the work of Constantin Brancusi.4 When Sheeler arrived at the Metropolitan in the summer of 1942, the Museum was already operating under wartime conditions. Many important and vulnerable works of art had been stored for safekeeping in a mansion outside of Philadelphia. Yet the Museum, under the direc­ torship of Francis Henry Taylor, was a lively place, and Museum attendance actually rose steadily during the war years.
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