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.

Title page photograph by Charles Sheeler for the Metropolitan Museum of Art Annual Report, 1942.

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. Sheeler was hired as a member of the staff of the Department of Publications. He apparently never performed the routine tasks of a staff photographer, but rather was given free rein to work directly with the curators in rephotographing for publi cation many of the Museum's masterpieces. He broke precedent and experimented with color transparencies that were used for the earliest color covers of the Museum's Bulletin. Among the most successful of these were details of paintings selected by Sheeler, accompanied in a number of cases by his insightful commentaries. His black-and-white photographs were used to illustrate the Bulletin and various other Museum publications and appeared as well in major art periodicals illustrating articles about the Museum's activities. Sheeler's negatives were also reproduced as postcards, Christmas cards, lantern slides, and large-scale reproduc tions. Sheeler was closely involved in the conception and preparation of three publications illustrated with his photographs: Egyptian Statues (1945), Egyptian Statuettes (1946), and The Great King, King of Assyria (1946). His celebrated series of photographs of the Museum's ancient Assyrian reliefs from Nimrud appeared as one of the first nonacademic picture books pub lished by the Museum and is among the finest achievements of Sheeler's career. Sheeler worked full time at the Museum, commuting daily by train from Irvington-on- Hudson, New York, where he had moved in 1942 with his new wife, Musya. Most of his expo sures were made in the Museum's Photograph Studio, situated in the attic above the domes of the Great Hall. Studies of many new acquisitions were probably made while they were in the studio for record photography; at other times, Sheeler arranged with Museum riggers to have objects removed from the galleries and brought to the studio to be photographed by him. He also took his camera directly to the galleries and traveled to The Cloisters, where he produced a large group of negatives of medieval sculpture and architectural elements for another proposed publication. Sheeler worked slowly, carefully organizing his compositions and studying the objects before making an exposure, usually only one of each subject. Sheeler's connections with the Museum began well before 1942. Four of his photographs were among Alfred Stieglitz's 1933 gift of photographs to the permanent collection. Sheeler's artistic roots extended to the circle around Stieglitz, who, along with Paul Strand, may be counted among the American pioneers of an aesthetic that combined sharp-focus realism with a highly personal and subjective style. There is an economy to Sheeler's distilled images that is at once elegant and classical. He often aligned his subjects parallel to the picture plane without eccentric viewpoints or perspec- tival effects. Objects were usually strictly centered, confronted squarely by the camera or placed in profile ; they were photographed from a level vantage point at close range. Sheeler sometimes reinforced the compactness of his compositions by including within an image a second, interior frame created by the edges of a sculpture's mount. All transitory effects have been eliminated in the studio's immaculate environment. This classical dislocation of the object from momentary conditions both distances and idealizes it, promoting aesthetic con templation. Sculptural fragments held a fascination for Sheeler. He believed that in classic art "so per fectly do the rhythms function, that even in a fragment-like section of a figure, the life of the complete conception is not abated."5 In photographing paintings and the Assyrian reliefs, Sheeler moved very close to his subjects to isolate the parts of the works that particularly inter ested him. Fabrics swirling around the angel Gabriel's legs in Joos van Cleve's Annunciation form a striking abstract pattern in Sheeler's detail, offering a fresh approach to the painting, which was Sheeler's expressed intention. A detail of Assurnasirpal II's cupbearer reveals both the plasticity of the massive stone slab's shallow relief and the architectonic nature of its design. Light plays a primary role in achieving the distinctive effects of these images. Soft shadows enhance both plastic form and a gravity of expression in the Roman copy of Polykleitos's head of an athlete. In his portrait of Hiram Powers's bust of Andrew Jackson, Sheeler exploits through a masterful use of artificial lighting an entire range of tonal possibilities to register the smooth modulations of the marble and the forcefulness of Jackson's noble countenance filling the field. Multiple light sources create a complex, intricately patterned environment of cast shadows for the Ile-de-France Virgin and Child, while diffuse daylight pervades the Pontaut Chapter Room at The Cloisters. It binds architecture and atmosphere in an overall high-keyed tonality, capturing the ambience and spirit of the Romanesque chamber. These are compelling images of great distinction that impress themselves upon our memory with an unusual clarity. They are testaments to Sheeler's vision of art as expressive, essential form, enduring through time, but timeless.

Wendy W. Belser NOTES

i. Statement by Sheeler in Anderson Galleries, The Forum Exhibition of Modern American Painters (New York, 13-25 March 1916). 2. Quoted in A. L. Chanin, "Charles Sheeler: Purist Brush and Camera Eye," Art News 54 (Summer 1955): 71. 3. African Negro Wood Sculpture. Photographed by Charles Sheeler, with a Preface by Marius de Zayas (New York, 1918). Robert Goldwater Library, The Metropolitan Museum of Art. 4. Bernard van Dieren, Epstein (New York, 1920); Albert Eugene Gallatin, Gaston Lachaise: 16 Reproductions of the Sculp tor's Work (New York, 1924) ; Paul S. Wingert, The Sculpture of William Zorach (New York, 1938) ; Jeanne Robert Foster, "New Sculptures by Constantin Brancusi," Vanity Fair 18 (May 1922) : 68. 5. Charles Sheeler, "Notes on an Exhibition of Greek Art," The Arts 7 (March 1925): 153. LIST OF PLATES

Carnarvon head of Sesostris III

Fragment of a head of King Akhenaten

Assurnasirpal II, king of Assyria, and cupbearer

The Annunciation

The Virgin and Child

Statue of a Diadoumenos

Andrew Jackson

Chapter house from former abbey of Notre-Dame-de-Pontaut

CARNARVON HEAD OF SESOSTRIS III

This face, though sadly broken, is the most famous of all the extant portraits of Sesostris III. The heavy-lidded eyes, fur rowed brow, and lined cheeks are those of the other sculp tural likenesses of this powerful king, but his usual expression of arrogance or disdain is here softened by the melancholy expression of the delicately modeled lips. The head, for all its fleshlike quality, is carved in one of the hardest stones used by the Egyptians.

Text from Masterpieces of Fifty Centuries, New York, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1970, No. 18.

EGYPTIAN, XII DYNASTY, CA. 185OB.C. Red quartzite 6% inches high 26.7.1394 The Metropolitan Museum of Art Carnarvon Collection, Gift of Edward S. Harkness, 1926

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For a brief period at the end of the XVIII Dynasty a new free dom of conception can be detected in the art of the Nile valley. This fresh spirit was in good measure due to the influence of the heretic king Akhenaten (1370-1353 B.C.), who turned his back on Egypt's old gods and exclusively worshiped the newly prominent solar deity, Aten. To break connections with the past Akhenaten moved his court from Thebes, where remembrance of the older gods was strong and the power of the priesthood even stronger, to a new capital called Akhetaten (now called Tell el Amarna) in honor of his god. The representations of Akhenaten dramatically illustrate the way in which he overturned the old conventions, causing his own unforgettable features to be exaggerated into images of religious and emotional intensity. Of what must have been a superb likeness of the king, sensitively modeled in limestone, there remains only the nose and mouth.

Text from Guide to the Collections: Egyptian Art, New York, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1962, p. 28.

EGYPTIAN, XVIII DYNASTY Hard limestone 3V4 inches high 26.7.1395 The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Carnarvon Collection Gift of Edward S. Harkness, 1926

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In both southern and northern Mesopotamia there was a long tradition of embellishing the palace walls with figurai com positions and decorative patterns. Before the Neo-Assyrian period, such ornamentation was either painted directly onto the wall plaster or composed of bricks molded in relief. Assur- nasirpal was the first Assyrian ruler to augment these tradi tional forms of architectural decoration with huge limestone wall panels carved in low relief. This form of decoration, which had its origins in North Syria and Hittite Anatolia, was so effective that it became an essential element of palace dec oration throughout the period of the Neo-Assyrian Empire.

Text from Vaughn E. Crawford, Prudence O. Harper, and Holly Pittman, Assyrian Reliefs and Ivories in The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, 1980, p. 16.

IX CENTURY B.C. Stone 92 inches by 90% inches 32.143.4 The Metropolitan Museum of Art Gift of fohn D. Rockefeller,fr., 1932

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Joos van Cleve, a detail of whose painting of the Annuncia tion appears as the second in a series of details taken by Charles Sheeler, has a brief biography. He is first recorded working in Antwerp in 1507, directed a shop there, and died in 1540 or 1541. In recent years his identity was obscured, and he was known only as the Master of the Death of Mary. More recent ly, however, his name and history have been recovered. According to Mr. Sheeler, Joos van Cleve was "an artist of conspicuous skill in his craft, and he had a fine appreciation of design within the contours of the figures that inhabit his pic tures. His color is cool and crisp and as refreshing as a cup of spring water."

Text from Metropolitan Museum of Art Bulletin, N.S. 1, No. 4 (December 1942), inside cover.

JOOS VAN CLEVE (FLEMISH, ACTIVE BY I507, DIED 1540/41) Tempera and oil on wood 34 inches by 31% inches 32.100.60 The Metropolitan Museum of Art Bequest of Michael Friedsam, 1931 The Friedsam Collection

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Of the countless sculptures of the Virgin and Child made in France during the fourteenth century, few today possess so much of their original paint or are in such splendid condition as this imposing figure. Placed high above an altar and lit by myriad rows of candles, it must once have given an impres sion of great majesty. The tips of the crown, probably leafy fleurons, the top of the Virgin's scepter, and other very small areas are missing but do not detract from the statue's extraor dinary condition. The Museum's statue is clearly related to the best Parisian models, in particular to the Virgin and Child from the Cathe dral of Notre-Dame, now in the church of St.-Germain-des- Prés. The Museum's Virgin stands almost vertically, her head slightly tilted. The Child holds the end of his mother's veil across her chest. Many other French Madonnas generally follow the same drapery formula. The Museum's statue is probably to be dated in the second quarter of the century, and is roughly contemporary with the Virgins from Notre- Dame, from St. Denis (1340), and from Langres (1341).

Text from Masterpieces of Fifty Centuries, New York, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1970, No. 152.

FRENCH, ILE DE FRANCE (POSSIBLY EAST OF PARIS), XIV CENTURY, CA. 1340-135O Painted limestone 5 feet, 8 inches high 37159 The Metropolitan Museum of Art The Cloisters Collection, 1937 hñ<

The bronze original by Polykleitos, produced about 430 B.C., was long ago melted down, but we know from ancient writers that it was one of the most highly esteemed works of antiquity. Its popularity is further attested by the large number of copies which have survived. The good preservation of the remaining parts, especially the head, compensates for this loss. The head may indeed be considered the best of all the copies of the head which have survived. It is practically intact, with the surface in beautiful condition and even the nose unbroken ; and the work is unusually sensitive. We have few heads from antiquity which convey so sucessfully the Greek conception of a beautiful youth— serene, sensuous, intellectual. It makes us realize afresh the nobility of the Greek ideal and our close kinship with the Greeks. For the ideal here expressed needs no interpretation ; our response is immediate and instinctive.

Text from Gisela M. A. Richter, "A Statue of the Diadoumenos," Bulletin of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, No. 28 (December 1933), pp. 214-215.

ROMAN COPY OF GREEK ORIGINAL BY POLYKLEITOS, ABOUT 440 B.C. Pentelic marble Height as restored, 73 inches 25.78.56 The Metropolitan Museum of Art Fletcher Fund, 1925

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The bust of Jackson, acknowledged by the artist as one of his finest, was modeled in three sittings at the White House. When he hesitated to represent Jackson's toothless mouth, Powers was admonished by the President: "Make me as I am, Mr. Powers, and be true to nature always— I have no desire to look young as long as I feel old "In the Roman Republi can portrait tradition, Powers depicted with unflagging real ism the dignity and forcefulness of the sixty-eight-year-old military and political fighter.

Text from 19th-century America: Paintings and Sculpture. An Exhibition in Celebration of the Hundredth Anniversary of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, April 16 through September 7,1970, No. 56.

HIRAM POWERS (1805-1873), AMERICAN, 1837 Marble 34 V2 inches high Signed (on base): HIRAM POWERS/SCULP. 94.14 The Metropolitan Museum of Art Gift of Mrs. Frances V. Nash, 1894

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The abbey of Notre-Dame-de-Pontaut (also called Pontault, Ponteau, and Pons Altus), south of Bordeaux, was founded by Geraldus, abbot of Dalon, about 1115. It was at first an abbey of the Benedictine order, but in 1151, in the time of Gaufre- dus—who had become its first abbot about 1125—the mon astery was given to the Cistercians. To judge from the elabo rate carving, the chapter house was built for the Benedictines, for after Saint Bernard's Apologia ad Guilelmum (about 1127) the Cistercians had tried to simplify their architecture and to avoid unnecessary embellishment. The Huguenots partly destroyed the abbey in 1569, and by 1572 only a priest, seven monks, and a wounded soldier were in residence. In 1791, dur ing the French Revolution, the buildings were sold to Dyzez de Samadet, whose only daughter married a member of the Poudenx family, who was related to the last abbot of Pontaut. The chapter house was removed in 1932 and erected in a garden at Mesnil-le-Roi, near Paris, where it remained for only two years. For some time before this it had been in a dilapidated condition, and where formerly the monks of a thriving monastery had assembled each morning to discuss the business of the abbey, animals were herded together. Two of the columns still have tethering rings fastened to them. Once again the chapter house was moved stone by stone and brick by brick, this time across the Atlantic, and re- erected in a fitting place adjacent to the Cuxa cloister. The original setting at Pontaut is suggested in the relationship between the three arches of the facade of the chapter house and the walk of the Cuxa cloister. The plastered vaults and tile floors had to be renewed. A twelfth-century tile from the church at Cuxa was used as the model for the modern tiles of the present flooring.

Text from James J. Rorimer, Medieval Monuments at The Cloisters, As They Were and As They Are, New York, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, revised edition by Katherine Serrell Rorimer, 1972, pp. 25-26.

FRENCH (GASCONY, XII C.) Limestone and brick (floortiles and plasterwork modern) 35-50 The Metropolitan Museum of Art The Cloisters Collection

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