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Barn Decorations, 1959 Oil on Canvas, 27 3/16 X 38 3/16 In Information on Charles Sheeler American, 1883–1965 Barn Decorations, 1959 Oil on canvas, 27 3/16 x 38 3/16 in. Mary and Sylvan Lang Collection 1975.52 Subject Matter In Sheeler’s Barn Decorations, what seems to be a turmoil of windows, doors, sides, and roofs is, in fact, a carefully thought-out image involving use of a slide viewer alongside the artist’s easel. He juxtaposed images from photographs of barns to reduce his subject to its barest elements of geometric structure. Through his photographic exposure technique, the basic shape is reversed, and a carefully rendered wall and reflecting windows undergo a metamorphosis, becoming transparent planes in an analytical Cubist arrangement. Color has been added as a subordinate to the strong structural arrangement. In contrast to the architectural forms are two decorative roundels. Called hexenfoos or hex signs, these symbols were painted on Pennsylvania Dutch barns from about 1750–1850. The Pennsylvania Dutch believed these symbols protected barn animals from disease and other misfortunes. To be politically correct today, most residents prefer the term decorative symbols instead of hex signs because of the connotation of witchcraft. From about 1910 to 1918, Sheeler and fellow artist Morton Schamberg rented a Shaker farmhouse where they spent weekends photographing, drawing, and painting Shaker and Pennsylvania Dutch houses and barns in Bucks County outside Philadelphia. Dr. Henry Mercer, a local collector and preservationist of Shaker and Pennsylvania Dutch artifacts and buildings, helped raise Sheeler’s awareness of the need to preserve this purely American form of architecture. Thus, through his painting, Sheeler has preserved the by-gone barns of the farmers. His admiration for the sound craftsmanship of early settlers was a theme he painted throughout his life, especially during times of depression or change. Though a late example of the style, Sheeler’s Barn Decorations is considered Precisionist (see About the Artist). About the Artist Born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, to Irish and Welsh parents, Charles Sheeler studied applied design (as in wallpaper) at the Quaker School of Industrial Art in Philadelphia during the week, and on weekends took a class in still life. After three years, he went to study at the prestigious Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts from 1903 to 1906, then directed by the American Impressionist William Merritt Chase. Chase took his students on summer art study tours abroad. While the rest traveled by steamship, Sheeler went more economically by cattle boat. On this trip, Sheeler was greatly impressed by classical and Renaissance artists’ use of form and color. On a later trip, Sheeler saw the startling, revolutionary Cubist paintings of Braque and Picasso in Paris, and realized he had to abandon his earlier classical and Impressionist training. After graduation from the Pennsylvania Academy, Sheeler and artist-companian Morton Schamberg rented a studio in Philadelphia, which they used until about 1918. Schamberg, who knew influential artists, poets, and architects, taught Sheeler to use the camera. Sheeler took up commerical photography while continuing to paint. Although soft focus photography was in favor at the time, Sheeler took the opposite direction, working in straight photography. His photographs were fresh and clear, with a strong sense of inherent design and a rendering of textures that has been unsurpassed. This work ran parallel to his new preoccupation with structural form in painting. theMcNay Charles Sheeler Barn Decorations, 1959 About the Artist continued For the 1913 Exhibition of Independent Artists (the Armory Show) in New York, six of Sheeler’s paintings were selected. Around 1918, Sheeler, Schamburg, and Charles Demuth developed a form of American Cubism that came to be known as Precisionism. They admired profoundly urban, industrial, and, in Sheeler’s case, architectural achievements. Characteristics of Precisionism include: (1) flat, non-painterly brushstrokes; (2) hard-edge, precise delineation; (3) simultaneously realistic and abstracted (simplified) imagery; (4) having little or no involvement with social issues; (5) unpeopled images made up of geometric forms inherent in the subject. In the 1920s, Sheeler married, moved to New York City, and continued his commercial photography and painting. He gained international recognition after completing a series of photos of the River Rouge Ford Motor Car plant outside Detroit, where the new Ford Model A car was assembled. His solo exhibition in 1931 at the Downtown Gallery in New York turned into an exclusive affiliation with that gallery. In the 1940s, he worked at the Museum of Modern Art in New York as Senior Artist-in-Residence. He also produced a series of photographs of Shaker buildings and the UN Building. In the 1950s, he traveled to Los Angeles for a retrospective exhibition at UCLA, and visited Ansel Adams in San Francisco. In 1958, one year before the McNay painting, and before a stroke left him somewhat paralyzed for the last six years of his life, he returned to begin yet another series of Bucks County barn images, a reenactment of the formative period of his early career. Wherever Sheeler lived, he maintained his orderly working habits, painting on a large dining room table. He worked seven or eight hours a day, taking little recreation. Painfully inarticulate, he declined interviews, either from an excessive modesty or an indifference to his fame. Quote from the Artist Photography is nature seen from the eyes outward, painting from the eyes inward. Strategies for Tours Primary Grades (ages 6–8): Is this a portrait, still life, or landscape? What is it? What geometric shapes do you see in the painting? What primary colors? What secondary colors? If the artist had used red for the barn in this painting (which was the favored color of the Pennsylvania Dutch), how would the mood change? Upper Elementary (ages 9–11) and Middle School/High School (ages 12–18): What is this a picture of? How far back in space are we looking? What tells you how deep the space is? How do you think the artist made the decorative roundels? What parts of this painting look like a black and white photograph? [Tell them about Sheeler’s experience as a photographer.] Why did he put some shapes at a diagonal? Adults: In what part of the country is this barn? What clues give it away? What parts of this painting seem influenced by classical order, Cubism, Impressionism, and photography? Sources Worth Consulting Brock, Charles. Charles Sheeler: Across Media. Washington: National Gallery of Art in Association with University of California Press, Berkeley, 2006. Lucic, Karen. Charles Sheeler in Doylestown: American Modernism and the Pennsylvania Tradition. Allentown, Pennsylvania: Allentown Art Museum, 1997. Troyen, Carol, and Hirschler, Erica E. Charles Sheeler: Paintings and Drawings. Boston: Little, Brown and Co., 1987. Tsujimoto, Karen. Images of America: Precisionist Painting and Modern Photography. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1982. Prepared by Joann Neal Date 10/95 theMcNay.
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