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Charles Sheeler; Modernism, Precisionism and the Borders Of Charles Sheeler Sheeler01 pre.indd 1 31/10/2007 14:12:33 Charles Sheeler Modernism, Precisionism and the Borders of Abstraction Mark Rawlinson Sheeler01 pre.indd 3 31/10/2007 14:12:34 First Published in 2007 by I.B.Tauris Published 2020 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN 605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business Copyright © Mark Rawlinson 2007 The right of Mark Rawlinson to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patent Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. A full CIP record for this book is available from the British Library A full CIP record is available from the Library of Congress Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: available Typeset by JCS Publishing Services Ltd, www.jcs-publishing.co.uk ISBN 13: 978-1-8504-3902-8 (pbk) Sheeler01 pre.indd 4 31/10/2007 14:12:34 Contents List of Illustrations vii Introduction 1 1 Musing on Primitiveness 8 2 A Photograph, a Drawing and a Painting: Sheeler’s New York Series 44 3 The Disappearing Subject: Self-Portrait 77 4 Is it Still Life? Sheeler, Adorno and Dwelling 99 5 Between Commission and Autonomy: Sheeler’s River Rouge 128 6 Late Work/Late Style 164 Afterword 180 Notes 182 Index 207 Sheeler01 pre.indd 5 31/10/2007 14:12:34 Illustrations Black and White Figures 1 Side of White Barn, Bucks County 9 2 Barn Abstraction 10 3 Doylestown House: Stairwell 36 4 Doylestown House: Stairway with Chair 37 5 Doylestown House: Interior with Stove 40 6 New York, Park Row Building 46 7 New York 47 8 Dan Mask, Female Style, Ivory Coast 56 9 Frances Picabia, Here, This is Stieglitz Here (Ici, C’est ici Stieglitz) 82 10 Morton Schamberg, Mechanical Abstraction 84 11 Morton Schamberg, Telephone 85 12 African Musical Instrument 105 13 Still Life and Shadows 107 14 Cactus 108 15 Tulips and Etruscan Vase 115 16 Criss-Crossed Conveyors – Ford Plant 130 17 Ingot Molds, Open Hearth Building – Ford Plant 131 18 Ingot Molds, Open Hearth Building – Ford Plant detail 135 19 Upper Deck 149 20 Canal with Salvage Ship – Ford Plant 157 21 Rolling Power – Power-series 167 22 The Artist Looks at Nature 171 23 Ballardvale Mill, Close Up with Raking Shadows 174 24 Counterpoint 177 25 Ore into Iron 178 Sheeler01 pre.indd 7 31/10/2007 14:12:34 viii Illustrations Colour Plates appearing between pages 88 and 89 1 Flower Forms 2 Church Street El 3 Skyscrapers (formerly known as Offices) 4 Self-Portrait 5 View of New York 6 Interior 7 Home, Sweet Home 8 American Landscape 9 Classic Landscape 10 Ballardvale 11 New England Irrelevancies 12 Aerial Gyrations Sheeler01 pre.indd 8 31/10/2007 14:12:34 Introduction The identification of familiar objects comprising a picture is too often taken for an appreciation of the work itself and a welcome opportunity for a cessation of investigation. Charles Sheeler1 Charles Sheeler’s work has been lauded as exemplary and Precisionism, the art historical category with which his work is synonymous, occasionally accorded the distinction of being the first original modern art movement in twentieth-century American art. Equally, Sheeler’s precisionist art and Precisionism as a wider art historical movement have been derided as derivative; a weak and stylised interpretation of Cubism, bereft of the latter’s intellectual core, and too much in the sway of the culture industry’s mythologising of American monopoly capitalism. Situated somewhere between these oppositional accounts is yet another Sheeler: avant-garde in his principles, yet resolute in the pursuit of a form of realism over pure abstraction; unashamedly bewitched by the technological advances of his age, yet fearful of their consequences; a man with one eye on modern design and architecture, the other fixed on traditional crafts and architecture, especially those of the Shaker communities. Consequently, what distinguishes the artist’s attitude towards American modernity is neither criticism nor hyperbolic proselytising but ambivalence. And this seems a fair assessment. Sheeler’s self- commentary reveals an artist often conflicted, unable to resolve fully the more incompatible aspects apparent between his intellectual position, aesthetic sensibilities and working practices. On paper, the tensions across Sheeler’s work and practice seem suggestive of a more complex series of issues at work in the works themselves. And actually, when one looks very closely at Sheeler’s work, it is exactly these tensions that, I will argue throughout this book, reveal the works themselves as being far from ambivalent. My emphasis in this volume, then, is not to offer yet another critical biography of Sheeler but to focus much more on the Sheeler02 intro.indd 1 31/10/2007 14:13:25 2 Charles Sheeler works themselves in order to move beyond an ‘appreciation’ of the work and towards further investigation. The majority of Sheeler criticism shares one thing: the emphasis on contextualising the artist’s career in terms of his engagement with industrial subject matter or, more obviously, the machine age. Sheeler’s career highpoint is conceived to be around 1931, the period in which he produced those works most readily associated with the artist, and the works that have come to define an American appreciation of the industrial landscape; namely, Classic Landscape and American Landscape. These paintings in particular have become one-stop illustrations of the so-called machine-age aesthetic, a style and approach that tends also to be referred to as Precisionism. And though Precisionism is characterised most ably by works such as American Landscape, similar characteristics can be found in the work of other artists from the period, including Charles Demuth, Georgia O’Keeffe, Elsie Driggs, Ralston Crawford and even Joseph Stella, to name a few. None of these artists ever considered themselves as part of a group, so the longevity of Precisionism as a means to link these artists through an interest in a specific type of content – industrial subject matter – and a shared style of artistic form, which Karen Tsujimoto calls ‘reasoned abstraction’, is interesting.2 The initial association between precision and Sheeler’s work came about simply because his work was visually precise in comparison to the ‘still popular works of Lawson, Chase, Redfield, or Warner’.3 From the 1920s onwards, the relationship between precision and Sheeler’s style was cemented almost inevitably as links between his practice – painting from photographs – and his subject matter – skyscrapers/factories/ machines – determined. The similarities between Sheeler’s technique and his subject matter not only compounded the image of the artist’s work as precisionist but became the blueprint for Precisionism: Sheeler’s industrial works become archetypal. Clearly, there are reasons for such a sustained conflation of an artist’s practice with a cultural period like the machine age, the most obvious being that modern artists are expected to be engaged with the most pressing issues of their day: in this case, the impact of technology and the machine on American culture. For Milton Brown, the predominance of industrial and mechanical forms in America meant it was a logical and natural home for the artist alive to ‘the material results of this development visible on all sides and integral to normal existence’.4 Similarly vocal were European emigrés Marcel Duchamp and Francis Picabia who, on their arrival in America during the early part of the twentieth century, confirmed Brown’s observation. ‘Since machinery is the soul of the modern world and since Sheeler02 intro.indd 2 31/10/2007 14:13:25 Introduction 3 the genius of machinery attains its highest expression in America,’ Picabia argued, ‘why is it not reasonable to believe that in America the art of the future will flower most brilliantly’. The 1939 retrospective of Sheeler’s work at the Museum of Modern Art was in recognition of Sheeler’s ‘unique contribution to American art’, particularly his ‘industrial scenes which were felt by many to be the complete summations of American environment and sensibility’.5 Simply put, Sheeler was at the forefront of this future when he found his major subject in the industrial landscape of America. How true is this? Is Sheeler’s major subject the industrial landscape of America? Is his work the archetype of Precisionism? These questions might seem rather obvious but they are seldom articulated, let alone answered in relation to Sheeler. This is because criticism of the artist and his work often satisfies itself with addressing only the most obvious aspects of the work, rarely questioning the core principles on which most critical accounts are set. Analysis begins with an assumption that Sheeler is solely an artist of the machine age and that his work and career can only be interpreted from the perspective of a machine-age aesthetic. This book challenges these first principles for several reasons. The diversity of Sheeler’s work and practice extends far beyond that which a machine aesthetic can account for. And whilst Sheeler’s work is often identifiably precisionist in terms of both subject matter – architectural, machinic and/or industrial – and form – the emphasis on design and geometric precision – these works seem also to resist their categorisation.
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