Charles Sheeler; Modernism, Precisionism and the Borders Of

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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. The paintings, drawings and photographs that Sheeler made of those most modern entities like New York skyscrapers or of Henry Ford’s River Rouge Plant might share the clean, precise and angular representation of their subject matter, but his style enables the inclusion of objects definitively not modern. These include the architecture of Pennsylvania barns, the Doylestown House and also pre-modern subject matter like Etruscan vases and the traditional crafts of the Shakers. The most significant aspect of this book’s analysis, though, is the focus upon the imprecision and formal dissonance in so many of his works. From Constance Rourke to Wanda Corn, attention has been drawn to anomalies in Sheeler’s work; Sheeler’s windows are rarely transparent and shadows exist in impossible formations. In the past, these have been viewed as cryptic elements, something akin to visual puzzles, but little more. I argue that these anomalies, whether imperfections in representation or quite drastic alterations to the properties of objects like glass, are significant and crucial for the re-imagining of Sheeler’s aesthetic and his work. This re-imagining will draw on the aesthetic

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theory of Theodor Adorno, a philosopher who insists that inconsistency, error and failure in a work – dissonance – should draw closer attention rather than encourage its glossing over. In this way, the book’s critical framework is mainly drawn from the aesthetic theory of Theodor Adorno. The reasons for this are straightforward, unlike Adorno’s writings themselves. From the outset it was clear to me that Adorno’s writings on aesthetics and modern art resonate with Sheeler’s work. Most obviously there are Adorno’s criticisms of the culture industry and Fordist/Taylorist doctrine explored in Dialectic of Enlightenment, co-authored with Max Horkheimer; these are impossible to ignore in respect of an artist commissioned by the Ford Motor Company to photograph the River Rouge. If this was not concern enough, then Sheeler’s later paintings of the Rouge, shown as a gleaming industrial landscape, evoking an impossible serenity and produced at the height of the Depression, are highly problematic. Adorno’s writings offer the chance to re-imagine Sheeler’s work because of his emphasis on the artwork and its modes of production rather than on biographical interpretation or as seeing artworks as a means to psychoanalyse their makers. Adorno’s rigorous analysis of the role of the artwork in society and the capacity of art to critique industrial society, mostly written after his own experience of exile in America, are extremely relevant for an analysis of Sheeler. Central to this study is the attention Adorno pays to the role and means of artistic production, especially his re-evaluation of Walter Benjamin’s concept of mimesis. Adorno’s focus in his aesthetic theory on the production of the artwork rather than on the artist provides a more systematic and theoretical interpretation of Sheeler’s work and its relationship to American modernity. This approach is useful for several reasons. It avoids drawing conclusions based on the artist’s self-commentary, although many are extremely insightful, and places the emphasis on examining what factors shape the construction of the particular artwork. This book argues that the more formal aspects of Sheeler’s constructive technique are loaded with references to the process of rationalisation, the working principle powering all spheres of American modernity, including mass-production and architecture. Crucially, Sheeler’s work is not a simple replication of the techniques of rationality transferred into art but a form of critique that reveals the contradictions inherent in the processes of rationalisation. From the collapse of geometry in his depictions of buildings or the denial in scale of the production process at the River Rouge, Sheeler’s work takes a dissenting line, both literally and metaphorically. In simple terms, the forms and content of Sheeler’s

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work are not governed by a geometrically precise technique as is often believed; on the contrary, many works are riddled with imperfections and moments of imprecision that not only question Precisionism as a category but suggest a more negative rather than ambivalent encounter with American modernity. Adorno’s aesthetic theory allows connections to be made between the artwork and its relationship to these ongoing processes in American society, and Sheeler’s artworks’ immanent critique of them through the dissenting line has been unacknowledged or insufficiently developed in previous critiques. On saying this, one of this book’s aims is to re-evaluate Adorno’s aesthetic theory, particularly its emphasis on the autonomous artwork. Sheeler’s work for the culture industry and that related to it are not autonomous in the Adornian sense and might well be judged as incapable of critique. This is because Sheeler highlights how Adorno is wrong about the non-critical nature of art of the culture industry. Instead, the example of Sheeler merely goes to prove that Adorno’s concentration on the larger processes of the culture industry, rather than individual instances of cultural production, excludes work such as Sheeler’s; work that is critical according to Adorno’s own aesthetic theory. Sheeler’s work, therefore, opens one of the more rigid aspects of Adorno’s aesthetic theory to scrutiny and revision.

Chapter One, ‘Musing on Primitiveness’, outlines the development and cultural context of Sheeler’s early work and introduces a key theme, namely the problematic status of home. Sheeler’s early period is to a large degree beset by a series of challenges, which include the process of redefinition as a modern artist. As part of this process, Sheeler begins a lifelong engagement with photography and finding a subject for his art; this chapter follows the artist’s break with his education under William Merritt Chase in pursuit of not only a new subject but also a new way of making work. The early period, dominated by imagery of Pennsylvania barns and the Doylestown House, can be defined by Sheeler’s concerted effort to achieve both, drawing on Cézanne, cubism and photography. I argue that this shift in aesthetic sensibilities produces a series of works linked by their engagement with primitive forms, and that these forms are Sheeler’s first philosophical reflection on dwelling. Chapter Two, ‘A Photograph, a Drawing and a Painting: Sheeler’s New York Series’ explores the continuing importance of photography in Sheeler’s work. Through the close examination of three works, a photograph, a drawing and a painting of the same scene – the rear of the Park Row Building, Manhattan – the idea of Sheeler’s work as

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precisionist is examined. All three images reveal a flattening of space and reveal a stripping of extraneous detail through the process of abstraction, a technique that earned Sheeler a reputation as an artist who employed the language of the architect and engineer. But Sheeler’s painting and drawing are riddled with imprecision. Here Adorno’s critique of rationalisation and the principles of modernity, epitomised by functionalism, show how the artwork is able to adopt the language of rationalisation whilst remaining critical of it. In Chapter Three, ‘The Disappearing Subject: Self-Portrait and View of New York’, I advance the critique of Sheeler’s work through the exploration of two images: Self-Portrait (1923) and View of New York (1931). The chapter introduces two important Adornian concepts: the constellation and mimesis. Both these concepts help clarify how the artwork is both constructed and experienced. Adorno’s theory of mimesis explains how the modernist constructed artwork production and aesthetic experience. The chapter studies closely the dialectical relationships in the works between photography and painting, realism and abstraction and subject and object that emerge from Sheeler’s photographic vision, and the surrendering of the self to the work. Chapter Four, ‘Is it Still Life? Sheeler, Adorno and Dwelling’, considers the inadequacy of machine-age readings of Sheeler’s still life works. Through a materialist critique of the genre of still life, I argue that Sheeler’s work engages with the modernist philosophical preoccupation with dwelling and the inability to dwell under the conditions of modernity. Throughout the 1920s, Sheeler’s still life work extends its focus beyond the tabletop and into the interior of the artist’s home. Sheeler engaged with a radical revision of the genre through formal experimentation. Their construction and imprecision complicate the ‘naturalistic’ appearance of the interior images through the sustained experimentation with form and perspective that alludes to a harmonious whole, which is on closer examination an illusion. Chapter Five, ‘Between Commission and Autonomy: Sheeler’s River Rouge’, discusses the impact on Sheeler’s aesthetic of the Ford Motor Company commission to photograph the River Rouge Plant. Despite being produced in the pay of Ford, I argue that both Sheeler’s commissioned images and the later paintings of the Rouge are not, as Karen Lucic suggests, ambivalent in their response towards their industrial subject matter but extremely negative and critical of Fordist rationality. Reading Adorno’s theory of the culture industry against the grain helps disrupt the exclusive concept of the autonomous artwork, the only truly critical artwork, to reveal the capacity for Sheeler’s work to

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retain their negatively critical aspect. Close readings of the breakthrough work, Upper Deck (1929), and the Rouge-inspired American Landscape (1930), indicate a level of complexity in the works’ aesthetic beyond an uncritical or ambivalent representation of a technological utopia. I conclude that Sheeler’s work is far from a glorification of American industrial might or an ambivalent response to American modernity but a genuine critique of the rationalisation of culture and society. The final chapter, ‘Late Work/Late Style’, argues for a re-evaluation of Sheeler’s work of the 1940s and 1950s. Criticism of Sheeler’s late period rarely asks difficult questions of works which appear rather staid repetitions of themes and subject matter drawn from earlier works. Recent criticism has, it seems, respectfully disengaged from a more thorough appraisal in order to preserve the reputation of an important artist of the machine age. In this chapter, I argue that the lack of consistency evident in the late works is not necessarily a problem with the artist’s work but rather with the critical expectation. Drawing on Adorno’s work on late Beethoven, this chapter shows that there is much more to Sheeler’s late period than has previously been imagined, but such an understanding requires a significant shift in critical perspective and expectation. In all chapters it is evident that Sheeler’s work is a refined realism that operates at the borderline of abstraction; drawing on photographic realism and cubist abstraction, the tensions inherent in Sheeler’s practice collide to produce works that present an outward appearance of harmony, of precision, but, in the interplay of form and content, the imprecise qualities of Sheeler’s images reveal something disturbing and odd. In the end, Sheeler’s work resists its categorisation and reveals itself to be the undoing of Precisionism.

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