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Ambivalence, Irony, and Americana: Sheeler's American Interiors

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Ambivalence, Irony, and Americana: Sheeler's American Interiors Ambivalence, Irony, and Americana Charles Sheeler’s “American Interiors” Kristina Wilson This article examines the canvases and photographs made by Charles Sheeler between 1926 and 1939 of his own collection of Shaker furniture, hooked rugs, and nineteenth-century ceramics. It argues that the paintings possess modernist self- consciousness, ambivalence, and irony toward their historical subject matter and that they critique the contemporary collecting fad for all things Americana. The article sets Sheeler’s paintings in the context of the Metropolitan Museum’s American Wing and the writings of Holger Cahill and Edward and Faith Andrews and argues that an ambivalent, ironical attitude pervaded much of the early scholarship on these artifacts. HROUGHOUT THE 1920sand1930s, more than an expression of Sheeler’s love for these Charles Sheeler participated in the popu- objects—although they are certainly that. They are T lar trend of collecting American material a profound meditation on the culture of collecting artifacts by photographing and painting his per- Americana and of buying reproduction American sonal collection of Shaker furniture, hooked rugs, antiques that had arisen over the previous few de- and nineteenth-century ceramics. While some of cades. Sheeler’s paintings interrogate, with modern- his images are essentially still-life studies of assorted ist self-consciousness, ambivalence, and irony, the objects, a series of four paintings, probably inspired cultural phenomenon that elevated humble artifacts by a group of photographs, captures his collection made in an earlier century to cherished possessions as he arranged it and lived with it in his own home: and canonical masterpieces of the present day. They Interior (1926), Americana (1931), Home, Sweet Home celebrate and at the same time question whether the (1931), and American Interior (1934; see below). Al- American past is substantial enough to serve as a though Sheeler moved from South Salem, New foundation for its commercially driven present. York, to Ridgefield, Connecticut, in 1932, all four In her 1938 biography of Charles Sheeler, of these paintings are based on the interiors of his Constance Rourke quoted the artist discussing his South Salem residence. The series, sometimes re- interest in nineteenth-century American artifacts. ferred to as the “American Interiors,” is well known “I don’t like these things because they are old but to historians of American art.1 The paintings are in spite of it,” he said somewhat cryptically. “I’d like them still better if they were made yesterday be- Kristina Wilson is associate professor of art history in the Depart- cause then they would afford proof that the same ment of Visual and Performing Arts at Clark University, Worcester, ”2 Massachusetts. kind of creative power is continuing. Critics have For insightful comments on earlier drafts of this project, the author would like to thank Karen Lucic, Carol Troyen, Jonathan Gladioli (1927, private collection) be considered part of the group Weinberg, Amy Earls, and the anonymous reviewers for Winterthur of paintings of interiors; another possible candidate is Interior Portfolio. She would also like to thank the staff at the Worcester Art (1940, National Gallery of Art). Newhaven is, in my opinion, an ex- Museum Library for their substantial research assistance. plicitly different project: it depicts the interior of the Ridgefield 1 These paintings merit discussion as a group not only because house and interrogates historic architecture as much as, or more they depict the same place, but also because they focus on antique than, antique furnishings. Spring Interior, Gladioli, and the 1940 Inte- furnishings to the exclusion of architecture; they are best classified rior are better understood as still lifes, rather than domestic interiors, ’ in the genre of domestic interior. In her catalog of Sheeler s paint- because they focus on single arrangements of objects and plant life 1932 ings, Carol Troyen suggested that Newhaven ( , private collec- on a table top. Carol Troyen and Erica E. Hirshler, Charles Sheeler: 1927 tion), Spring Interior ( , Museum of Fine Arts, Boston), and Paintings and Drawings (Boston: Little, Brown, 1987), 112. B 2011 by The Henry Francis du Pont Winterthur Musuem, 2 Constance Rourke, Charles Sheeler: Artist in the American Tradi- Inc. All rights reserved. 0084-0416/2011/4504-0001$10.00 tion (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1938), 136. # xxxxx UCP: Winterthur Portfolio article # 450401 2 Winterthur Portfolio 45:4 long celebrated Sheeler’s ability to extract his sub- Schnakenberg, collectors Walter and Louise jects from the context of time and to present them Arensberg, historian Henry Chapman Mercer, as transcendent truths, and this statement would curators Holger Cahill and Juliana Force, the critic appear to support that: after all, he claims that what (and Sheeler’s biographer) Rourke, and his in- interests him is how well the objects work, in what- fluential dealer, Edith Halpert. These intellectuals’ ever time period.3 Yet the heart of this passage is the interest in objects from the American past must be irreducible identity of these artifacts as “old”: they seen, in turn, as part of a broader public fascination are from a time when things were better than they with the nation’s material history, as evidenced by are now. Despite his laconic reserve, Sheeler’s words the popularity of “colonial revival” as a decorating reveal a deep-seated ambivalence: he admits that style in the 1920sand1930s and the founding of he cherishes these old objects and, simultaneously, public collections such as the American Wing, with claims he would discard them for new ones—but its parade of fully furnished period rooms, at the only if the new had the same “creative power” as Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1924.5 While the the old. The statement has a curious, insistent circu- colonial revival focused on higher-style objects than larity, where the reader continually arrives back at the Shaker and folk objects of Sheeler’s circle, all of “these old things,” even as Sheeler attempts to pull these collecting practices contained contradictory the narrative into the present day. If Sheeler’s state- impulses that, on the one hand, celebrated the ment can be read as an index to his thoughts on the American past as a model for the present and, on American artifactual past, it is representative not in the other, reworked history to better fit present its surface content—which professes to celebrate concerns.6 the past in the present—but rather in its convoluted Although the American Interiors series is clearly logic and ambivalence, where the past always threat- a part of this interwar culture of collecting, consum- ens to overshadow the present. ing, and displaying American artifacts, these paint- Various scholars have argued, quite compel- ings should not be seen as simple, unapologetic lingly, that Sheeler’s American Interiors embrace celebrations of the American past. Rather, they vernacular objects from the American past in an are complex expressions of the commercialized effort to build a modernist idiom unique to the society that exhumed such objects. Carol Troyen United States. The American Interiors have been observed that the Interiors, with their dramatic placed in the context of a broader intellectual cropping, vertiginous sight lines, and collage-like movement in the interwar decades that aimed to es- arrangement of forms, were “disquieting” depic- tablish a genealogy of American artistic and literary tions of “unwelcoming spaces.” She too argued that sources, or to find, in the famous words of Van Wyck the paintings were more than mere celebrations, Brooks, a “usable past.”4 Sheeler shared his interest and that they seemed to have an “ironic under- in the American artifactual past—in particular tone”: “It is hard to say whether Sheeler was speak- Shaker objects and nineteenth-century folk art— ing only personally or for his whole generation in with many compatriots in the interwar art world, in- intimating a kind of hollowness in the embracing cluding fellow artists Elie Nadelman and Henry of America’spast.”7 In the pages that follow, this 5 3 Both Michael Kammen and Wanda Corn interpret this state- For a good study of political undertones of the colonial revival “ ment as a preference for form over any specific time period, but as manifested in the American Wing, see Wendy Kaplan, R. T. H. ” both also mention (without discussing it further) the possibility that Halsey: An Ideology of Collecting American Decorative Arts, 17 1 1982 43–53 conflicting sentiments might be found in Sheeler’swords.See Winterthur Portfolio , no. (Spring ): . Michael Kammen, Mystic Chords of Memory: The Transformation of Tra- 6 For a variety of views on the complex phenomenon known as dition in American Culture (New York: Vintage Books, 1993), 328; the colonial revival, see, among others, Richard Guy Wilson, Shaun Wanda M. Corn, The Great American Thing: Modern Art and National Eyring, and Kenny Marotta, eds., Re-creating the American Past: Essays on Identity, 1915–1939 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), the Colonial Revival (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 314. 2006); Thomas Denenberg, Wallace Nutting and the Invention of Old 4 The two significant pieces of scholarship about the American America (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press and Wadsworth 2003 Interiors emphasize Sheeler’s positive celebration of the past: Corn, Athenaeum of Art, ); Karal Ann Marling, George Washington Slept 1876–1986 Great American Thing, chap. 6; Susan Fillin-Yeh, Charles Sheeler: Amer- Here: Colonial Revivals and American Culture, (Cambridge, 1988 “ ican Interiors (New Haven, CT: Yale University Art Gallery, 1987). MA: Harvard University Press, ); Abigail Carroll, Of Kettles and Karen Lucic has explored many facets of Sheeler’s revival interests, Cranes: Colonial Revival Kitchens and the Performance of National ” 43 4 2009 335–64 especially his Doylestown work, and has examined the ambivalence Identity, Winterthur Portfolio , no.
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