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Figure 1. Charles Sheeler (1883-1965). Doylcstown House: Stairway Figure 2. Charles Sheeler, Doylestown House: Stairway with C.1917, gelatin silver print mounted on paperboard. image: 245 x .169 Chair, 1917, gelatin silver print on paper. National Gallery (9 5/8 X 6 5/8); sheet: 253 x .196 (9 15/16 x 7 11/16). . Washington, Gift of the Brown Foundation. Inc., of Art, Washington, New Century Fund Houston, 1998.19.1.

Mark Rawlinson Charles Sheeler: Musing on Primitiveness

Alfred Stieglitz condescendingly referred to the interior which is Bachelard's privileged mode of representation,

arrangement of Charles Sheeler's Doylestown house as his but I will argue throughout this essay that Sheeler's " Hut aesthetitque."' In The Poetics of Space, images of the Doylestown house, besides their obvious

Gaston Bachelard makes a similar claim: "'[a] dreamer of engagement with a photo-cubist aesthetic, reflect another refuges," he says, "dreams of a hut, a nest, or of nooks and of Bachelard's claims, namely that "we must start musing corners into which he would like to hide away like an on primitiveness."^ To muse on primitiveness is to access

animal in its hole."- For Walter Benjamin, "[t]he original the very beginnings of our "becoming," it is to trace most form of all dwelling is existence not in the house but in the poignantly the relationship between the individual and shell. The shell bears the impression of its occupant."^ the home. Contrary to Stieglitz's disdain of Sheeler's

Unable to return to the shell, we make of the house a primitive retreat, it is precisely the inclusion of the refuge, a space in which to burrow, where each room primitive in these images, which marks them out for wears the traces of occupancy. As a man who once referred attention. And whilst these works explicitly reveal the to himself as "the hermit of Doylestown," for all the world primitive function of the hut, they generate a region Sheeler seems in tune with Benjamin and Bachelard.' "beyond human images" in the dialectical interplay between the realism of photography and the abstraction of The dreamer of refuges lives, according to Bachelard, "in a formal experimentation.

region that is beyond human images" and it is through the medium of the image—in this instance, the photograph In each of Sheeler's Doylestown photographs, entry and that Sheeler "dreams."^ It is poetry and not the image exit, the flow between boundaries and over thresholds, is

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imprisonment. In the end. however, I want to argue that In Doylestown House: Stairwell (c.l917) (Fig. 1) we see the Sheeler's series of Doylestown photographs—repeated twisting risers of the staircase caught between a images of darkened windows, silhouetted stoves, shady whitewashed wall and the edge of the frame of the door, stairwells and half-open doorways—allow us to access both brightly lit. The lighting catches the underside of the something fundamental, something ancient. These rooms rising stairway; the stairwell illuminated enough to allow are monadic, literally windowless because the windows us to distinguish the space beneath and the pattern of the are no longer transparent, where the truth of the monad stairs themselves. But two vertical stripes of murky lies in its self-containment. Taken from Leibniz, the notion darkness frame these thin interjections of light, pressing of the monad recurs in the work of both Benjamin and in on the scene. On one level, the photograph abandons Theodor Adorno. For Adorno, "[t]he interpretation of an content in favour of formal composition, a photo-cubist artwork as an immanent, crystallised process at a rendering of the space in terms of geometric line and tonal standstill approximates the concept of the monad;" the pattern. On another, one literally can identify a doorway, importance of this is that the "monadological constitution a stairwell, and the underside of the stairs rising up and of artworks in themselves points beyond itself."' These into an unseen space above. In Doylestown House: images of restrained access, of barred thresholds, are Stairway with Chair (c.l917) (Fig. 2), a similar themselves thresholds which allow access to the world in arrangement of forms presents itself to us: strong miniature. verticals, this time in white, frame a black/grey oblong which contains the stairs coiling diagonally to the right, Between 1910 and 1926 Charles Sheeler rented the continuing upwards into darkness. The door at the bottom Doylestown House, a colonial cottage in Bucks County, of the stairs is open, extending out toward the viewer, Pennsylvania, built by Jonathan Worthington in 1768. concealing a window to the left. Next to the window, The house, shared with fellow artist, Morton Schamberg nearest the viewer is a small mirror, which is countered until his death during the influenza epidemic in 1917, was bottom right by a slither of a chair and its shadow. The a place to escape to, a retreat where both men could door is open, so one can ascend the stairs but the darkness produce art. The house was isolated and the isolation of is forbidding: the window and mirror are redundant, as is, the place was felt doubly because of the distance of Bucks because of the little we see of it, the chair. County from the developing art scene in Manhattan, but also because of the attitude of those in the local area Together this reordering of the visible and the imagined toward . According to Sheeler. "Modern art space exposes Bachelard's dreamer of nooks and crannies was considered there on the same status as an illegitimate to a degree of critique. What lurks in those dark spaces child born into the first families, something to live down under stairs, or behind the door? What has happened to rather than providing opportunity to introduce new the world beyond the windowpane? 'For whatever reason, blood."* The hostility Sheeler obviously felt towards his Bachelard does not find anything sinister in nooks and growing modernist influences did not discourage him from crannies, only adventure, anticipation, discovery. The exploring them explicitly in relation to the house itself, a home is seen as the source of happy memories; it exists as risky venture one might presume. a place that returns to us in dreams as we sleep or in daydreams when our minds wander. But, as Rachel As Karen Lucie notes, the choice of subject is not the usual Bowlby argues, there is something troubling about fodder for the determined modern artist because Sheeler Bachelard's untroubled home." For Bowlby, Bachelard's could quite easily have been accused of nostalgia and of view of the home is overly optimistic, reminding us of betraying his avant-gardist principles. And yet Sheeler's Freud's notion of the unheimlich. The fact that the house Doylestown images avoid both with some skill. For Lucie can also be the opposite of the home: a place of darkness, this is because "Sheeler aimed to synthesize past and fear and hostility. Freud's nightmarish vision of the present in a new way;" a formula that he was to repeat familiar made unfamiliar is all about fear, peril, and the over and again throughout his career.' This neat equation loss of the sense of security in the place where it matters should not foreclose the analysis of the Doylestown most, the place where one must always feel at home: in images. According to Theodore Stebbins, Sheeler saw in one's own home. these photographs "something personal," but evades the issue of what this might have been in favour of questions Bachelard's eulogy on nooks and crannies and Freud's and not answers, provisional or not.'" I would like to ask willingness to find horror in them, however, does not fully the question again: Sheeler saw in these photographs account for the feeling Sheeler's photographs generate.

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One can argue that the Doylestown house is not a homely Sheeler says "Light is the great designer" and in these

place at all, there is nothing subtle about the place, hard photographs light works to outline or abstract form, it is whitewashed walls, harshly lighted with excessive bright used to both illuminate surface texture and to obliterate spots and deep, deep shadows, all add up to an texture also." Constance Rourke writes: uncomfortable place to be. One cannot help but note the staged-ness of each image. These photographs are full of With Sheeler light becomes a palpable medium dark spaces, looming silhouettes; there are thresholds that through which form is apprehended to the full, cannot be crossed, stairs that cannot be climbed and through variations in its quality, through windows that cannot be seen through. The interior thus contrasting shadow, through modulations of tone becomes site of containment, a claustrophobic space with within shadow.... A full perception of the use of harsh, unpredictable lighting and deep, dark shadowy shadow in his art may lead to an understanding area which one dare not venture into. of its most fundamental qualities, bringing the spectator back finally to the constant use of light Lucie argues with justification that these images are a itself as a dimensional force. '^ series, or with Adorno in mind, a constellation. As such,

one can piece together the house, as it were. In spite of I would argue that in the case of the Doylestown the house's residual closedness. the viewer begins to photographs and subsequent related images. Rourke is recognise latches, doorways, fireplaces, windows and other only half right. Locked as we are in the monadic house, objects, which act as visual clues and in turn form a imprisoned amongst its nooks and crannies, pushed into

mental map of the space. But what a flattened space it its corners, thresholds barred and our sense of space remains even with this acquired knowledge. The impeded, we see only the interior. Light blackens the fragmentary forms of the individual images themselves, windows, denying them their transparency, making this though, make for an unstable constellation. Rare are the house a windowless place: from inside we cannot see images which offer more than a doorway or a corner for us outside. What we forget in this confusion is that we can be to peer into, the most Sheeler gives us is Doylestown seen from outside of the house, from the other side of the House: Interior with Stove (c.1932) (Fig. 3).'- Here is a blackened glass. wider perspective on a room with a door to the right which is cropped—the white beads of the window bright against the blackened window panes, to the left another closed door, and in the middle a glowering silhouette of the stove, light bursting from its belly through an open

door. But this image is hardly panoramic.

Interior with Stove is illuminating for a number of reasons. As part of a series or constellation. Interior with Stove appears like a sun. providing light and the forcefield. which binds the constellation together. The importance of

Interior with Stove is underscored by its reappearance in Sheeler's self-portrait. The Artist Looks at Nature (1943). Here Sheeler sits at an easel working on a re-rendering of Interior with Stove, perhaps in conte crayon, but the artist

is not in the studio, he is working au plein air and the scene before him a montage of an older home, Ridgefield, Connecticut and the Boulder Dam." The "something

personal" is again invoked and I want to suggest here that

it is the work of light in this image that makes it such an important image. It seems possible to imagine that in the other photographs in the constellation, the light source is not a strategically placed photographic lamp but the light from this stove emanating through the house. Granted Figure 3 Charles Sheeler, Interior uith Store. 1932. stove is a fire Sheeler's the light in the a lamp and not but Conte crayon on wove paper. National (lallery of imagery seeks to make the analogy. Art. Washington. Gift (Partial and Promised) of

Aaron I. Fleischman, 2000.181.1

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/thld_a_00249 by guest on 24 September 2021 This is the illuminated hut in which Bachelard finds As a threshold the viewer can imagine looking into the poetry. Referring to Henri Bachelin's novel, Le Serviteur. Doylestown House from outside, rather than from inside Bachelard claims; out, and by doing so gain access to this pre-history, present and future time. The blackened windows and non- [The author] finds the root of the hut dream in reflective mirrors, the closed or half-open doors, the lack of the house itself. He has only to give a few furniture, all evoke an uncomfortable sense of a place and touches to the spectacle of the family-sitting yet from the other side of the window this place and space room, only to listen to the stove roaring in the become timeless, evocative, and dream-like. The evening stillness, while an icy wind blows Doylestown House is a burrow, a place to hide, a bolthole, against the house, to know that at the house's a place we search out for in the darkest dreams, a centre, in the circle of light shed by the lamp, he miniature world that lies beyond the unhomely. is living in the round house, the primitive hut, of prehistoric man."*

Bachelard makes much of the image of the lamp in the window as a vigilant and safeguarding eye of the house, and in turn relates an anecdote about Rilke. One dark night, Rilke and his friends were about to cross a field when they saw "the lighted casement of a distant hut, the hut that stands quite alone on the horizon before one comes to fields and marshlands." They felt like "isolated individuals seeing night for the first time."'' For the dark background of our lives is assumed as inevitable until a

flash of insightful light is seen. As Bachelard puts it: Notes One might even say that light emanating from a lone watcher, who is also a determined watcher, 1. quoted in Wanda Corn. The Great American Thing: Modern Art and Natwnal Identity, 1915.1935 (California: University of California Press), 299. attains to the power of hypnosis. We are 2. Gaston Bachelard, 77ie Poetics of Space (: Beacon Press. 1986). 30. solitude, hypnotized by hypnotized by the gaze of 3- Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project (London: Harvard University Press, 1999). the solitary house; and the tie that binds us to it 221.

4, Sheeler quoted in Karen Lucie, Charles Sheeler in Doylestown: American is so strong that we begin to dream of nothing and the Pennsylvania Tradition (Allentown: , but a solitary house in the night.'* 1997), 19.

5, Bachelard. 30. This is what Bachelard's means when he says "we must 6, Emphasis as in the original text. Ibid,. 33, 7, Theodor Adorno, Aesthetic Theory (: University of Minnesota Press, start musing on primitiveness."" The Doylestown House 1997). 180, a retreat from the world. The isolation of is was the place 8, Sheeler quoted in Constance Rourke. Charles Sheeler: Artist in the American evident in every photograph of every room. To picture the Tradition (New York: Harcourt, Brace. 1938), 59, landscape in which the house sits would make this no 9, Lucie, 26. 10, Theodore Stebbins, Charles Sheeler: The Photographs (Boston: Museum of Fine more obvious but to imagine the lighted house as a beacon Arts, 1987). 9.

in the darkened landscape or as a place into which we can 11, See Rachel Bowlby, "Domestication" in Feminism Beside Itself, eds, Diane Elam peer and watch unseen provides an altogether different and Robyn Wiegman (New York: Routledge, 1995). 76. 7, 12, Deliberately reproduced here is Sheeler's conte crayon drawing of the perspective. The house as a monad is; photograph, which appears in The Artist Looks at Nature (1943)—a drawing, which is

a copy of the photograph of the same name and is reproduced here to impress the An object blasted free of time for the purposes of importance of the series, or constellation, in Sheeler's practice, 13, See Lucie, 110. Carol Troyen and Erica Hirshler, Sheeler: Paintings and analysis—it is concentrated time, pre-history, the present, and post-history are crushed Drawings (Boston; Museum of Fine Arts, 1987), 183.5, 14- Sheeler quoted in Rourke. 109, together there... It is an important moment of the 15, Ibid, past that can explain the present and the 16- Bachelard. 31.

possibilities of the future. An image of a greater 17, Rilke quoted in Bachelard, 35-6, totality—the experience of an historical era—can 18- Bachelard, 36- be found there. It is a threshold.™ 19- Emphasis as in the original text. Ibid,. 33 20. Esther Leslie, "Walter Benjamin's /Ircatics' Project" [article online]; available from Http://www,militantesthetix, co.uk/yarcades.html; Internet; accessed 28 February 2006.

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