When his dealer, Edith Halpert, convinced Sheeler to downplay his photography in order to enhance his standing as a painter, the artist took a photograph that led to this oil of his abandoned photography studio. "View of New York,” 1931, is in the collection of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.
:One of the most important and influential early American modernists, Charles Sheeler (1883–1965) was an innovative visionary who excelled in a number of media. The unusual manner in which he utilized painting, drawing, photography and film as central elements in his art is the subject of this fascinating, first-of-its-kind exhibition. The show especially explores how Sheeler, equally gifted as painter and photographer, used both skills in creating iconic artworks.
"Charles Sheeler: Across Media" is curated by Charles Brock, assistant curator of American and British paintings at the National Gallery, where the exhibition was seen earlier this year. It is on view at the Art Institute of Chicago thru January 7, and then travels to the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, de Young, February 10–May 6.
Comprising some 50 paintings, photographs, works on paper and a film, the show is organized chronologically and by themes, enabling viewers to compare works of the same subject rendered in a variety of media. "At first glance," says Brock, "some of these works may seem identical, but closer inspection reveals their subtle and meaningful differences."
Featured are Sheeler's famous 1917 photographs of his house in Doylestown, Penn., the film Manhatta, made in collaboration with photographer Paul Strand, numerous photographs and a number of paintings, including iconic images of the Ford Motor Company's River Rouge Plant. The key to his success, suggests Brock, was "Sheeler's extraordinarily rigorous, varied and long apprenticeship."
Born in Philadelphia, Sheeler studied there at the School of Industrial Art, receiving training in industrial drawing, decorative painting and applied art. At the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts under the redoubtable William Merritt Chase he was schooled in Impressionism and painterly techniques. He traveled to Europe twice with Chase to view the Old Masters, and exhibited paintings with the bravura brushwork of his mentor.
This sharp, colorful and serene Precisionist oil on canvas view of the Ford plant at River Rouge, "American Landscape,” 1930, was created after earlier photographs and a watercolor of the same site. The Museum of Modern Art.
On his last trip, 1908–1910, with his classmate Morton Schamberg, Sheeler encountered and fell under the sway of the then-shocking, avant-garde art of Henri Matisse and Pablo Picasso. He soon ditched his Chase-inspired conception of art for a more modernist point of view.
Around this time Sheeler purchased his first camera, and before long he was photographing art for galleries and dealers in New York. He exhibited six paintings in the 1913 Armory Show and attended the Manhattan salons of collectors Walter and Louise Arensberg, where he met Marcel Duchamp, Francis Picabia and other avant-garde stars.
During this time Sheeler shared a studio in Philadelphia with Schamberg. They also rented an Eighteenth Century Quaker fieldstone house in Doylestown. Excursions into the nearby countryside enhanced Sheeler's affinity for the simple, unadorned architecture of the area and for early American artifacts.
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