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| 1931-32 Self-Portrait at Easel gelatin silver print 24.4 x 18.8 cm Art Institute of Chicago, IL |
Charles Sheeler (1883 – 1965) was an American painter and commercial photographer. He is recognised as one of the founders of American modernism, developing a "quasi-photographic" style of painting known as Precisionism and becoming one of the master photographers of the 20th century.
Charles Rettew Sheeler Jr. was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. He attended the Pennsylvania Museum School of Industrial Art from 1900 to 1903, and then the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts where he studied under William Merrit Chase. He found early success as a painter and exhibited at the Macbeth Gallery in 1908. Most of his education was in drawing and other applied arts. He went to Italy with other students, where he was intrigued by the Italian painters of the Middle Ages, such as Giotto and Piero della Francesca. Later, he was inspired by works of Cubist artists like Picasso and Braque after a trip to Paris in 1909, when the popularity of the style was skyrocketing. Returning to the United States, he realised that he would not be able to make a living with Modernist painting. Instead, he took up commercial photography, focusing particularly on architectural subjects. He was a self-taught photographer, learning his trade on a five dollar Brownie camera. Early in his career, he was dramatically impacted by the death of his close friend Morton Livingston Schamberg in the influenza epidemic of 1918. Schamberg's painting had focused heavily on machinery and technology, a theme which would come to feature prominently in Sheeler's own work.
Sheeler owned a farmhouse in Doylestown, Pennsylvania, about 39 miles outside Philadelphia, which he shared with Schamberg until the latter's death. He was so fond of the home's 19th century stove that he called it his "companion" and made it a subject of his photographs. The farmhouse itself serves a prominent role in many of his photographs, which include shots of the bedroom, kitchen, and stairway. At one point he was quoted as calling it his "cloister." His work was also part of the painting event in the art competition at the 1932 Summer Olympics.
In 1939, Sheeler married Muusya Metas Sokolova his second wife, six years after the death in 1933 of first wife Katharine Baird Shaffer (married 1921). In 1942 Sheeler joined the Met museum as a senior research fellow in photography, worked on a project in Connecticut with the photographer Edward Weston, and moved with Musya to Irvington-on-Hudson, some twenty miles north of New York. Sheeler worked for the Metropolitan Museum's Department of Publications from 1942 to 1945, photographing artworks and historical objects.
Sheeler painted using a technique that complemented his photography and has been described as “quasi-photographic". He was a self-proclaimed Precisionist, a term that emphasised the linear precision he employed in his depictions. As in his photographic works, his subjects were generally material things such as machinery and structures.
This is part 1 of 5-part series on the works of Charles Sheeler:
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| 1907 Gloucester Harbour oil on board 26.7 x 34.9 cm |
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| 1910 Peaches in a White Bowl oil on canvas 10.5 x 13.7 cm |
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| 1912 Chrysanthemums oil on linen 61.3 x 51.1 cm Whitney Museum of American Art, New York |
Still-life painting was of such importance to Sheeler that he wrote an essay on the subject in about 1925 (unpublished, Forbes Watson Papers, Archives of American Art, Reel D56: 1094). In this essay, Sheeler made clear his admiration of Paul Cézanne, whose work he had seen during a trip to Europe in 1908-09 and subsequently in New York City. He realised that Cézanne's "selection [of objects] is based upon preference in the matter of shapes, surfaces, and quantities related to a geometric structure," and attempted to develop a similar underlying structure in his own work. Sheeler, like Cézanne, favoured the genre because he could control the content, layout, and lighting in the pictures. He began making tabletop still lifes as early as 1910, but the mid-1920s were a particularly productive period for him. Sheeler's compositions usually included either fruit or flowers, often arranged in his growing collection of early American glassware and pottery.
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| 1912 Three White Tulips oil on panel 34.9 x 26.6 cm Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, MA Gift of the William H. Lane Foundation |
1914-17 Doylestown House:
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| 1914-17 Doylestown House, Stairway, Open Door gelatin silver print 24.2 x 17.6 cm MoMA, New York © 2020 The Lane Collection |
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| 1914-17 Doylestown House, Stairwell gelatin silver print 24.2 x 16.8 cm MoMA, New York © 2020 The Lane Collection |
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| 1917 Doylestown House - The Stove gelatin silver print Pepita Milmore Memorial Fund National Gallery of Art, Washington DC |
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| c1917 Doylestown House - Closet Door with Scythe gelatin silver print 23.5 x 17 cm SFMoMA, San Francisco, CA |
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| c1917 Doylestown House - Closet, Stairs gelatin silver print 24 x 16.5 cm SFMoMA, San Francisco, CA |
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| c1917 Doylestown House - Downstairs Window gelatin silver print 24 x 16.5 cm SFMoMA, San Francisco, CA |
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| c1917 Doylestown House - Stairway, Open Door gelatin silver print 24 x 17.5 cm SFMoMA, San Francisco, CA |
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| c1917 Doylestown House—Open Window gelatin silver print 22.7 x 16.6 cm The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art |
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| 1915 Bucks County Barn gelatin silver print 24.5 x 19.7 cm (image) Whitney Museum of American Art, New York |
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| 1915 Zinnia and Nasturtium Leaves gelatin silver print |
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| 1915-17 Side of White Barn, Bucks County, Pennsylvania gelatin silver print 19.4 x 24.6 cm MoMA, New York © 2020 The Lane Collection |
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| 1916 Barn Abstraction lithograph 20.9 x 47 cm (compostion) MoMA, New York |
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| c1916-22 Untitled (Danaïde - Sculpture by Brancusi) gelatin silver print 24 x 17.4 cm Philadelphia Museum of Art, PA |
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| 1917 Barn conté crayon on paper 10.8 x 15.2 cm MoMA, New York |
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| 1917 Barns (Fence in Foreground) conté crayon on paper 13.9 x 22.8 cm Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, New York |
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| 1917 Barns conté crayon on paper 15.2 x 22.8 cm Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, New York |
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| 1917 Buggy, Doylestown, Pennsylvania gelatin silver print MoMA, New York © 2020 The Lane Collection |
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| 1917-18 African Sculpture gelatin silver print 24.2 x 19.2 cm MoMA, New York © 2020 The Lane Collection |
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| 1918 Bucks County Barn matt opaque paint (possibly casein) and black fabricated chalk on wove paper 27.9 x 35.6 cm Philadelphia Museum of Art, PA |
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| 1918 Flower in a Bowl details not found |
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| 1932 Bucks County Barn artwork 60.6 x 75.9 cm MoMA, New York |
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| 1918 Bucks County Barn gelatin silver print 19.2 x 25 cm |
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| c1918 Living Room of New York Apartment of Louise and Walter Arensberg (Section of East Wall) gelatin silver print 19.4 x 24.5 cm Whitney Museum of American Art, New York |
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| 1919 Interior of the Arensberg Apartment (east wall, elevated view) gelatin silver print 19.1 x 24.1 cm |
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| c1919 (after May 1919) Interior, Arensberg's Apartment, New York casein silver print 19.4 x 24.4 cm Philadelphia Museum of Art, PA |
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| c1919 (after May 1919) Interior, Arensberg's Apartment, New York casein silver print 19.4 x 24.6 cm Philadelphia Museum of Art, PA |
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| c1919 (after May 1919) Interior, Arensberg's Apartment, New York casein silver print 19.4 x 24.9 cm Philadelphia Museum of Art, PA |
c1919 African Negro Wood Sculpture
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| c1919 African Negro Wood Sculpture |
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| African Negro Sculpture, plate 1 gelatin silver print 23.8 x 14.6 cm Smithsonian American Art Museum |
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| African Negro Sculpture, plate 2 gelatin silver print 23.8 x 14.6 cm Smithsonian American Art Museum |
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| African Negro Sculpture, plate 3 gelatin silver print 23.7 x 18.3 cm Smithsonian American Art Museum |
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| African Negro Sculpture, plate 5 gelatin silver print 24.3 x 19.4 cm Smithsonian American Art Museum |
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| African Negro Sculpture, plate 6 gelatin silver print 23.2 x 16.1 cm Smithsonian American Art Museum |
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| African Negro Sculpture, plate 7 gelatin silver print 22.9 x 17.2 cm Smithsonian American Art Museum |
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| African Negro Sculpture, plate 8 gelatin silver print 24.2 x 14.4 cm Smithsonian American Art Museum |
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| African Negro Sculpture, plate 9 gelatin silver print 24.5 x 19.5 cm Smithsonian American Art Museum |
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| African Negro Sculpture, plate 10 gelatin silver print 23.7 x 15.2 cm Smithsonian American Art Museum |
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| African Negro Sculpture, plate 11 gelatin silver print 21.9 x 16.8 cm Smithsonian American Art Museum |
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| African Negro Sculpture, plate 12 gelatin silver print 24.2 x 17.3 cm Smithsonian American Art Museum |
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| African Negro Sculpture, plate 13 gelatin silver print 21.6 x 13.7 cm Smithsonian American Art Museum |
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| African Negro Sculpture, plate 14 gelatin silver print 24.3 x 15.7 cm Smithsonian American Art Museum |
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| c1919 African Negro Sculpture, plate 15 gelatin silver print 23.9 x 15.7 cm Smithsonian American Art Museum |
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| c1919 African Negro Sculpture, plate 17 gelatin silver print 21.9 x 16.1 cm Smithsonian American Art Museum |
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| African Negro Sculpture gelatin silver print 23.7 x 12.3 cm Smithsonian American Art Museum |
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| African Negro Sculpture, plate 18 gelatin silver print 23.3 x 13.2 cm Smithsonian American Art Museum |
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| African Negro Sculpture, plate 19 gelatin silver print 23.5 x 11.2 cm Smithsonian American Art Museum |
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| African Negro Sculpture, plate 20 gelatin silver print 24.2 x 17 cm Smithsonian American Art Museum |
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