Charles Sheeler

Charles Sheeler (July 16, 1883 – May 7, 1965) was an American painter and commercial photographer. He is recognized 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 Merritt 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 realized 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. 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.

On April 2, 1939, Sheeler married Musya Metas Sokolova his second wife, six years after the deathin 1933 of first wife Katharine Baird Shaffer (married April 7, 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 emphasized the linear precision he employed in his depictions. As in his photographic works, his subjects were generally material things such as machinery and structures. He was hired by the Ford Motor Co. to photograph and make paintings of their factories.

Films created by Charles Sheeler

• 1921 Manhatta (with Paul Strand)]

Photographic works

• 1917 Doylestown House: Stairs from Below (Metropolitan Museum of Art)
• 1927 Criss-Crossed Conveyors, River Rouge Plant, Ford Motor Company (Metropolitan Museum of Art)
• 1928 Images from Vogue and Vanity Fair

Early works

• Church Street El (1920) –
• Still Life (1925) –
• Lady of the Sixties (1925) –
• Upper Deck (1928–1929) –
• American Landscape (1930) –
• Americana (1931) –
• Classic Landscape (1931) –
• View of New York (1931) –
• Interior with Stove (1932) –
• River Rouge Plant (1933) –
• American Interior (1934) –
• Ephrata (1934) –
• City Interior (1936) –

Power series

In 1940, Fortune Magazine published a series of six paintings commissioned of Sheeler. To prepare for the series, Sheeler spent a year traveling and taking photographs. Fortune editors aimed to “reflect life through forms … [that] trace the firm pattern of the human mind,” and Sheeler chose six subjects to fulfill this theme: a water wheel (Primitive Power), a steam turbine (Steam Turbine), the railroad (Rolling Power), a hydroelectric turbine (Suspended Power), an airplane (Yankee Clipper) and a dam (Conversation: Sky and Earth) .

• Conversation: Sky and Earth (1939) –
• Primitive Power (1939) –
• Rolling Power (1939) –
• Steam Turbine (1939) –
• Suspended Power (1939) –
• Yankee Clipper (1939) –

Later works

• Interior (1940) –
• Fugue (1940) –
• Bucks County Barn (1940) –
• The Artist Looks at Nature (1943) –
• Water (1945) –
• Incantation (1946) –
• Amoskeag Canal (1948) –
• Windows (1952) –
• Conversation Piece (1952) –
• Aerial Gyrations (1953) –
• New England Irrelevancies (1953) –
• Ore Into Iron (1953) –
• Stacks in Celebration (1954) –
• Architectural Cadences Number 4 (1954) –
• Lunenburg (1954) –
• Midwest (1954) –
• Golden Gate (1955) –
• Western Industrial (1955) –
• The Web (1955) –
• On a Shaker Theme (1956) –
• Red Against White (1957) –
• Composition Around White (1959) –

• "Charles Sheeler: Paintings, Drawings, Photographs" – Museum of Modern Art, New York, October 4 – November 1, 1939.
• "Paintings by Charles Sheeler" – Dayton Art Institute, Dayton, Ohio, November 2 – December 2, 1944.
• "Charles Sheeler: A Retrospective Exhibition" – Art Galleries, University of California at Los Angeles, October 11 – November 7, 1954. Toured November 18 – June 15, 1955 at the M. H. de Young Memorial Museum, San Francisco; Fine Arts Gallery of San Diego; and Fort Worth Art Center, Fort Worth, Texas; Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia; Munson-Williams Proctor Institute, Utica, New York.
• "Charles Sheeler Retrospective Exhibition" – Allentown Art Museum, Allentown, Pennsylvania, November 17 – December 31, 1961.
• "Charles Sheeler Retrospective Exhibition" - March 17 – April 14, 1963 - State University of Iowa, Department of Art.
• "Charles Sheeler" – National Collection of Fine Arts, Washington, DC, October 10 – November 24, 1968. Toured January 10 – April 27, 1969 at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York.
• "Charles Sheeler: Across Media" – National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC, May 7 – August 27, 2006. Toured at the Art Institute of Chicago, October 7, 2006 – January 7, 2007; and the M. H. de Young Memorial Museum, February 10 – May 6, 2007. 50 works included, including paintings, photographs, works on paper, and a film.
• "The Photography of Charles Sheeler" – Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Toured at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, June 3 – August 17, 2003; the Detroit Institute of Arts; and the Georgia O'Keeffe Museum. Nearly 100 works, including 90 photographs.
• "Charles Sheeler: Fashion, Photography, and Sculptural Form", Curated by Kirsten M. Jensen, Ph.D., Gerry & Marguerite Lenfest, Chief Curator, James A. Michener Art Museum, March 18-July 9, 2017.

• 1958 - Oral history interview with Charles Sheeler, 1958 Dec. 9, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution
• 1959 -Oral history interview with Charles Sheeler, 1959 June 18, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution