Charles Sheeler
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THE AMERICAN WAY of seeing rather than the American scene is Charles Sheeler's contribution. Faith in things, in industry and invention, has cleared away the irrelevance of atmosphere. Intent on abstract order, he finds it in the work of man's hands. He carries the industrial scene back to the clarity of the blueprint, the utensil back to the bench. In the end he has painted a sort of pragmatic faith in private effort: what the American really means by the word capitalism.
He was born in Philadelphia in 1883; studied at the School of Industrial Art, then at the Pennsylvania Academy under William Chase. He saw Europe in Chase's entourage, took a number of years to free himself from Chase's bravura brushwork and the onetime attack. A further trip to Europe in 1909 proved a voyage of discovery. Italy disclosed a new world of form in Giotto and Piero della Francesca: in Paris Sheeler opened his eyes to Cézanne. Renoir, and above all to the early cubism of Picasso. He came home with a new conception of paint.
He took up photography for self-support and developed it into an art which complemented his painting, a front rank accomplishment in itself. He became a photographer for architects. Weekends, in Doylestown, he experimented with cubism and his painting reflected an architectural bent. He found subject matter in the sober early buildings of the region.
He exhibited in the Armory Show, and in the first Independents. when he met the Walter Arensbergs, who introduced him into an advanced experimental group in New York. There he worked with Edward Steichen on Vogue.
A commission to photograph the Ford plant at River Rouge turned Sheeler to the industrial scene. A few years of crystallization were needed before it emerged in paint. Upper Deck set a pattern in 1929; in the early thirties Classic Landscape recalled Detroit. In industry and invention, the painter saw an abstraction built of the forces of nature. He saw integrity invested in our constructions. This was what America meant.
His paintings of the early American scene, begun in Doylestown, have continued to parallel the transcriptions of industry. But Sheeler was not painting for the record. He was responding to the same thing which he saw in Detroit--integrity, function; and when he paints Americana, Shaker Buildings, Kitchen, Williamsburg, it is the integrity he gives us, behind the artifacts, utensils and houses. These things look as they do because they too were seriously meant.
The 1940's saw a change. Color was now for intensity instead of for clarification. Forms took on a complex life of their own, overlaying each other, composing in a sort of counterpoint.
Sheeler: I can't go out and find something to paint. Something keeps recurring in memory with an insistence increasingly vivid and with attributes added which escape observation on first acquaintance. Gradually a mental image is built up which takes on a personal identity. The picture takes on a mental existence that is complete within the limits of my capacities, before the actual work of putting it down begins. Since the value of the mental picture can be determined only by the degree of response it arouses in other persons it must be re-stated in physical terms--hence the painting.
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