Charles Sheeler

Painter and photographer Charles Sheeler pioneered the distinctly American modernist style known as precisionism, a starkly exact manner inspired by the stripped-down utilitarian aesthetic of the modern environment. After three years of training at the School of Industrial Art in his native Philadelphia, Sheeler studied at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts under the important painter and teacher William Merritt Chase, from whom he absorbed the rich paint surface, bright color, and genteel modern subjects of impressionism. Between 1908 and 1909 Sheeler visited Paris, where he encountered the work of radical modernist artists whose struggle to express essential truth and structure in their art resonated with his training in unornamented functional design. Sheeler’s art was transformed by cubism, the portrayal of the forms of everyday objects as series of their component planes and angles.

After his return to America, to supplement his income, Sheeler took up architectural photography. The medium’s mechanical qualities inspired the further evolution of his coolly analytical art, which ranged throughout the remainder of his career from a stripped-down, hard-edged realism to a precisionist cubism with varying degrees of abstraction. Sheeler’s modernism was partly inspired by the uncluttered functionality of traditional and vernacular design. Between 1910 and 1926, he worked on weekends in a small eighteenth-century house in Doylestown, Pennsylvania, which he furnished with the spare work of local artisans. The house’s interior, along with nearby barns, became an important source for Sheeler’s paintings, drawings, and prints as well as his photographs, which served as aids to paintings and as artworks in their own right.

In 1919, Sheeler opened a studio in New York City. He became a member of several circles of artists, dealers, and collectors who sympathized with modernist currents, and his work was widely shown. In the 1920s he produced some of his most haunting and ironic still life and interior images. He also began to portray New York’s towering skyscrapers. In 1920, Sheeler and photographer Paul Strand (1890–1976) produced the short film Manhatta, a celebration of the city that is considered the first modernist motion picture. Closely connected with his painting, photography continued to be an important aesthetic medium for Sheeler as well as a means of support. His photographic documentation of the Ford Motor Company’s new plant in River Rouge, Michigan, in 1926, for example, became the basis of several important paintings of industrial architecture and machinery.

Sheeler’s status as a pioneering American modernist was acknowledged relatively early in his career: in 1938 he was the subject of a full-length biography, and the following year the Museum of Modern Art in New York staged a large-scale retrospective of his work. Through the correspondence between his precisionist style and the purely functional forms of his subjects, Sheeler revealed the essential unity between American traditional design and the industrial and urban environments that defined American modernity.