Charles Sheeler : modernism, precisionism and the borders of abstraction

219 Pages·2008·11.37 MB·English

by  Rawlinson

Charles Sheeler
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Charles Sheeler
Modernism, Precisionism and
the Borders of Abstraction
Mark Rawlinson
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Published in 2008 by I.B.Tauris & Co Ltd
6 Salem Road, London W2 4BU
175 Fifth Avenue, New York NY 10010
www.ibtauris.com
In the United States of America and Canada
distributed by Palgrave Macmillan, a division of St Martin’s Press
175 Fifth Avenue, New York NY 10010
Copyright © Mark Rawlinson 2008
The right of Mark Rawlinson to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted
by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patent Act 1988.
All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in a review, this book, or any part thereof,
may not be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in
any form or by any means, eletronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise,
without the proior written permission of the publisher.
ISBN 970 1 85043 901 1 (hb)
970 1 85043 902 8 (pb)
A full CIP record for this book is available from the British Library
A full CIP record is available from the Library of Congress
Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: available
Typeset by JCS Publishing Services Ltd, www.jcs-publishing.co.uk
Printed and bound in Great Britain by TJ International Ltd, Padstow, Cornwall
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Contents
List of Illustrations vii
Introduction 1
1 Musing on Primitiveness 8
2 A Photograph, a Drawing and a Painting: Sheeler’s New York
Series 44
3 The Disappearing Subject: Self-Portrait 77
4 Is it Still Life? Sheeler, Adorno and Dwelling 99
5 Between Commission and Autonomy: Sheeler’s River Rouge 128
6 Late Work/Late Style 164
Afterword 180
Notes 182
Index 207
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Illustrations
Black and White Figures
1 Side of White Barn, Bucks County 9
2 Barn Abstraction 10
3 Doylestown House: Stairwell 36
4 Doylestown House: Stairway with Chair 37
5 Doylestown House: Interior with Stove 40
6 New York, Park Row Building 46
7 New York 47
8 Dan Mask, Female Style, Ivory Coast 56
9 Frances Picabia, Here, This is Stieglitz Here (Ici, C’est ici Stieglitz) 82
10 Morton Schamberg, Mechanical Abstraction 84
11 Morton Schamberg, Telephone 85
12 African Musical Instrument 105
13 Still Life and Shadows 107
14 Cactus 108
15 Tulips and Etruscan Vase 115
16 Criss-Crossed Conveyors – Ford Plant 130
17 Ingot Molds, Open Hearth Building – Ford Plant 131
18 Ingot Molds, Open Hearth Building – Ford Plant detail 135
19 Upper Deck 149
20 Canal with Salvage Ship – Ford Plant 157
21 Rolling Power – Power-series 167
22 The Artist Looks at Nature 171
23 Ballardvale Mill, Close Up with Raking Shadows 174
24 Counterpoint 177
25 Ore into Iron 178
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viii Illustrations
Colour Plates appearing between pages 88 and 89
1 Flower Forms
2 Church Street El
3 Skyscrapers (formerly known as Offices)
4 Self-Portrait
5 View of New York
6 Interior
7 Home, Sweet Home
8 American Landscape
9 Classic Landscape
10 Ballardvale
11 New England Irrelevancies
12 Aerial Gyrations
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Introduction
The identification of familiar objects comprising a picture is too often taken
for an appreciation of the work itself and a welcome opportunity for a
cessation of investigation.
Charles Sheeler1
Charles Sheeler’s work has been lauded as exemplary and Precisionism,
the art historical category with which his work is synonymous,
occasionally accorded the distinction of being the first original modern
art movement in twentieth-century American art. Equally, Sheeler’s
precisionist art and Precisionism as a wider art historical movement have
been derided as derivative; a weak and stylised interpretation of Cubism,
bereft of the latter’s intellectual core, and too much in the sway of the
culture industry’s mythologising of American monopoly capitalism.
Situated somewhere between these oppositional accounts is yet another
Sheeler: avant-garde in his principles, yet resolute in the pursuit of a
form of realism over pure abstraction; unashamedly bewitched by the
technological advances of his age, yet fearful of their consequences; a
man with one eye on modern design and architecture, the other fixed
on traditional crafts and architecture, especially those of the Shaker
communities.
Consequently, what distinguishes the artist’s attitude towards
American modernity is neither criticism nor hyperbolic proselytising
but ambivalence. And this seems a fair assessment. Sheeler’s self-
commentary reveals an artist often conflicted, unable to resolve fully the
more incompatible aspects apparent between his intellectual position,
aesthetic sensibilities and working practices. On paper, the tensions
across Sheeler’s work and practice seem suggestive of a more complex
series of issues at work in the works themselves. And actually, when
one looks very closely at Sheeler’s work, it is exactly these tensions that,
I will argue throughout this book, reveal the works themselves as being
far from ambivalent. My emphasis in this volume, then, is not to offer
yet another critical biography of Sheeler but to focus much more on the
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