Word: sheeler
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...with his right arm paralyzed, Charles Sheeler is nearly beyond accolades. Like blueprints of a new aesthetic, his precision paintings were the reductio ad minutam of the machine age. He mixed the academicism of his teacher, William Merritt Chase, with the cubist masters, made a living as a photographer until his immaculate industrial visions caught on. He could refine the reality of a locomotive's monstrous driving wheels so that even when they are frozen in two dimensions, their tremendous momentum leaps...
...stroke stopped Sheeler's production in 1959. Some of his last works, now on view in Manhattan's Downtown Gallery, show that his precise touch never faltered. The 14 paintings are executed in tempera on small Plexiglas plates, something he often did before expanding them on large canvases. Some seem like multiple-photo exposures of oil refineries, lonely steelscapes gyrating in the sky. Others are pure scenery, where patchy foliage parts to let a background watercolor peep through the Plexiglas...
...Sheeler's fame in U.S. art history is already assured. Hard-edge and pop artists today acknowledge that they owe a clear debt to him. But he was "deeply moved by the response of the youngest generation," aged seven to twelve years, who have rated him No. 1 among such company as Cézanne, Franz Kline, Ben Shahn, Van Gogh and Robert Indiana. Some 300 children at U.C.L.A.'s University Elementary School preferred slides of Sheeler's work to those of any other artist. Their art teacher suggested last year that they write to the artist...
...countries that do not have a gallery of national art in their capital," says Mrs. Halpert. Her remedy is a magnificent mixture (see color pages) of Marin, Sheeler, Davis, Demuth, Jack Levine, Ben Shahn, William Zorach, Max Weber-all at one time shown in her gallery -and dozens more. Yet she refuses to let the Corcoran label her bequest as the Halpert Collection, because she hopes to persuade others to give works. "There are lots of gaps," says she. "You see, I've only bought the things I've loved." Her love has hardly gone astray...
Indiana's ancestors in hard-edge imagery are Charles Sheeler, Charles Demuth, and other U.S. precisionists; the lettering is akin to Stuart Davis. His waterfront studio overlooks the Brooklyn Bridge, and among his recent works are images that recall Joseph Stella's adoration of the bridge in paint. But Indiana circles them with poetry from Hart Crane, as he circles salvaged sailing-ship masts in his show with staccato words. Commanding, yes, but the weakness of his work is that the wordiness relates more to literature than painting, and the forms more to highly repetitive geometry than...