Word: sheeler
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Even if we admit that the 20th century was not a great era for religious art, that doesn't mean it was not an age of faith among American artists. For most of his career, Charles Sheeler (1883-1965) was in the grip of two consuming devotions--the cult of modernism and the religion of the Industrial Age. It was his great intuition to bring the two together in paintings and photographs of what you might call exalted exactitude. Sheeler called it Precisionism. It was a taut, hard-edged and sanitary style that bound art and industry into hymns...
...Sheeler was trained as a painter at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts--and throughout his life that is what he chiefly considered himself to be. For the most part, art history tends to treat him the same way. The show of Sheeler's photography that runs at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, through Feb. 2, then moves to New York City, Frankfurt and Detroit, is the first major museum exhibition devoted entirely to his work with a camera. Organized by Theodore E. Stebbins Jr. and Gilles Mora, it's an enjoyable reminder that Sheeler...
Maybe it helped that Sheeler took up photography nonchalantly around 1910, when he was 27 and simply looking for a way to earn extra money by making documentary and commercial photographs of grand suburban houses. But it didn't take him long to see the larger possibilities of this new toy. During a trip to Europe a few years before, he was converted to the work of Picasso and Braque. (He was soon well enough established as a painter that six of his canvases were included in the Armory Show of 1913, which brought the work of the European avant...
...from Below, in which the underside of a cellar stairway forms a hard-edged, spiraling abstraction, he was drawing connections between the most radical modernism and old traditions of American art and life. What his picture hints is that the 20th century had a backstairs connection to the 19th. Sheeler suspected, and he was right, that a Pennsylvania farmhouse drew upon the same instinct for clarity and simplicity as a Cezanne, that modernism was not a break with the past but an excavation of its underlying structures...
...1920s, Sheeler had begun to think of the industrial landscape, even at its most unromantic--sheds and conveyor belts, assembly lines and smokestacks--as a place as beautiful as any farm country. It was a materialist faith with a long American pedigree, one that had found its way into the plainspoken art of Winslow Homer and Thomas Eakins in the 19th century. Its essence was summed up for the 20th in the dictum of the poet William Carlos Williams, who was an acquaintance of Sheeler's and once sat for his camera: "No ideas but in things...