EXHIBIT REVIEW
Charles Sheeler: Across Media
At the Art Institute of Chicago
MARK B. POHLAD
Charles Sheeler: Across Media is an intriguing examination of how this important American artist explored the connections between painting, photography and film.1 The thrust of the exhibition is to demonstrate how
compelling art is often made in the interplay between varying pictorial
technologies. Sheeler (1883–1965) not only mastered several media—conté
crayon, the printed image, the paintbrush, and silver salts on a paper matrix
(the photograph)—he did so in order to represent American subjects, most
notably the industrial landscape, in a new stylistic language.
This exhibition is pioneering in the sense that it deals evenly with
Sheeler’s unique transmedia identity. The very first sentence of the wall text
and catalog asserts that he was “equally gifted as a painter and a photographer.” The show explores how photography played a critical role in Sheeler’s painting, his artworks demonstrating the complex relationship between the two media. This link, we are told, “is one of his most innovative
and important contributions to early-twentieth-century American art.”
The exhibition is organized around the major themes of his career: the city,
early American buildings and interiors, and images of factories. As most
people know, Sheeler was the major exponent of a style called Precisionism,
a uniquely American movement of the 1920s through the 1940s that celebrated the geometry, forms, and surfaces of industry.
The exhibition includes Sheeler’s most recognized works: paintings of
factories, such as Classic Landscape (1931), as well as his most famous phoMark Pohlad is associate professor of art history at DePaul University in Chicago, where
he teaches American and modern art. He frequently publishes on photohistory, and he
is on the editorial board of the journal History of Photography.
©2007 by the Society for the History of Technology. All rights reserved.
0040-165X/07/4802-0006$8.00
1. The exhibit opened at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., in May
2006. It traveled to the Art Institute of Chicago from October to January 2007, and it will
be at the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, de Young, from 10 February to 6 May
2007.
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tographic series, of Detroit’s River Rouge plant (1927), commissioned by
the Ford Motor Company. Paid to make flattering pictures, Sheeler’s photographs celebrate industry by their unflinching gaze and by their refusal to
represent machines as dirty, threatening, life-robbing capital. Visitors to
this exhibition see a re-created giant triptych version of a photographic
mural Sheeler had intended to submit to a mural exhibition. The result is
like a vast altarpiece to the American factory, a photographic version of a
WPA mural.
Sheeler’s art education was steeped in technological values. He attended
the Philadelphia School of Industrial Design from 1900 to 1903, where he
took courses in drafting. He underwent a more traditional fine arts education at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts (1903–06), that bastion
of pragmatic realism, where he studied under Thomas Eakins and Thomas
Anshutz. But Sheeler’s most conspicuous teacher at the PAFA was the suave
American Impressionist William Merritt Chase (1849–1916). Of more importance to him were trips to Europe (1908–09) with his close friend Morton Schamberg (1881–1918). They were enthralled by the geometry of early
Renaissance painting and by the geometries of contemporary painters such
as Cézanne and the Cubists Braque and Picasso.
This exhibition is filled with the presence of Sheeler’s intriguing friends
and associates. His early career was decisively impacted by the short-lived
Schamberg, who died in the flu pandemic of the teens. The two became
friends and traveling companions after art school, and Sheeler was influenced by Schamberg’s sophisticated machine paintings. Indeed, Schamberg
was a friend to many of the most intriguing artists of his time—even Dadaists such as Marcel Duchamp and the eccentric “baroness” Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven. With the baroness, Schamberg made the well-known,
definitive work of New York Dada, God (1917), a sculpture composed simply of a plumbing trap and a miter box.
While still in his twenties, Sheeler took up commercial photography to
help support himself as a painter. But he mastered the medium and even
found that he could express himself with the camera. He did so without
sacrificing what he (and Alfred Stieglitz, who encouraged him) saw as photography’s distinct ability, that is, to portray something objectively and
without apparent artistic intervention. Stieglitz’s support was crucial. The
older photographer and missionary of modernism was interested in producing a distinctly American modernism. A number of writers and intellectuals were also finding a vital new beauty in the American city, in billboards, skyscrapers, subways, and in factories. In progressive salons, such as
the one at the home of the collectors Walter and Louise Arensberg, Sheeler
met kindred souls like the future Precisionist Charles Demuth, the Futurist
Joseph Stella, and the Dadaists Marcel Duchamp and Francis Picabia. All
these artists were, like Sheeler, producing mechanical imagery for a range of
iconoclastic purposes.
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FIG. 1 Charles Sheeler, Interior with Stove (1932, National Gallery of Art,
Washington, D.C. Gift [Partial and Promised] of Aaron I. Fleischman, 2000.
Photo courtesy of the Art Institute of Chicago).
Sheeler was certainly not the first artist to use photography in the service of his paintings. The Philadelphia realist Thomas Eakins also relied on
photos to help him construct his pictures and to assist him in achieving a
degree of realism not seen before. And like Sheeler, Eakins was an accomplished camera artist in his own right. Of the same generation, the American
expatriate John Singer Sargent and the English realist Walter Sickert slyly
used photographs as part of their arsenal of painting tools.2 But no other
modern American painter was also a commercial photographer or used
photography so explicitly in the service of his art as Sheeler did.
Interior with Stove (fig. 1) is a conté crayon drawing based closely on a
photograph. Its resemblance to a photo is uncanny, and exhibition visitors
look closely to prove to themselves it is not. When Sheeler was working
2. For an intriguing examination of artists’ longstanding reliance on photography
and other pictorial technologies, see the painter David Hockney’s Secret Knowledge: Rediscovering the Lost Techniques of the Old Masters (New York, 2001).
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FIG. 2 Charles Sheeler, American Landscape (1930, Museum of Modern Art,
New York. Gift of Abby Aldrich Rockefeller, 1934. Photo courtesy of the
Art Institute of Chicago).
from a photograph, he often omitted tiny details—hinges, handles, tiny irregularities—and made edges crisper and surfaces cleaner. The same is true
of his “classic” Precisionist paintings, those Depression-era paeans to industry, pictures of factories such as American Landscape (fig. 2). But Sheeler’s reliance on photography was not only technical. For him it engendered
a different way of seeing entirely. As he once said, “Photography is nature
seen from the eyes outward, painting from the eyes inward.” 3 Even so, considering his carefully contrived art, one senses he would have liked to paint
even more like a camera. Photography has the automatic aspect of technology Sheeler admired, whereas painting involved a measure of the (handmade) industry he valued. About his Precisionist paintings of the 1920s,
Sheeler said that he wished to mask the painting method from the viewer’s
attention. Thus, one sees no reckless impasto in his pieces, no expressive
gestures, no hints of the soulful drips of American painting’s next generation. Instead, Sheeler’s art draws from centuries of academic tradition in
which covering one’s tracks, so to speak, is a traditional technique. How the
painting was made was not supposed to show in the realized work. Because
3. Constance Rourke, Charles Sheeler: Artist in the American Tradition (New York,
1938), 119.
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of this, Sheeler’s art seems aloof and at times inhuman. His technique dazzles, but one yearns to know more about the man behind the meticulous
craftsmanship.
The camera helped Sheeler see in more general terms, which in turn
enabled him to transform gritty industrial forms into clean, precise planes.
Photography also helped him reduce unnecessary detail in his paintings
and concentrate on a central, framed motif. In his reliance on and use of
photography in his paintings, Sheeler shows how a Renaissance pictorial
technology (oil on canvas) can be made engaging for the twentieth century.
In this he is the earliest of that group of contemporary artists whose art
incorporates the visual rhetoric of photography—Richard Estes, Chuck
Close, Warhol, Gerhardt Richter. He was truly a photorealist avant la lettre,
and in the most genuine way. One wonders what Sheeler would have made
of the digital imaging techniques of today. Would he have manipulated his
photos, then painted them? Less speculatively, one wonders what Sheeler
might have done with color photography had it been more accessible and
easier to use (it was beyond the reach of most amateurs even as late as the
1950s). In essence, many of Sheeler’s paintings might be regarded as “colorized” photographs.
Later in his career, in the 1940s, Sheeler aspired to paint another aspect
of photography. Intrigued by multiple-exposure photography, his paintings
began to show subjects from several different points of view simultaneously. This is at odds with the essential character of the photograph, that is,
to depict its subject from one point of view at one moment of time. But it
is consistent with motion photography and movie effects. To assist him in
painting overlapping planes, Sheeler actually made sketches on superimposed sheets of plastic and Plexiglas. Even in this, where one might have expected him to improvise, he arrived at a technique to assist him in the most
precise pictorial outcomes.
Sheeler also made forays into motion pictures, and the exhibition featured a continuously running film, a beautifully restored print of Manhatta
(1920), which Sheeler made with the photographer Paul Strand (1890–
1976). The title and captions of this seven-minute-long celebration of New
York City are taken from Walt Whitman’s poetry. A defining example of
what might be called the “urban sublime,” the film is composed of carefully
set up shots (what one would expect from classical still photographers)
filled with quirky camera angles, moving boats, elevated trains, and pedestrians. One particular overhead shot, of an elevated train shuttling between
buildings, provided the source for Sheeler’s painting Church Street El
(1920), which is displayed nearby. Altogether, this is the first large-scale
exhibition to display Sheeler’s paintings and photographs side-by-side to
make their transmedia connections explicit. But this was played down in
Sheeler’s own time. His dealer refrained from showing his photos because
it was thought they would weaken his reputation as a painter. As students
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of contemporary art know, since the 1960s painters have routinely used
photographs as sources.
An interesting anachronism, or so it seems, was Sheeler’s love of early
American buildings and furniture. But one must remember that it was his
generation in the 1920s and 1930s that first extensively collected and appreciated American antiques. In their quaint forms, they saw reflected the
sleek, geometric modernism of skyscrapers and industry. Sheeler embodied
such fascinating paradoxes. For instance, he was enthralled by the American city, that nexus of culture and technology, as many of his artworks
show. On the other hand, his subjects were often taken from a historic
agrarian world (often Bucks County, Pennsylvania). In the 1920s and
1930s, no one painted the loci of American production with such avid contemporaneity as Sheeler. Yet his art was made with centuries-old materials,
such as conté crayon, gouache, and paint on canvas.
The exhibition concludes with Sheeler’s large Self-Portrait (1923), in
which one sees the artist’s own partial reflection in a window in the background. The artist shows himself only from the bust up to his chin—he is
literally effaced—the most conspicuous form being a carefully rendered,
candlestick-style telephone. Inserting his own image in the picture—
Sheeler does so famously again in Chicago’s own The Artist Looks at Nature
(1943)—begs questions about how he saw the presence of the artist in relation to his art and what, if anything, he was trying to express through such
careful pictorial strategies. But the answers are not forthcoming; Sheeler
remains cool and reticent. One recognizes a similar tightlipped-Yankee
quality in the art of other seminal American realists like Winslow Homer,
Eakins, and Sheeler’s exact contemporary Edward Hopper (1882–1967).
Correspondingly, the hanging of the exhibition itself is spare and restrained, with plenty of space for Sheeler’s airless works to “breathe” and for
viewers to discover all manner of pictorial relationships between his camera-derived artworks and those constructed from his paint box. The exhibition catalog as well has a dry, clean, carefully composed layout. This is appropriate, since Sheeler’s art is a source for the design aesthetic of the
current Information Age, and the artist himself is a distant relative of computer-based designers who are adept at all manner of image production
and manipulation.
Charles Brock’s catalog is excellent in its writing, its historical context,
its organization, and in the quality and number of its reproductions.4 The
chapters appear to reflect Sheeler’s deepening involvement with photography. Indeed, as his career unfolded, his paintings were no longer mere transcriptions of photographs he had taken. Like the late works of the Impressionist painter Claude Monet, Sheeler kept challenging his ability to
transcribe (photographed) light effects. Thus, after a general opening chap4. Charles Brock, Charles Sheeler: Across Media (Washington, D.C., 2006).
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ter on Sheeler’s cross-media interests, chapters on photography and film
are followed by the factory images of Sheeler’s commercial photography.
The last two chapters, “Mixing Media” and “Photomontage,” explore the intricate pictorial and technological challenges the artist posed for himself. A
useful chronology and an appendix devoted to Sheeler’s commercial photography for magazines such as Vogue and Vanity Fair complete the volume. His elegant photographs of fashion models demonstrate that Sheeler
was a worldly, pragmatic artist, one who sought work where he could find
it. Between 1942 and 1945 Sheeler worked as a photographer for the Museum of Modern Art in New York, taking pictures of the artworks in its collection. Finally, it may surprise some to learn of his work as an industrial
designer. In this capacity, Sheeler designed fabric, glassware, and tableware
in the mid-thirties, all of which reveal his characteristic interest in precise,
geometric pattern.
In the end, one is left with the impression that Sheeler’s entire project
was to explore the conceptual seams between paint and silver emulsion, between the eye and the camera lens, between the hand and the machine.
These interests in picture-making reflected the profound changes America
was undergoing in the first decades of the twentieth century, as it moved
from the late industrial age into a culture of technology.
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