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
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25
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Side of White Barn, Bucks County
9
Barn Abstraction
10
Doylestown House: Stairwell
36
Doylestown House: Stairway with Chair
37
Doylestown House: Interior with Stove
40
New York, Park Row Building
46
New York
47
Dan Mask, Female Style, Ivory Coast
56
Frances Picabia, Here, This is Stieglitz Here (Ici, C’est ici Stieglitz) 82
Morton Schamberg, Mechanical Abstraction
84
Morton Schamberg, Telephone
85
African Musical Instrument
105
Still Life and Shadows
107
Cactus
108
Tulips and Etruscan Vase
115
Criss-Crossed Conveyors – Ford Plant
130
Ingot Molds, Open Hearth Building – Ford Plant
131
Ingot Molds, Open Hearth Building – Ford Plant detail
135
Upper Deck
149
Canal with Salvage Ship – Ford Plant
157
Rolling Power – Power-series
167
The Artist Looks at Nature
171
Ballardvale Mill, Close Up with Raking Shadows
174
Counterpoint
177
Ore into Iron
178
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viii
Illustrations
Colour Plates appearing between pages 88 and 89
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
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Flower Forms
Church Street El
Skyscrapers (formerly known as Offices)
Self-Portrait
View of New York
Interior
Home, Sweet Home
American Landscape
Classic Landscape
Ballardvale
New England Irrelevancies
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 selfcommentary 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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Charles Sheeler
works themselves in order to move beyond an ‘appreciation’ of the work
and towards further investigation.
The majority of Sheeler criticism shares one thing: the emphasis on
contextualising the artist’s career in terms of his engagement with
industrial subject matter or, more obviously, the machine age. Sheeler’s
career highpoint is conceived to be around 1931, the period in which
he produced those works most readily associated with the artist, and
the works that have come to define an American appreciation of the
industrial landscape; namely, Classic Landscape and American Landscape.
These paintings in particular have become one-stop illustrations of the
so-called machine-age aesthetic, a style and approach that tends also to
be referred to as Precisionism. And though Precisionism is characterised
most ably by works such as American Landscape, similar characteristics
can be found in the work of other artists from the period, including
Charles Demuth, Georgia O’Keeffe, Elsie Driggs, Ralston Crawford and
even Joseph Stella, to name a few. None of these artists ever considered
themselves as part of a group, so the longevity of Precisionism as a
means to link these artists through an interest in a specific type of content
– industrial subject matter – and a shared style of artistic form, which
Karen Tsujimoto calls ‘reasoned abstraction’, is interesting.2
The initial association between precision and Sheeler’s work came
about simply because his work was visually precise in comparison to the
‘still popular works of Lawson, Chase, Redfield, or Warner’.3 From the
1920s onwards, the relationship between precision and Sheeler’s style
was cemented almost inevitably as links between his practice – painting
from photographs – and his subject matter – skyscrapers/factories/
machines – determined. The similarities between Sheeler’s technique
and his subject matter not only compounded the image of the artist’s
work as precisionist but became the blueprint for Precisionism: Sheeler’s
industrial works become archetypal. Clearly, there are reasons for such a
sustained conflation of an artist’s practice with a cultural period like the
machine age, the most obvious being that modern artists are expected to
be engaged with the most pressing issues of their day: in this case, the
impact of technology and the machine on American culture.
For Milton Brown, the predominance of industrial and mechanical
forms in America meant it was a logical and natural home for the artist
alive to ‘the material results of this development visible on all sides and
integral to normal existence’.4 Similarly vocal were European emigrés
Marcel Duchamp and Francis Picabia who, on their arrival in America
during the early part of the twentieth century, confirmed Brown’s
observation. ‘Since machinery is the soul of the modern world and since
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Introduction
the genius of machinery attains its highest expression in America,’ Picabia
argued, ‘why is it not reasonable to believe that in America the art of the
future will flower most brilliantly’. The 1939 retrospective of Sheeler’s
work at the Museum of Modern Art was in recognition of Sheeler’s
‘unique contribution to American art’, particularly his ‘industrial scenes
which were felt by many to be the complete summations of American
environment and sensibility’.5 Simply put, Sheeler was at the forefront of
this future when he found his major subject in the industrial landscape
of America.
How true is this? Is Sheeler’s major subject the industrial landscape
of America? Is his work the archetype of Precisionism? These questions
might seem rather obvious but they are seldom articulated, let alone
answered in relation to Sheeler. This is because criticism of the artist
and his work often satisfies itself with addressing only the most obvious
aspects of the work, rarely questioning the core principles on which most
critical accounts are set. Analysis begins with an assumption that Sheeler
is solely an artist of the machine age and that his work and career can
only be interpreted from the perspective of a machine-age aesthetic.
This book challenges these first principles for several reasons. The
diversity of Sheeler’s work and practice extends far beyond that which
a machine aesthetic can account for. And whilst Sheeler’s work is often
identifiably precisionist in terms of both subject matter – architectural,
machinic and/or industrial – and form – the emphasis on design and
geometric precision – these works seem also to resist their categorisation.
The paintings, drawings and photographs that Sheeler made of those most
modern entities like New York skyscrapers or of Henry Ford’s River Rouge
Plant might share the clean, precise and angular representation of their
subject matter, but his style enables the inclusion of objects definitively
not modern. These include the architecture of Pennsylvania barns, the
Doylestown House and also pre-modern subject matter like Etruscan vases
and the traditional crafts of the Shakers. The most significant aspect of
this book’s analysis, though, is the focus upon the imprecision and formal
dissonance in so many of his works.
From Constance Rourke to Wanda Corn, attention has been drawn to
anomalies in Sheeler’s work; Sheeler’s windows are rarely transparent
and shadows exist in impossible formations. In the past, these have
been viewed as cryptic elements, something akin to visual puzzles,
but little more. I argue that these anomalies, whether imperfections in
representation or quite drastic alterations to the properties of objects
like glass, are significant and crucial for the re-imagining of Sheeler’s
aesthetic and his work. This re-imagining will draw on the aesthetic
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Charles Sheeler
theory of Theodor Adorno, a philosopher who insists that inconsistency,
error and failure in a work – dissonance – should draw closer attention
rather than encourage its glossing over.
In this way, the book’s critical framework is mainly drawn from
the aesthetic theory of Theodor Adorno. The reasons for this are
straightforward, unlike Adorno’s writings themselves. From the outset
it was clear to me that Adorno’s writings on aesthetics and modern
art resonate with Sheeler’s work. Most obviously there are Adorno’s
criticisms of the culture industry and Fordist/Taylorist doctrine explored
in Dialectic of Enlightenment, co-authored with Max Horkheimer; these
are impossible to ignore in respect of an artist commissioned by the Ford
Motor Company to photograph the River Rouge. If this was not concern
enough, then Sheeler’s later paintings of the Rouge, shown as a gleaming
industrial landscape, evoking an impossible serenity and produced at
the height of the Depression, are highly problematic.
Adorno’s writings offer the chance to re-imagine Sheeler’s work
because of his emphasis on the artwork and its modes of production
rather than on biographical interpretation or as seeing artworks as a
means to psychoanalyse their makers. Adorno’s rigorous analysis of the
role of the artwork in society and the capacity of art to critique industrial
society, mostly written after his own experience of exile in America, are
extremely relevant for an analysis of Sheeler. Central to this study is
the attention Adorno pays to the role and means of artistic production,
especially his re-evaluation of Walter Benjamin’s concept of mimesis.
Adorno’s focus in his aesthetic theory on the production of the artwork
rather than on the artist provides a more systematic and theoretical
interpretation of Sheeler’s work and its relationship to American
modernity. This approach is useful for several reasons. It avoids drawing
conclusions based on the artist’s self-commentary, although many are
extremely insightful, and places the emphasis on examining what factors
shape the construction of the particular artwork.
This book argues that the more formal aspects of Sheeler’s constructive
technique are loaded with references to the process of rationalisation,
the working principle powering all spheres of American modernity,
including mass-production and architecture. Crucially, Sheeler’s work
is not a simple replication of the techniques of rationality transferred
into art but a form of critique that reveals the contradictions inherent
in the processes of rationalisation. From the collapse of geometry in his
depictions of buildings or the denial in scale of the production process
at the River Rouge, Sheeler’s work takes a dissenting line, both literally
and metaphorically. In simple terms, the forms and content of Sheeler’s
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Introduction
work are not governed by a geometrically precise technique as is often
believed; on the contrary, many works are riddled with imperfections
and moments of imprecision that not only question Precisionism as a
category but suggest a more negative rather than ambivalent encounter
with American modernity. Adorno’s aesthetic theory allows connections
to be made between the artwork and its relationship to these ongoing
processes in American society, and Sheeler’s artworks’ immanent
critique of them through the dissenting line has been unacknowledged
or insufficiently developed in previous critiques.
On saying this, one of this book’s aims is to re-evaluate Adorno’s
aesthetic theory, particularly its emphasis on the autonomous artwork.
Sheeler’s work for the culture industry and that related to it are not
autonomous in the Adornian sense and might well be judged as incapable
of critique. This is because Sheeler highlights how Adorno is wrong
about the non-critical nature of art of the culture industry. Instead, the
example of Sheeler merely goes to prove that Adorno’s concentration
on the larger processes of the culture industry, rather than individual
instances of cultural production, excludes work such as Sheeler’s; work
that is critical according to Adorno’s own aesthetic theory. Sheeler’s
work, therefore, opens one of the more rigid aspects of Adorno’s aesthetic
theory to scrutiny and revision.
Chapter One, ‘Musing on Primitiveness’, outlines the development and
cultural context of Sheeler’s early work and introduces a key theme,
namely the problematic status of home. Sheeler’s early period is to a
large degree beset by a series of challenges, which include the process of
redefinition as a modern artist. As part of this process, Sheeler begins a
lifelong engagement with photography and finding a subject for his art;
this chapter follows the artist’s break with his education under William
Merritt Chase in pursuit of not only a new subject but also a new way of
making work. The early period, dominated by imagery of Pennsylvania
barns and the Doylestown House, can be defined by Sheeler’s concerted
effort to achieve both, drawing on Cézanne, cubism and photography. I
argue that this shift in aesthetic sensibilities produces a series of works
linked by their engagement with primitive forms, and that these forms
are Sheeler’s first philosophical reflection on dwelling.
Chapter Two, ‘A Photograph, a Drawing and a Painting: Sheeler’s
New York Series’ explores the continuing importance of photography
in Sheeler’s work. Through the close examination of three works,
a photograph, a drawing and a painting of the same scene – the rear
of the Park Row Building, Manhattan – the idea of Sheeler’s work as
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Charles Sheeler
precisionist is examined. All three images reveal a flattening of space
and reveal a stripping of extraneous detail through the process of
abstraction, a technique that earned Sheeler a reputation as an artist
who employed the language of the architect and engineer. But Sheeler’s
painting and drawing are riddled with imprecision. Here Adorno’s
critique of rationalisation and the principles of modernity, epitomised
by functionalism, show how the artwork is able to adopt the language of
rationalisation whilst remaining critical of it.
In Chapter Three, ‘The Disappearing Subject: Self-Portrait and View of
New York’, I advance the critique of Sheeler’s work through the exploration
of two images: Self-Portrait (1923) and View of New York (1931). The
chapter introduces two important Adornian concepts: the constellation
and mimesis. Both these concepts help clarify how the artwork is both
constructed and experienced. Adorno’s theory of mimesis explains how
the modernist constructed artwork production and aesthetic experience.
The chapter studies closely the dialectical relationships in the works
between photography and painting, realism and abstraction and subject
and object that emerge from Sheeler’s photographic vision, and the
surrendering of the self to the work.
Chapter Four, ‘Is it Still Life? Sheeler, Adorno and Dwelling’, considers
the inadequacy of machine-age readings of Sheeler’s still life works.
Through a materialist critique of the genre of still life, I argue that Sheeler’s
work engages with the modernist philosophical preoccupation with
dwelling and the inability to dwell under the conditions of modernity.
Throughout the 1920s, Sheeler’s still life work extends its focus beyond
the tabletop and into the interior of the artist’s home. Sheeler engaged
with a radical revision of the genre through formal experimentation. Their
construction and imprecision complicate the ‘naturalistic’ appearance of
the interior images through the sustained experimentation with form
and perspective that alludes to a harmonious whole, which is on closer
examination an illusion.
Chapter Five, ‘Between Commission and Autonomy: Sheeler’s
River Rouge’, discusses the impact on Sheeler’s aesthetic of the Ford
Motor Company commission to photograph the River Rouge Plant.
Despite being produced in the pay of Ford, I argue that both Sheeler’s
commissioned images and the later paintings of the Rouge are not,
as Karen Lucic suggests, ambivalent in their response towards their
industrial subject matter but extremely negative and critical of Fordist
rationality. Reading Adorno’s theory of the culture industry against the
grain helps disrupt the exclusive concept of the autonomous artwork,
the only truly critical artwork, to reveal the capacity for Sheeler’s work to
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Introduction
retain their negatively critical aspect. Close readings of the breakthrough
work, Upper Deck (1929), and the Rouge-inspired American Landscape
(1930), indicate a level of complexity in the works’ aesthetic beyond
an uncritical or ambivalent representation of a technological utopia.
I conclude that Sheeler’s work is far from a glorification of American
industrial might or an ambivalent response to American modernity but a
genuine critique of the rationalisation of culture and society.
The final chapter, ‘Late Work/Late Style’, argues for a re-evaluation
of Sheeler’s work of the 1940s and 1950s. Criticism of Sheeler’s late
period rarely asks difficult questions of works which appear rather staid
repetitions of themes and subject matter drawn from earlier works. Recent
criticism has, it seems, respectfully disengaged from a more thorough
appraisal in order to preserve the reputation of an important artist of the
machine age. In this chapter, I argue that the lack of consistency evident
in the late works is not necessarily a problem with the artist’s work but
rather with the critical expectation. Drawing on Adorno’s work on late
Beethoven, this chapter shows that there is much more to Sheeler’s late
period than has previously been imagined, but such an understanding
requires a significant shift in critical perspective and expectation.
In all chapters it is evident that Sheeler’s work is a refined realism
that operates at the borderline of abstraction; drawing on photographic
realism and cubist abstraction, the tensions inherent in Sheeler’s
practice collide to produce works that present an outward appearance
of harmony, of precision, but, in the interplay of form and content, the
imprecise qualities of Sheeler’s images reveal something disturbing and
odd. In the end, Sheeler’s work resists its categorisation and reveals itself
to be the undoing of Precisionism.
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Chapter One
Musing on Primitiveness
Introduction
Forming Charles Sheeler’s earliest identifiable aesthetic style are the
photographs, drawings and paintings of the Doylestown House and Bucks
County barns he produced from c.1915. These works appear towards the
end of the artist’s early period; one that begins with his graduation from
the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts in 1906, followed by a period of
re-education, artistic appropriation, and culminating with arguably his
most abstract work, Flower Forms (1917) [Plate 1]. The level of abstraction
evident in Flower Forms marks the work out as an anomaly in Sheeler’s
oeuvre. However, tracing the development of Sheeler’s aesthetic from its
beginnings, through works such as Side of White Barn (1917) [Figure 1]
and Barn Abstraction (1917) [Figure 2], to the more abstract Flower Forms
reveals the opposite. As an expression of primitive form, or ur-formen
form, Flower Forms is an extension of rather than a diversion from the
aesthetic Sheeler developed through his Doylestown House and Bucks
County barn works.1 Because of the status of Flower Forms, emphasis
in the past has dispensed with the need to situate the work in a critical
framework, evading the necessity of addressing issues that arise when
one considers its similarity to previous work. As an integral part of
Sheeler’s aesthetic development, one has to ask why the artist withdrew
and retreated from the seemingly inevitable pursuit of pure abstraction.
Sheeler’s aesthetic is made up of a combustible mix of primary and
secondary elements; one might say that both the foundations and building
blocks of his aesthetic are contradictory and, sometimes, counter-intuitive.
For example, his works are more than suggestive of an avant-gardist
frame of mind – exploring and experimenting in abstraction across media
– and yet they appear resolutely traditional, drawing on a recognisable
‘real’ world, one rooted in the vernacular and the commonplace. The
point is that beyond, say, a simple dialectical tension at work between
painting and photography in Sheeler’s aesthetic, or between European
modernist theory and American realism, there are several other tensions
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Musing on Primitiveness
actively playing out in the artist’s early work. For one, the defining of
one’s self as a ‘modern’ artist in America at the beginning of the twentieth
century was highly problematic, a problem compounded by the artist’s
interest in the relatively new field of artistic photography. Moreover,
Sheeler’s modernism is complicated by his active engagement with
decidedly non-modernist interests and practices, the most obvious being
his studies of the vernacular architecture of Bucks County, Pennsylvania.
In essence, Sheeler’s aesthetic is structured around and built on conflict;
this chapter argues that what gives Sheeler’s work its dynamism are a
1. Charles Sheeler, Side of White Barn, Bucks County (negative date 1917)
Photograph, gelatin silver print
Sheet: 20.3 x 25.4 cm (8 x 10 in.)
Mount: 50.8 x 38.1 cm (20 x 15 in.)
© The Lane Collection
Courtesy, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
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10
Charles Sheeler
2. Charles Sheeler, Barn Abstraction (1917)
Fabricated black chalk on Japanese paper
36.3 x 49.5 cm (14 1⁄8 x 19 1⁄2 in.)
Philadelphia Museum of Art: The Louise and Walter Arensberg
Collection
series of dialectical tensions, the syntheses of which, and this is crucial,
rarely if ever find resolution in harmonious synthesis.
This chapter discusses Sheeler’s concentration on so-called primitive
forms, the ways in which he ‘discovered’ and then re-presented them, and
how we should re-imagine the significance of primitive form in Sheeler’s
early work. The aim is to read Sheeler against the grain and argue that
there exists a dimension to Sheeler’s work long unacknowledged in
criticism.
Appropriation
Influence is a rather vague term to describe the kind of debt one artist owes
another. It can be a case either of straightforward appropriation, which is
something every young artist does, even has to do, in one way or another, to
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Musing on Primitiveness
11
get started at all; or a two-sided relationship in the sense that you recognise
in another artist something that you have long been searching for without
being able to identify or articulate the need. The discovery may relate to
only one aspect of the other artist’s work, but it will be central to you.
Bridget Riley2
As Benjamin Buchloh notes, ‘all cultural practice appropriates alien or
exotic, peripheral or obsolete elements of discourse into its changing
idioms’.3 Sheeler’s own early aesthetic appropriations are numerous, but
before discussing these specifically, the importance of the appropriation
of Sheeler’s work itself requires several lines. The proselytisers of
early American modernism, William Carlos Williams and Constance
Rourke, are crucial figures in the identification and articulation of
an American type of modernism. Their influential criticism of both
American modernism and the work of Sheeler was invaluable in creating
a blueprint for an understanding of the artist – as well as the historical
period of early American modernism – one that continues to influence
the reception of his work.
Buchloh defines this exact mode of appropriation as ‘motivated by
a desire to establish continuity and tradition and a fiction of identity’,4
which in part explains why early American modern artists like Sheeler
relied upon figures like Rourke and Williams to explain and justify their
modern art. Between Rourke’s biography of Sheeler published in 1938
and Williams’ various contributions to exhibition catalogues, Sheeler’s
identity as an American modern artist is born and his work situated within
an American artistic tradition. But the birth of the American modern
artist had its complications, as Rourke and Williams’ texts reveal.
Perhaps the greatest obstacle facing both artists and critics was striking
a balance between the theories of modern art coming out of Europe at
the turn of the twentieth century and a desire to make an identifiable
and specific American modern art. As Arthur Wertheim explains, those
artists in New York who saw themselves as moderns, ‘rebelled against
the past century’s genteel artistic standards and wanted to replace the
older culture with a new indigenous American art and literature more
representative of their generation’.5 Modern artists sought to reject the
so-called genteel tradition promulgated by the American academies.
A major hurdle was the trenchant position of the academies, which
remained impervious to the radical changes taking place in European
art. The most influential of the academies, the New York-based National
Academy of Design, founded in 1825, stuck to its belief in a strict classical
education of life drawing and anatomy classes for its students, placing ‘a
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12
Charles Sheeler
premium on the imitation of nature’.6 For the academies, art was meant
to ‘express permanence and continuity – embody divine moral truth and
abstract spiritual values’, and to offer a ‘certitude that seemed lacking in
a world that was undergoing extensive economic expansion and social
change’.7 For the newly formed American moderns, such an attitude was
akin to barbarism, and they argued art should above all represent the
contemporary world of uncertainty and chaos.
However, the chaotic nature of the contemporary world brought about
by America’s transition from the production economy of the nineteenth
century to the new consumer economy of the twentieth was yet another
concern for American moderns. For Lewis Mumford, this new economy
affected every aspect of society and culture, making the individual
‘dependent on the market for the satisfaction of his needs, on advertising
and mass culture for instruction in the art of living, and on manufactured
images for the illusion of reality’. The overall cost was the ‘atrophy of
competence, the invasion of everyday life by expertise, and the growth
of the universal market that assimilates everything – even art and love
– into the apparatus of commodity production’.8 However, Mumford’s
criticisms of modernity are not necessarily a straightforward rejection of
modernity itself. Rather, Mumford saw a perversion of the principles of
modernity, principles lost amongst the rationalised ethos of the pursuit
of profit. The core of the problem was the ways in which Henry Ford’s
system of mass production (Fordism) and F.W. Taylor’s ‘Scientific
Management’ (Taylorism) had inverted the potential of rationalisation
toward profit and away from social equality. The problem facing
Mumford and Bourne et al. was the fact that the rationalised order of
Fordism and Taylorism had strong allies amongst those in power. Calvin
Coolidge was a particularly vocal supporter of Ford and his expansionist
form of capitalism. ‘Wealth is the chief end of man’, he observed and,
more famously, in reference to Ford, he proclaimed: ‘The man who builds
a factory builds a temple, the man who works there worships there’.9
Such rhetoric was anathema to many progressive reformers who were
actively seeking new ways of thinking about and knowing the world;
the adaptation of forms of rationalisation for the public good appeared
the most attractive and sensible way.10 Such broad-based interest in the
‘positive’ qualities of rationalisation seemed to suggest that, rather than
being blind to the incumbent social antagonisms intrinsic to monopoly
capitalism, rationalisation possessed within itself its own remedy.
At the forefront of this intellectual movement was the radical publication,
The Seven Arts magazine, with which Randolph Bourne was actively
involved along with other New York-based radicals.11 Like Mumford, The
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Musing on Primitiveness
13
Seven Arts intellectuals believed politics was directly related to culture
and that the free enterprise system was antithetical to artistic creation.
They were disaffected by a growing culture of rationalised production
and consumption, which many saw as detrimental to America’s cultural
development; The Seven Arts magazine carried their dissenting voices.12 A
key voice in this movement was that of Van Wyck Brooks, who summed
up the attitude of the group towards a culture based on consumption and
the drive for profit in ‘Young America’. Contra the gushing rhetoric of
Coolidge, Brooks described Henry Ford as one of America’s ‘bewildered
men’.13 Brooks’ criticism of figures such as Ford was ultimately a concern
for an American culture out of step with the real America. ‘I am aware,
of course,’ said Brooks, ‘that we have had no cumulative culture, and
that consequently the professors who guard the past and the writers who
voice the present inevitably have less in common with this country than
anywhere in the Old World’.14 Those self-appointed guards of the past,
such as the National Academy of Design, were accused of betraying the
present and future of modern American culture.
Questioning exactly where America was heading, both politically and
culturally, the pre-war intellectuals looked to Europe and European
modernism. However, the radicals were not interested in importing
European culture wholesale; rather, they sought a home-grown American culture, as Brooks’ ‘On Creating a Usable Past’ essay suggested. The
development of an American culture was the common goal for political activists, intellectuals and artists. It is the avant-garde movements
of experimental artists that are of real interest here, especially in their
formulation and prescription of what kind of artist might contribute
and develop this American modern culture. ‘Stieglitz was’, as Wertheim
notes, ‘interested in creating an indigenous American modern art movement’ and so, too, was William Carlos Williams, who was associated
with the Others Group.15 As part of the growing number of experimental
artists in poetry, art, literature and theatre, all were related through various groups, such as the Stieglitz and Others Groups, and the salons of
Mabel Dodge and Walter and Louise Arensberg. It was Stieglitz who
acted as link between Sheeler and the New York scene, but it was William Carlos Williams, the doctor-poet immersed in the New York scene,
who discovered in Sheeler and his work the promise of the true modern
American artist.
As a response to the factors outlined above, Williams identified within
Sheeler’s work and practice the ability to represent America through the
most modern means. Sheeler as a modern artist aims at ‘Driving down
for illumination into the local’, Sheeler ‘gives us . . . a world, of elements
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14
Charles Sheeler
we can believe in’, according to Williams. Distinguishing Sheeler’s talent
is ‘this eye for the thing’, a directness of vision that allows Sheeler to
separate ‘the valuable from the impost and to paint that only’. Out of
the blur of the real, Sheeler presents to us a world we recognise but do
not properly understand. And whilst ‘Pictures are made with paint and
a brush on canvas’, Sheeler makes ‘use of the photographic camera in
making up a picture’; in doing so, his pictures are deceptively simple
objects, strange but familiar: they are enigmatic objects that hold the
viewer’s attention because they speak of a place that Americans recognise
but are no longer able to experience or engage with in a genuine way.16
If one untangles Williams’ web of simple but cryptic sentences an
image forms of Sheeler’s centrality in the development of an Americantype modernism.17 To modern ears, the phrase ‘American modernism’
sounds over-familiar but Williams’ critique of Sheeler is as much about
defining the grounds of what constitutes American modern art more
widely as it is specifying exactly what is American and modern about
Sheeler. ‘There is a source in AMERICA for everything we think and
do’, says Williams, whose argument articulates at once frustration with,
and an implied solution to, the dilemma facing the American artist at
the turn of the twentieth century.18 In short, one can resolutely choose
modernism and be modern whilst exploring America or, as Williams
would have it, the ‘local’. Time and again, Williams presents Sheeler’s
work as an example of this solution: an American artist able to bridge the
gap between modernist formal experimentation and the representation
of an explicitly American subject matter or content.
Likewise, Constance Rourke’s biographical analysis of Sheeler echoes
and reinforces Williams, but in less esoteric terms. Rourke’s book, with
its rather unsubtle title – Charles Sheeler: Artist in the American Tradition
– consistently draws attention to what she argues is the inherent
Americanness of Sheeler’s experimental, modernist artworks. Perhaps
what are most significant, and which garner considerable acclaim and
attention, are the ways in which Sheeler’s practice overwhelms the
‘French influence within his own expression’.19 Neither capitulation to,
nor a negation of, European influences, Sheeler’s work answers decisively
a key question for Rourke: ‘could [American artists] appropriate these
influences and transform them into terms which were genuinely our
own’?20
For Rourke, Sheeler symbolises exactly the artist able to translate,
assimilate and transform the influence of high European modernism
into the language of American art. She concludes in a somewhat familiar
tone that Sheeler ‘was working in the American grain, not against
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Musing on Primitiveness
15
it’.21 The construction of Sheeler’s aesthetic identity as a vanguard
American artist by Rourke is underscored with a determination to write
a history of American art in which the turn to modernism is not seen
as a radical break from, or a rejection of, American artistic tradition
but as a necessary and, to an extent, inevitable facet in American art’s
continuing development. In this sense, Sheeler becomes a conduit,
receptive and sensitive to European art – whether the Masters or the
moderns – as well as rooted and educated in American art, to draw on
in America.22
Of course, Rourke’s biography and Williams’ articulation of an American
type of modernism serve to reveal that to be modern during this period
was, by definition, problematic. This was in part due to the influence of
the academies on what constituted art but was also due to the extensive
definition of the term ‘modern’ artist. According to Douglas Tallack, the
‘right to be called modern was being contested in the years up to and
beyond the Armory Show of 1913 . . .’.23 So the group of artists known
as the ‘Eight’,24 realists whose attention found clearest focus on the new
urban world, and those associated with Alfred Stieglitz’s gallery, 291,25
could both be called modern. The problem here is that their respective
philosophies and approaches to the production and display of their work
represent very different means and forms of expression. Being ‘modern’
was, therefore, a rather general state of affairs, where to self-identify as a
modern artist meant a public rejection by the artist of the genteel tradition
of portraiture, landscape and American impressionism’.26
What initially marks out Sheeler’s work as ‘modern’ is his rejection of
his own artistic education under American impressionist William Merritt
Chase. Chase taught that true art was about spontaneity, catching the
moment, and ‘that great artists painted only from inspiration, a process
akin to magic’.27 The result was that ‘the idea of function or use never
entered our heads’.28 The realisation that art could be something other
than what he had been taught occurred to Sheeler on his return from
Europe in 1909. Speaking about the effect on both himself and his
travelling partner, Morton Schamberg, Sheeler says:
We began to realise that forms could be placed with consideration to their
relationship to all other forms in the picture, not merely to those adjacent.
We began to understand that a picture could be assembled arbitrarily with
a concern for design, and that the result could be outside time, place, or
momentary considerations.29
Besides the overt rejection of Chase’s impressionism, Sheeler’s comments
are suggestive of new kind of awareness at play in his attitude towards
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16
Charles Sheeler
producing pictures, an approach that combines the cosmological (‘outside
time and place’) and the material.
Between 1913 and 1916 Sheeler painted only landscapes and his
expressed aim was to ‘communicate his [the artist’s] sensations of
some particular manifestation of cosmic order’.30 Troyen and Hirshler
identify a work like House with Trees (1915) as the clearest indication of
a new direction in Sheeler’s work. Neither a slavish copy of cubism nor
traditional realism, the house is rendered simply without ornamentation,
a disarticulated row of boxy forms compressed between an enveloping
tree line behind and abstracted trees to the front. Within two years,
Sheeler replaced the fauvist-coloured densely populated canvases with
line drawings on bare white Japanese paper, along with a series of
photographs of barns and the interior of the Doylestown House.
The source of this inspiring revelation relates to Sheeler’s time spent
in Paris, in January–February 1909, where he at once failed to attend any
of Leo and Gertrude Stein’s soirées but did manage to see first-hand the
work of the early European moderns. Sheeler writes:
It was at this time I first saw the paintings of Picasso, Matisse, Braque
and Derain . . . and of van Gogh and Cézanne among their immediate
predecessors. They were very strange pictures which no amount of
description, of which I had considerable in advance, could prepare me for
the shock of coming upon them for the first time.31
The ‘shock’ of seeing such ‘strange pictures’ hints at epiphany, but
the ‘French influence’, to which Rourke attends such weight, affects
Sheeler’s work in a typically refined manner. As one can see in Landscape
(1915),32 Sheeler’s appropriation of Cézanne is formal, but his interest in
the French artist extends to include the issue of colour, the role of light
and also the significance of the way in which space is articulated on the
canvas.
It is this latter aspect that I want to consider here. Cézanne’s notion of
espace, where ‘painting becomes a space . . . a laboratory of productive
investigation and experiment, which had less and less relation to the
literal spaces of modern life’, is crucial for Sheeler. Abandoning the
production in paint on canvas of a world we can see, Cézanne’s paintings
are to be judged on their ‘capacity to produce a visual truth’ within the
parameters of the frame.33 Here, the work of art emphasises its status as
an object in itself, one that does not pretend to be anything other than a
work of art and not some window on the ‘real’ world.
Free from the constraints of having to perform a role, the artwork as
object necessarily reconfigures the parameters of experience and the work
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