Charles Sheeler

American painter and photographer of industrial subjects

By Alexandra A. Jopp

Charles Sheeler, one of America’s leading Modernists, found formal beauty in machinery, the principal emblem of modernity

I. Biography

Charles Sheeler, a central figure in American Realism and one of the most interesting and ambitious American artists, was known for producing compelling images of the Machine Age. During his prolific career, Sheeler employed machines, factory complexes near Detroit, New York skyscrapers, locomotive engines, power plants and barns as subjects for his pictures and used painting, drawing, and photography in his works, often in combination. Trained in Impressionist approaches to landscape themes, he experimented with painterly compositions before finding and mastering his outwardly depopulated landscape style, now often called precisionism. In this manner, Sheeler illustrated the beauty objects, even in the absence of people.

A native of Philadelphia, Charles Sheeler was born on July 16, 1883, the only child of Charles Rettew and Mary Cunningham Sheeler. He began his artistic training from 1900 to 1903 at the Philadelphia School of Industrial Art (now the University of the Arts), where he was introduced “to the various orders of ornament, Greek, Egyptian, Romanesque and others, and the application of them as designs for carpets, wall-papers and other two-dimensional surfaces.”1 Sheeler spent the next three years at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, where he studied with William Merritt Chase, who taught Sheeler a fluid, Impressionistic style. He spent two summers in England while studying with Chase, then visited Holland in 1904 and Spain in 1905. During his visits to Europe, Sheeler acquired an admiration for Spanish motifs, in particular those of Velazquez, Goya and the Dutch painters whom the artist saw exhibited at the National Gallery of London. In 1908, accompanied by artist and friend Morton Schamberg, Sheeler traveled through northern Italy, where he saw works by the Italian masters. On a trip to Paris, he was drawn to the works of Matisse and the Cubists, particularly Picasso and Cézanne, finding in them a new direction for his art. He had a Cubist period in 1913, but his involvement with abstract forms was brief. From 1913 to 1916, he focused on painting landscapes.

Following his return from Paris, Sheeler shared a studio with Schamberg while also renting a house in Doylestown, Penn., where he turned to commercial photography as a way to support his attempts at Modern painting. For the next several years, he concentrated on photographs of buildings, taking pictures of farmhouses around Doylestown while continuing his experiments with Modernism.

After the untimely death of Schamberg in 1918, Sheeler moved to New York. The next year, he joined with Paul Strand, a photographer and filmmaker, on a novel short film, Manhatta, which interpreted the urban environment as a demonstration of human power and vision. The film focused on functionalism and industrial forms and is considered the first avant-garde film made in America. During the next decade, Sheeler continued working in his Manhattan studio as a freelance illustrator and advertising photographer. In 1927, he was commissioned to photograph the Ford Motor Company’s new River Rouge plant outside Detroit. He produced 20 photographs, two drawings and four oil paintings of the plant, helping to build his reputation as a machinery artist.

In 1929, Sheeler produced one of his best known works, Upper Deck, a portrayal of shipboard architecture, which, with its pristine, geometrical surfaces, launched the artist’s architectural phase. This phase continued for the rest of his career, with the artist focusing on conceptual contrasts such as “figure/ground, dark/light, object/void, inside/outside, personal/impersonal, and realism/abstraction … animated by a rich interplay of media.”2 Sheeler liked black, especially when it appeared next to white, as in Winter Window (1941) and The Open Door (1932).
In the mid-1940s, Sheeler’s style changed dramatically. He moved from detailed realism toward more abstract compositions, and his later oil paintings became considerably larger in scale. He worked mostly from images of architecture that were seen as overlapping and transparent forms, as from photographic double exposures. He moved away from soft, iridescent tones toward dazzling paint, and his favorite hues in these years were blues, maroon, rose and lavender, often used in subtle shades so that a barn or a factory wall would appear almost translucent.
The highlights of Sheeler’s oeuvre, both early and late in his career, combine silhouette and matter, the reminiscent and the newly seen. His paintings, with their photographic foundations, reflect “nature seen from the eyes outward [and] comprise nothing less than a fifty-year exploration of his understanding of reality.” 3

Sheeler died on May 7, 1965.

II. Chronology

• 1883 Born on July 16 in Philadelphia to Charles Rettew and Mary Cunningham Sheeler
• 1900 Enrolled in School of Industrial Art, Philadelphia
• 1903 Enrolled in Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts
• 1904 Traveled to London and Holland with William Merritt Chase
• 1905 Visited Spain with Chase
• 1906 Received degree from Pennsylvania Academy
• 1908 Traveled to Europe with parents and Morton Schamberg
• 1910 Started career as photographer
• 1919 Moved to New York
• 1920 Filmed Manhatta with Paul Strand
• 1921 Married Katharine Baird Shaffer on April 7
• 1925 Published essay on Greek art in Arts
• 1926 Began to work for Condé Nast Publications
• 1926 From October through December, photographed Ford Motor Company’s River Rouge Plant for N.W. Ayer and Son
• 1929 Traveled to Europe for last time; finished Upper Deck
• 1933 Wife Katharine died
• 1939 Married Musya Metas Sokolova on April 2
• 1942 Began to work at Metropolitan Museum of Art as senior research fellow in photography
• 1952 Traveled on commission to Pittsburgh and Cedarburg, Wisc.
• 1954 Visited Ansel Adams in San Francisco; photographed Pacific Gas and Electric power plant at Morro Bay
• 1961 Stroke ended career
• 1962 Received Award of Merit Medal for Painting, American Academy of Arts and Letters
• 1963 Elected to membership in National Institute of Arts and Letters
• 1965 Died on May 7

III. Collections

• Art Institute of Chicago
• Butler Institute of American Art, Ohio
• Detroit Institute of Arts, Michigan
• Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco
• Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington D.C.
• J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles
• Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City
• Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
• Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
• Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
• Museum of Modern Art, New York City
• National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C.
• Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Missouri
• San Francisco Museum of Modern Art
• The Phillips Collection, Washington D.C.
• Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, Connecticut
• Addison Gallery of American Art, Andover, Massachusetts
• Amon Carter Museum, Texas
• Brooklyn Museum, New York City
• Brooklyn Museum/Luce Center for American Art, New York City
• Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania
• Cincinnati Art Museum, Ohio
• Cleveland Museum of Art, Ohio
• Currier Gallery of Art, New Hampshire
• Dallas Museum of Art, Texas
• Davison Art Center at Wesleyan University, Connecticut
• Dayton Art Institute, Ohio
• Harvard University Art Museums, Massachusetts
• Indianapolis Museum of Art, Indiana
• James A. Michener Art Museum, Doylestown, Pennsylvania
• Memorial Art Gallery of the University of Rochester, New York
• New Britain Museum of American Art, Connecticut
• Oklahoma City Museum of Art, Oklahoma
• Orlando Museum of Art, Florida
• Palmer Museum of Art at Pennsylvania State University
• Philadelphia Museum of Art
• Princeton University Art Museum, New Jersey
• Reynolda House Museum of American Art, Winston-Salem, North Carolina
• San Diego Museum of Art, California
• Santa Barbara Museum of Art, California
• Sheldon Art Gallery, Lincoln, Nebraska
• Smith College Museum of Art, Massachusetts
• Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington D.C.
• Terra Foundation for American Art, Chicago
• Walker Art Center, Minnesota
• Whitney Museum of American Art, New York City
• Wichita Art Museum, Kansas
• Worcester Art Museum, Massachusetts
• Worcester Art Museum, Massachusetts

IV. Exhibitions

• 1907-10, 1930-31, 1939-58 Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts
• 1907-49 AIC (prize 1945)
• 1913 Armory Show
• 1917 Marius De Zaya’s Gallery (photographs)
• 1917 Forum Exh, NYC
• 1917 Society Independent Artists
• 1923 Salons of America
• 1932-57 Corcoran Gallery biennials
• 1934 FMA (solo)
• 1939 Museum of Modern Art, New York (solo)
• 1946 The Downtown Gallery
• 1947 Addison Gallery of American Art
• 1948 Currier Gallery of Art, Manchester, New Hampshire
• 1952 Walker Art Center
• 1954-55 Traveling exhibitions to University of California, Los Angeles, Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, De Young Museum
• 1958 San Diego MA
• 1958 Munson-Williams-Proctor Inst

V. Memberships

• American Academy of Arts & Letters

VI. Notes

1: Charles Brock. Charles Sheeler across Media. (Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: National Gallery of Art in association with University of California Press, 2006), p. 9.
2: Charles Brock. Charles Sheeler across Media. (Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: National Gallery of Art in association with University of California Press, 2006), p. 12.
3: Karen Lucin. Charles Sheeler in Doylestown. American Modernism and the Pennsylvania Tradition. (Allentown: Allentown Art Museum, 1997), p. 43.

VII. Suggested Resources

• Lucic, Karen. Charles Sheeler in Doylestown. American Modernism and the Pennsylvania Tradition. Allentown: Allentown Art Museum, 1997.
• Morgan, Ann Lee. The Oxford Dictionary of American Art and Artists. Oxford, New York: Oxford University Press, 2007.
• Brock, Charles. Charles Sheeler across Media. Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: National Gallery of Art in association with University of California Press, 2006.
• E. Hirshler, Carol Troyen. Charles Sheeler: Painting and Drawing. Boston: Little, Brown and Company, Boston, 1987.