Charles Sheeler [1883

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Charles Sheeler1883 1965

• American Landscape
• c. 1930

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• "Works of art are more than mere ornaments for
  the elite, They are primary documents of a
  civilization.
• A written record or a textbook tells you one
  thing but art reveals something else.
• Our students and citizens deserve to see American
  art that shows us where we have come from, what
  we have endured, and where we are headed."

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The Precisionist View

• In between the two World Wars two American
  artists (Edward Hopper and Charles Sheeler) began
  a new style loosely connected to Art Deco.
• Where Art Deco was more about high society,
  wealth and living the high life,
• Precisionism was more like the 19th century
  Realist art. Precisionism showed real people in
  real situations, real objects and architecture.

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• However the Precisionists didn't associate
  themselves with other realism artists in the
  United States
• (such as American Scene, the Regionalists
  painters such as Thomas Hart Benton, Grant Wood
  and John Stewart Curry).

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• Precisionists have been classified as a group of
  artist who began to depict the use of machinery
  using styles and techniques of the previous
  movements before them such as abstraction, cubism
  and Abstract Expressionism.

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• This movement came around shortly after World War
  1, when the use of machines began to boom within
  the United States.

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1915

• The precisionist movement was originally started
  in nineteen hundred and fifteen when a group of
  artists got together and decided to look forward
  to the art of the future.

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• The movement was built around the idea of artists
  using the precision of their instruments to
  display these ideas of machinery throughout
  America.

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• Construction and machinery were the two main
  influences of the precisionism movement which
  became big in the nineteen twenties around the
  time World War one was ending.
• With streamlining though mechanization was
  becoming an ideal everyday thing for Americans.
  
• Skylines going up in New York,( fifty to seventy
  story buildings)
• Cities such as Cleveland, Memphis and Syracuse
  were beginning to install twenty story buildings.

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• Precisionism became an art movement more as a
  response to society and the production of new
  products like motion picture films, antifreeze
  and cigarette lighters.

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• The term Precisionism itself was first coined in
  the early 1920s.
• Influenced strongly by Cubism, Futurism and
  Abstract Expressionism.
• Its main themes included industrialization and
  the modernization of the American landscape,
  which were depicted in precise, sharply defined,
  geometrical forms.

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• These movements all led up to and strongly
  influenced the movement of the precisionist
  artists.
• Precisionism is roughly a combination of these
  three movements together, using geometrical
  shapes and using them in abstract forms.

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• Artworks in the 1920s tended to show the rapidly
  growing nation along with its expansion of
  technology and industry.
• As a typical artist strongly influenced by big
  changes of the new age, Charles Sheeler revealed
  a love for contemporary urban life and the beauty
  of the machine through many of his photographs
  and paintings.

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• Charles Rettew Sheeler, Jr. (July 16, 1883 May
  7, 1965) was an American artist.
• He is recognized as one of the founders of
  American modernism and one of the master
  photographers of the 20th century.

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• Born in Philadelphia, he attended the
  Pennsylvania Museum School of Industrial Art, now
  the University of the Arts (Philadelphia), from
  1900 to 1903, and
• The Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, where he
  studied under William Merritt Chase.

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• He found early success as a painter and exhibited
  at the Macbeth Gallery in 1908.
• In 1909, he went to Paris, just when the
  popularity of Cubism was skyrocketing.

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• Returning to the United States, he realized that
  he would not be able to make a living with
  Modernist painting.
• Instead, he took up commercial photography,
  focusing particularly on architectural subjects.
• He was a self-taught photographer, learning his
  trade on a five dollar Brownie.

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Brownie Camera

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• Charles Sheeler
• standing next to a
• window. c. 1910

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Charles Sheeler

• Began his career as a commercial photographer
  specializing in architecture and would later add
  painting to his repertoire.
• He pioneered sharp focus effects and even
  collaborated on the film "Manhatta" (named after
  Walt Whitman's poem Mannahatta) in which the city
  was viewed from above (a revolutionary idea at
  the time).
• He used the same viewpoint in "Church Street E1"
  in 1920.

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Church Street E1 c. 1920

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• It was Sheeler who inaugurated the new style
  (soon to be called Precisionism) in which strict
  geometry and a love of technology were combined
  to mirror urban and city life.

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• "The ungainly name "Precisionism" was coined by
  the painter-photographer Charles Sheeler, mainly
  to denote what he himself did.
• It indicated both style and subject.
• In fact, the subject was the style exact, hard,
  flat, big, industrial, and full of exchanges with
  photography.
• Photography fed into painting and vice versa.
• No expressive strokes of paint.

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• Anything live or organic, like trees or people,
  was kept out.
• There was no such thing as a Precisionist
  pussycat.

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1927 - 1928

• In 1927-28 Sheeler was commissioned by the Ford
  Motor Company to document the Red River Plant in
  Michigan, a work that marked him as an admirer of
  machinery and industrial landscapes.

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• Sheeler's work however were strangely devoid of
  people.
• Although the machines and buildings were all
  man-made there were rarely people in his work.

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• He glorified the machine and the architecture,
  giving his urban landscapes a feeling of being
  almost robotic.

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• Sheeler's work records the displacement of the
  Natural Sublime by the Industrial Sublime, but
  his real subject was the Managerial Sublime, a
  thoroughly American notion.
• And though Precisionism broadened into an
  American movement in the late twenties and early
  thirties, Sheeler's work defined its essential
  scope and meaning.

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Criss-Crossed Conveyers at the Ford Plant c.
1927

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Upper Deck c. 1929

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Rolling Power
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• The only trace of humanity in Charles Sheelers
  austere American Landscape is a tiny figure
  scurrying across the railroad tracks.

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• With one arm outstretched, he appears frozen in
  action, as if in a snapshot, precisely halfway
  between two uncoupled freight cars.
• The calculated placement of this anonymous person
  suggests that he was included in the composition
  only to lend scale to the enormous factories,
  which dwarf even the train and displace every
  other living thing.

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Take a Closer Look.

• Locate the tiny figure.
• Where is the ladder?
• Locate the Silos.

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• Sheeler coined the term Precisionism to
  describe this emotionally detached approach to
  the modern world.
• Influenced by the mechanisms of modern
  technology, Precisionist art employs sharply
  defined, largely geometric forms, and often
  gauges the landscapes transformation in the wake
  of industrial progress.

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Perspective

• How does Sheeler indicate distance in this
  painting?

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• The parallel horizontal lines are converging,
  coming closer together, to the left of the
  painting.
• Objects overlap and distant structures are
  smaller, with fewer details.

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• American Landscape toys with our expectations.
• In a painting of that title, we hope to find a
  peaceful view of mountains and trees, or perhaps
  cottages and crops, in the manner of Thomas Cole
  or Albert Bierstadt

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• Instead, Sheeler gives us factories, silos,
  and smokestacks.

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• What lines look as if they were drawn with a
  ruler?

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• The lines on the edge of the canal,
• The train and tracks, and
• The buildings look as if they were composed with
  a straight edge.

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• Much of this painting is geometric.
• What parts are not?

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• The water and the reflections in the water, the
  sky and smoke, and the pile of ore are irregular
  in shape.

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Compare the Buildings with the Man

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• This plant mass-produced automobiles. Raw
  materials and ores were transformed into cars.
  Long conveyor belts moved materials within the
  factory.
• What structures in this view possibly house
  conveyor belts?

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• The long, thin white structure in front of the
  silos and other large buildings are possible
  sheds.

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What does this painting say about the scale of
American industry in 1930?

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• Sheeler was impressed with the massive scale of
  American industry and this plant.

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Think about it

• Works of art are more than mere ornaments for the
  elite, They are primary documents of a
  civilization.

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• Factories like this employed many people and the
  mass-produced goods they made were affordable to
  middle-class Americans.

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• Early twentieth-century Americans were proud of
  their countrys industrial development and
  appreciated the rise in their standard of living
  made possible by mass production.

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• Today, Americans are more sensitive to the
  effects of industrial development on the
  environment.
• This is also reflected in our art in 2011.

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• This work expresses the artists view that the
  forces of human culture, propelled by
  industrialism, have overtaken the forces of
  nature that once laid claim to American landscape
  painting.

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• Here, all thats left of the natural world is the
  sky, and not even that escapes the effects of
  mass production the smoke rising from a
  smokestack blends into the clouds, making them
  just another by-product of industry.

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• Like many traditional American landscapes, this
  one is organized around a body of water.
• Yet here, the water is contained in a canal, an
  artificial channel that controls its flow.

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• Sheeler earned his living as a professional
  photographer.
• In 1927, he spent six weeks taking pictures of
  the Ford Motor Companys enormous auto plant west
  of Detroit.

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• The company commissioned the project as a
  testament to Fords preeminence
• The plant at River Rouge was a marvel of
  mechanical efficiencywith miles of canals,
  conveyor belts, and railroad tracks connecting
  steel mills, blast furnaces, glass plants, and
  the famed assembly line.

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The Assembly Line

• Henry Ford himself had invented the term mass
  production to describe his innovation of making
  workers on a movable production line part of the
  machinery.

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• If the belt-driven process dehumanized workers,
  it helped to democratize capitalism by making
  manufactured goods affordable to a wider public.

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• There is but one rule for the industrialist,
  Ford declared, and that is
• Make the highest quality goods possible at
  the lowest cost possible.

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• To twenty first century viewers, American
  Landscape may appear as an indictment of the
  machine age, but to Sheelers contemporaries, it
  would have stood for the triumph of American
  ingenuity.

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• Sheeler derived American Landscape from the
  background of one of his River Rouge photographs.

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• To achieve the impersonal effect of the
  mechanical image, he eliminated every sign of
  brushwork and any other indication that the
  painting had been conceived by a distinct
  artistic personality and made by hand.

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• In this way, Sheeler downplays his own presence,
  as if he were just as anonymous as the faceless
  figure stranded on the train tracks.

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• After his time at River Rouge, Sheeler observed
  that factories had become a substitute for
  religious expression.

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The River Rouge Plant

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River Rouge Industrial Plant c. 1928

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What is his world view?

• The stillness and silence of the scene impart an
  air of reverence traditionally associated with a
  place of worshipor, in American painting, some
  awe-inspiring view of nature.
• But nature as a divine presence is absent it is
  industry, with its cold and indifferent
  factories, that prevails.

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Water c. 1945

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• Water depicts one of the power generators built
  by the Tennessee Valley Authority in the 1930s,
  when hydroelectric power was being distributed
  throughout the Tennessee River region of the
  United States.
• Sheeler's experience as a photographer influenced
  his Precisionist style of painting, in which he
  emphasized the geometric shapes of objects in a
  hard-edged, clearly lit manner.
• For Sheeler, these monumental, streamlined forms
  signified human ingenuity in harnessing nature's
  power.

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• His interpretation of American industry was
  somewhat idealized
• workers are never shown, and
• the machinery is pristine and gleaming, free of
  any dirt or smoke.

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• Sheeler expressed his feelings about the
  emotional symbolism of technology when he wrote
• "Every age manifests itself by some external
  evidence. In a period such as ours when only a
  comparatively few individuals seem to be given to
  religion, some form other than the Gothic
  cathedral must be found. Industry concerns the
  greatest numbersit may be true, as has been
  said, that our factories are our substitute for
  religious expression"

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The Golden Gate c. 1955

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• Charles Sheeler visited California for the first
  time in 1954, to attend a retrospective
  exhibition of his art at the Art Galleries of the
  University of California at Los Angeles.
• He also traveled to San Francisco, where he took
  photographs of the city's streets and landmarks.
  These included the Golden Gate Bridge, the famous
  suspension bridge that extends more than 4,000
  feet across the entrance to the San Francisco
  Bay.

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• Sheeler executed this painting in early 1955,
  working from his photographs, at his home in
  Irvington, New York. His evocation of the bridge
  is partially abstract, due to its simplified
  forms, heightened color palette, and extreme
  viewpoint.

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• This late work by Sheeler is at once a formal
  experiment, a tribute to a specific landmark, and
  a more generalized symbol of travel and
  opportunity.

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• Sheeler wrote, "I hope the title 'Golden Gate'
  will remain, it conveys my thought.
• More fluid than if bridge were added, then it
  would be limited to be the connecting link
  between two dots on the map.
• It is an opening to wherever the spectator thinks
  desirable."

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Skyscrapers c. 1922

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Amoskeag Canal c.1948

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Suspended Power c. 1939

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Steam turbine c. 1939

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Side of White Barn, Bucks County c. 1915

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Chartres c. 1929

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Three White Tulips c. 1912

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Bucks County Barn c. 1932

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Classic Landscape c. 1932

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Interior c. 1940

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American Interior c. 1934

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Incantation c. 1946

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MacDougal Alley c. 1924

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Yosemite c. 1957

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Pertaining to Yachts and Yachting c. 1922

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Connecticut Barns in Landscape c. 1934

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Introduction to Essay Questions

• Visualize how industrial progress changed this
  view of the American landscape.
• Imagine how this scene looked before the canal,
  railroad, and factories were built.

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• The river might have curved and been lined with
  trees and plants.
• Smoke would not fill the sky.

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Essay Question 1

• Do you think this painting seems more positive or
  negative regarding industrial development?
• Explain your answer.

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Essay Question 2

• How might an average American in 1930 answer the
  question, does this painting seems more positive
  or negative regarding industrial development?
• Consider what a factory might have
  meant/symbolized to the average American at that
  time. Think rural vs. industrialization.
• How did factories like this affect the lives of
  American consumers?

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