Charles Sheeler[1883 – 1965]

American Landscape

c. 1930

• "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."

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.

• 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).

• 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.

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

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.

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

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

Brownie Camera

Charles Sheeler

standing next to a

window. c. 1910

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.

Church Street E1 c. 1920

• 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.

• "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.

• Anything live or organic, like trees or people, was kept out.

• There was no such thing as a Precisionist pussycat.

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.

• 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.

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

• 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.

Criss-Crossed Conveyers at the Ford Plant c. 1927

Upper Deck c. 1929

Rolling Power

• The only trace of humanity in Charles Sheeler’s austere American Landscape is a tiny figure scurrying across the railroad tracks.

• 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.

Take a Closer Look….

• Locate the tiny figure.

• Where is the ladder?

• Locate the Silos.

• 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 landscape’s transformation in the wake of industrial progress.

Perspective

• How does Sheeler indicate distance in this painting?

• 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.

• 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

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

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

• 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.

• Much of this painting is geometric.

• What parts are not?

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

Compare the Buildings with the Man

• 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?

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

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

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

Think about it …

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

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

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

• Today, Americans are more sensitive to the effects of industrial development on the environment.

• This is also reflected in our art in 2011.

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

• Here, all that’s 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.

• 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.

• Sheeler earned his living as a professional photographer.

• In 1927, he spent six weeks taking pictures of the Ford Motor Company’s enormous auto plant west of Detroit.

• The company commissioned the project as a testament to Ford’s preeminence:

• The plant at River Rouge was a marvel of mechanical efficiency—with miles of canals, conveyor belts, and railroad tracks connecting steel mills, blast furnaces, glass plants, and the famed assembly line.

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.

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

• “There is but one rule for the industrialist,” Ford declared, “and that is:

Make the highest quality goods possible at the lowest cost possible.”

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

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

• 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.

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

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

The River Rouge Plant

River Rouge Industrial Plant c. 1928

What is his world view?

• The stillness and silence of the scene impart an air of reverence traditionally associated with a place of worship—or, 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.

Water c. 1945

• 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.

• 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.

• 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 numbers—it may be true, as has been said, that our factories are our substitute for religious expression"

The Golden Gate c. 1955

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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."

Skyscrapers c. 1922

Amoskeag Canal c.1948

Suspended Power c. 1939

Steam turbine c. 1939

Side of White Barn, Bucks County c. 1915

Chartres c. 1929

Three White Tulips c. 1912

Bucks County Barn c. 1932

Classic Landscape c. 1932

Interior c. 1940

American Interior c. 1934

Incantation c. 1946

MacDougal Alley c. 1924

Yosemite c. 1957

Pertaining to Yachts and Yachting c. 1922

Connecticut Barns in Landscape c. 1934

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.

• The river might have curved and been lined with trees and plants.

• Smoke would not fill the sky.

Essay Question 1

• Do you think this painting seems more positive or negative regarding industrial development?

Explain your answer.

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?