Charles Sheeler

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. 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. (Precisionism in America . . . 12-13).

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 becoming an ideal everyday thing for Americans, and things such as skylines going up in New York, anywhere from fifty to seventy story buildings in cities such as Cleveland and cities like 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 (Lucic. . .16).

Cubism, abstraction and abstract expressionism are the common art movements that come to mind when asked about artists. However, 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. These two ways are influenced by cubism and abstraction, while abstract expressionism comes from the expression of the artists' mind and feelings of the subject matter (Doezema, 74-75).

American Artists always find it important to truly reflect the transformation that is occurring in the society. 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.

As a son of an executive of a steamer company, Charles Sheeler (1883-1965) began his very first art classes at the School of Industrial Art in Philadelphia. After applying a number of times to the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, he finally accepted in 1903. There he studied under William Merritt Chase, who helped cultivate Sheeler's early painterly style. After graduation in 1906, he and his fellow artist, Morton Schamberg, began to experiment with photography which was used to support their paintings. He experienced the new trends in modern art through Cezanne, Picasso, Braque, and Matisse during a trip to Paris in 1908. In 1920, Sheeler, in collaboration with photographer Paul Strand, made a short experimental film named Manhatta, one of the first American art films. In 1927 the Ford Motor Company hired Charles Sheeler to spend six weeks in its River Rouge Plant taking photographs. It was when he was deeply impressed by that mighty factory, and consequently, he became passionate and involved in this subject. Under the gallery owner Alfred Stieglitz's encouragement, Sheeler showed his works in New York, where his reputation grew and where he eventually settled. Sheeler is associated with a group of American painters called Precisionists, and is best known for his paintings and photographs of architectural and industrial subjects.

Throughout his career, Charles Sheeler was haunted and sustained by the architecture of Doylestown, Bucks County, Pennsylvania, where he rented a house called Worthington from about 1910 to 1926. It seems that pictures of simple interior houses and barns in rural area are totally contrasted to his works in New York; however, these photographs play an important part in establishing the artist's point of view. The elements windows, stairs, doors, ladders Ð'... in Doylestown farmhouses, later on, transform into those in industrial factories and tall buildings at the center of the city. The elements are preserved: the way the artist captures the images does not change, but the viewers experience a drastic change. For Sheeler, Doylestown houses were a refugee from the hectic commercialism of the urban society. Although he ultimately gave up his tenancy of the Worthington house, Sheeler maintained a claim on its image throughout his career. (DaviesÐ'... 135-9)

Each view in the series emphasizes the emptiness and integrity of the little house. The Interior with Stove (1917) was taken from the southeast side of the house. The dark stove appears to be the sole light source for the interior. The window presents no opening to the world beyond the room. A latched door and a closed window with hinges uniquely increase the austerity and loneliness of the inside world. The source of light is actually a photographer's lamp hidden behind the stove, which created a dramatic contrast of lights and darks, of shadows and highlights that turn the empty room into a graphic composition.

Twenty six years later, the image appears again in an oil painting of 1943, The Artist Looks at Nature. It portrays the artist seated at his easel and soon becomes one of his most luminously successful drawings. Although facing a contemporary landscape, the painter creates an image of the Worthington house on the paper. Regardless the change in the scene, Interior with Stove still recalls to the artist's vision. The wall-surrounded and the built-up environment signify the kind of modern development that Sheeler fears would kill the old integrity of the little house (at the upper left corner of the painting). The painting is covered with a pale, lightly green of grass. The questionable aspect of the drawing is that the faceless artist who we assume Charles Sheeler concentrates in a scene that is obviously nowhere in front of him. Why is he painting his interior scene outdoors? His subject is totally out of memory. Apparently the artist is dressed neither for outdoors nor work: he is wearing a white shirt and a vest, a necktie, and formal shoes. His grey shirt and his brown pants are perfectly matched with the painting and its frame. The combination of colors which is really sophisticated expresses a special emotional interaction between Sheeler and the place. The painting shows the relationship of space and time. It also symbolizes the synthesis of rural architecture and the machine age.

In 1915, Sheeler began another series of photographs that captured the architectural traditions of Bucks County. This series portrays the barns which are less functional in Sheeler's time than they were

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