Charles Sheeler
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| Charles Sheeler |
| 1883-1965 |
| American |
| Sheeler, who was born in Philadelphia in 1883, first succeeded as a painter. However, in 1912, after studying at the School of Industrial Art and the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in Philadelphia, he began to support himself as an architectural photographer. In the 1920s, while working as a commercial photographer for Cond'e Nast, he was associated with artists who are now called Precisionists for the precise way in which they treated their themes, particularly industrial subjects. After a solo exhibition at the Downtown Gallery in 1931, he was known primarily as a realist painter. Sheeler consciously sought an architectural structure and an impersonal surface, devoid of temperamental slashes of paint or layers suggesting sequences of time. He did not underpaint. He wanted to eliminate "the means to the end, meaning the technique as far as possible and to present the subject in itself without the distraction of the means of achieving it . . . " But in Sheeler's best paintings, the impersonal surface shimmers; it is like a still reflection in a pond, not just a reflection of a single, unified image but an image of concentration. In Steam Turbine, the precision of the geometric structure, the subtlety of the paint surface, and the nuances of color simultaneously convey both the information of a photograph and the qualities of a painting. |
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Paintings by Charles Sheeler
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