GENERAL DESCRIPTION
Equally acclaimed as a painter and photographer, Charles Sheeler was born in Philadelphia, where his training included studies at the Philadelphia School of Industrial Design and the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. His first exposure to European modernism came through a study trip organized by his teacher, William Merritt Chase. Ironically, it was this experience that led him to embrace the experiments in form and space of a new generation of artists and reject the painterly style of his training.
Strengthened by his travels and his participation in the 1913 Armory Show, the exhibit that first widely exposed Americans to modernism, Sheeler developed a hard-edged, precise style that was also abstract, achieved through an emphasis on an object’s underlying geometric or architectural structure. Sheeler applied this style both to the urban scene, in such projects as the skyscrapers in the seven-minute film Manhatta (1920-1921), which he made with Paul Strand, as well as to the traditional Shaker furniture and barns of Bucks County, Pennsylvania, his rural home.
Sheeler initially trained as a photographer to support his painting career through commercial work; however, with the encouragement of art impresario and photographer Alfred Stieglitz, Sheeler came to regard photography as an equally valid tool of artistic expression. In fact, for Sheeler, the two became linked as ways to articulate the total experience of vision. “Photography is nature seen from the eyes outward, painting from the eyes inward,” he wrote.
By the time of his commission from Fortune, Sheeler had received acclaim for his freelance work for Vogue and Vanity Fair, and, in particular, his 1927 project to photograph the Ford Motor Company’s River Rouge plant. His paintings and photographs had been selected for a solo retrospective at the newly found Museum of Modern Art in 1939. He was only the fifth artist to receive that honor.
Excerpt from
DMA exhibition panel, 2006.
NOTES
Gail reviewed with a 1982 bio---i redid and would like to submit this for the new bio
ASSOCIATED CONTENT CHUNKS
AUDIO ASSETS
VIDEO ASSETS
IMAGE ASSETS
WEB RESOURCES
- Philadelphia Museum of Art~Learn more about the Arensberg group of which Sheeler was a part.
- Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History~Read an essay on Precisionism from the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
- YouTube~Explore the photography of Charles Sheller with Ted Forbes and The Art of Photography.
- YouTube~Watch this lecture from the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston titled "Painting from the Past: Marsden Hartley, Arthur Dove, and Charles Sheeler."
ARCHIVAL RESOURCES
FUN FACTS
TEACHING IDEAS
RULES
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apply to objects where constituent_id equals 999
apply to constituents where id equals 999
Category
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OR
General Description
Equally acclaimed as a painter and photographer, Charles Sheeler was born in Philadelphia, where his training included studies at the Philadelphia School of Industrial Design and the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. His first exposure to European modernism came through a study trip organized by his teacher, William Merritt Chase. Ironically, it was this experience that led him to embrace the experiments in form and space of a new generation of artists and reject the painterly style of his training.
Strengthened by his travels and his participation in the 1913 Armory Show, the exhibit that first widely exposed Americans to modernism, Sheeler developed a hard-edged, precise style that was also abstract, achieved through an emphasis on an object’s underlying geometric or architectural structure. Sheeler applied this style both to the urban scene, in such projects as the skyscrapers in the seven-minute film Manhatta (1920-1921), which he made with Paul Strand, as well as to the traditional Shaker furniture and barns of Bucks County, Pennsylvania, his rural home.
Sheeler initially trained as a photographer to support his painting career through commercial work; however, with the encouragement of art impresario and photographer Alfred Stieglitz, Sheeler came to regard photography as an equally valid tool of artistic expression. In fact, for Sheeler, the two became linked as ways to articulate the total experience of vision. “Photography is nature seen from the eyes outward, painting from the eyes inward,” he wrote.
By the time of his commission from Fortune, Sheeler had received acclaim for his freelance work for Vogue and Vanity Fair, and, in particular, his 1927 project to photograph the Ford Motor Company’s River Rouge plant. His paintings and photographs had been selected for a solo retrospective at the newly found Museum of Modern Art in 1939. He was only the fifth artist to receive that honor.
Excerpt from
DMA exhibition panel, 2006.
Fun Facts
Archival Resources
Web Resources
- Philadelphia Museum of Art~Learn more about the Arensberg group of which Sheeler was a part.
- Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History~Read an essay on Precisionism from the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
- YouTube~Explore the photography of Charles Sheller with Ted Forbes and The Art of Photography.
- YouTube~Watch this lecture from the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston titled "Painting from the Past: Marsden Hartley, Arthur Dove, and Charles Sheeler."
Notes
Gail reviewed with a 1982 bio---i redid and would like to submit this for the new bio
rules
Apply To
Constituents
id
Equals
999
source file
artists_and_designers-0009.xml.nores