Charles Sheeler: Across Media
The Art Institute’s superb exhibit of works by Charles Sheeler (1883-1965) reveals that he was a far more expressive artist than most have thought. This painter, photographer, filmmaker, and textile designer is best known for precisionist paintings of American industrial landscapes, which some critics of his time dismissed as “tinted photographs”; one writer called them “septic” and “bloodless.” This show originated at the National Gallery in Washington, where it was curated by Charles Brock, but Sarah E. Kelly’s installation for the Art Institute, divided into six focused sections, is organized more thematically and better illuminates the surprising emotion of Sheeler’s work.
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Trained first in industrial drawing and other applied arts, then at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Sheeler began as a painter but in about 1910 started doing commercial photography too, such as commissioned shots of buildings and artwork. The exhibit’s first room includes three 1917 photographs of his rural Pennsylvania home, built in 1768, plus a drawing and a painting he made from two of them later. As Brock points out in the excellent catalog, Doylestown House–The Stove doesn’t document an ordinary domestic interior: Brock calls the meticulously arranged scene a “self-conscious exercise in cubist collage,” with such objects as a paper disk on the wall seemingly placed with great care. Taken at night, the photo is backlit and centered on the stove. But the image also registers as more than a formal study. The warmly lit wall behind the stove and the essentially symmetrical composition suggest the home is a place of refuge. Doylestown House–Stairway With Chair is even more evocative, though the house is pictured in a less benign way: a stairway behind a door twists up to darkness. Sheeler’s painting from this photo, The Upstairs (1938), adds blue to the door’s shadow, which contrasts sharply with the glowing tan of the stairwell wall.
