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?