American Artist Charles Sheeler

US Painter and Photographer Made Manhatta Film With Paul Strand

Feb 10, 2008

Sheeler's paintings and photographs display a clean, sharp style that would come to be called Precisionism.

Born on July 16, 1883 in Philadelphia, Charles Sheeler studied at the School of Industrial Art and The Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts and was a pupil of painter William Merritt Chase. Sheeler became friends with a fellow student, Morton Schamberg, and with Schamberg made the usual tour of Europe that young artists tended to make at that time.

In Paris, Sheeler was intrigued by the then-new Cubist style of Georges Braque and Pablo Picasso, and it would have a strong influence on his work to come, particularly his contribution to the groundbreaking 1913 Armory Show. Sheeler would also be influenced by the modernist artist Marcel Duchamp.

The Interplay of Painting and Photography

Along with Schamberg, Sheeler established a studio back in Philadelphia and escaped the city on weekends at a farm in Doylestown, Pennsylvania. At this time, Sheeler supported himself as a commercial photographer. Self-reliant and resourceful, he had taught himself photography with just a beginner’s camera but was soon at a professional level.

Though he felt that his painting was more aesthetically important, Sheeler’s photography both on the job and in creative experiments was highly regarded. The clean lines of light and shadow in his photos would carry over into his paintings, which are known for their precise, geometric quality.

Manhatta and Method

In 1920, Sheeler and another photographer, Paul Strand, made what is considered one of the earliest American avant-garde films. Entitled Manhatta and inpired by poet Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass, within six minutes the film traces the scope of New York from sunrise to sunset, showing the interaction between man and metropolis with unusual and fascinating camera angles.

Sheeler’s favorite subjects tended to be urban or industrial structures, rural architecture or aspects of nature. He was also intrigued by the spareness of Shaker furniture, which worked well with his own personal vision and a style that would come to be known as Precisionism. Sheeler’s paintings and photographs are not emotional or sentimental in the least, and while his perfect angles and finely-edged perspectives somewhat resemble the style of his contemporary Edward Hopper, Sheeler never portrayed Hopper’s sense of melancholy or ambiguity.

Sheeler’s paintings rarely involve people, and even his 1943 oil The Artist Looks At Nature—depicting Sheeler seated at his easel before a maze-like landscape—shows a lean, formally dressed man with his back to us. We don’t see his face yet through the painting’s various elements, which include several artistic projects that Sheeler had worked upon, in its own cryptic way this work may be Sheeler’s most personally revealing expression.

Legacy

While Sheeler’s works display a detached quality and Sheeler himself had a certain amount of personal reserve, he was generally well-liked and formed many long-lasting friendships. His fellow artist Morton Schamberg was like a brother to him, and Sheeler was deeply affected by Schamberg’s death in the 1918 influenza epidemic. Sheeler was married twice and was also part of the innovative circle of artists surrounding photographer Alfred Stieglitz, including Sheeler’s Manhatta collaborator Paul Strand and Stieglitz’s second wife, painter Georgia O’Keeffe. Additionally, he loved certain houses with a passion, as if they had souls—which of course to Sheeler, they truly did.

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