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Charles Sheeler: Across Media
Art Institute of Chicago
Now that the holidays are over, or soon will be, catch this small show of Precisionist Charles Sheeler's works at the Art Institute of Chicago which will be up through January 7, before it heads to the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, deYoung. Painters have often gone from sketch to drawings, to painted studies, to full-scale painting, and finally, incorporation of an idea into a final masterpiece. We can see this progression with many of the world's masterworks. Artists often rehash ideas in new works. Ideas that haunt eventually become themes repeated among many pieces. A common theme among many traveling shows seems to be this process of creating the masterpiece as well as the personal history behind the art and artist. Charles Sheeler: Across Media doesn't disappoint on this front, but for such a small show, actually goes a little farther, helped, for the most part, by the artist himself. Across Media looks at Charles Sheeler's use of the photograph, drawing, and painting and how his works progressed from one medium to the next.
There is no doubt that the photograph changed how artists viewed the world. However, its use as an art form has been debated since its invention. Camps developed around studio photography vs. the un-doctored documentary photograph. Eventually, as modernism and art as individual expression has progressed (as opposed to schools or groups of artistic direction and thought), every line has been blurred and there is no leading voice of artistic direction. In the 1920s and 1930s, schools of artistic thought still had followers. The Precisionists were not a deliberate group of artists with a manifesto, as such, like the Futurists in Europe, but they had a similar philosophy and aesthetic heavily influenced by the effects of photography as it entered the artistic scene. Some, like Joseph Stella and Georgia O'Keefe, focused on the drive towards expression and abstraction. Alfred Steiglitz and Charles Sheeler focused on the photograph. Sheeler, however, was also a painter and a draftsman. A small show of only 50 works, Across Media is not a retrospective of Sheeler's work. Nor is it a comprehensive survey of his works in connection with the Precisionists. Instead, we see how Sheeler's main subject matter, the industrial landscape, is explored first in his photographs, then, in how he used his photographs to create finished drawings. From the drawings, we see how Sheeler reused the same compositions in his paintings. Eventually, the "across media" theme is all but dropped when we are shown Sheeler's later works where themes are reused, but now include photomontage, and their effect on his painting. Central to the exhibit is Sheeler's The Artist Looks at Nature (1943) where the show pulls out related photographs and drawings to suggest his awareness of how a mastery of various techniques shaped his identity as an artist.
Sheeler's industrial themes themselves today might seem like idealized visions of the industrial heyday of the U.S., but that may be too simplistic. The promise of these bright, clean, unblemished places of work and industry might seem like propaganda, but when Sheeler painted them it was as if the promised land of milk and honey had suddenly materialized. This was depression-era, pre-World War II U.S., when industry held so much promise for the return of work, decent wages, and good times for the everyday man. To express this enthusiasm, Sheeler choose to reduce his scenes into semi-abstracted representations and distance the work from the harsh realities of factory work to highlight the aesthetic qualities, as in the difference between Ford Plant, River Rouge, Canal with Salvage Ship (1927), and American Landscape (1930). Today, these idealized visions of industry, city, and 'progress' in many ways seem to mock us. Looking through the dark glass of history, among debates of offshore production and the outsourcing of jobs to foreign countries, we also see a naivete, an irony, and sad horror at knowing what was to come, and how little was actually changed. Sheeler sees a little of this in his own lifetime, and while not succumbing to pessimism or denouncing this progress, he continues to paint 'progress' in his own way, such as his 1946 work using the abandonded Ballardvale textile mill. He photographs the mill with its very real degradation, using photomontage to juxtapose compositions, then eventually paints idealized abstractions from the photographs. The effect is a very modernist deconstruction that simplifies the communication without compromising the reality.
The book accompanying the show (National Gallery of Art, University of California Press, 225 pages, with 49 color and 171 duotone illustrations) covers much more detail about not only Sheeler's history and work, but the philosophy behind his reuse of subjects and photographs. Not exactly light reading, the text is more interesting to those who are fascinated by the minutiae of what may have gone through the artists' mind as he made artistic decisions. Although the illustrative documentation seems much better than the show itself since it includes multiple versions of the same works in the show, it complements the show very well. Shows and text like this should be required study for any artist wishing to pursue a career in visual art. For admirers of American Modernists, a show focusing on Charles Sheeler is a rarity, which makes the show a must see, just for the opportunity to see so many of his works together. A special treat is the full viewing of the film, Manhatta that Charles Sheeler made with Paul Strand, which further illustrates Sheeler's use of film as medium and its influence on his work. -- Richard Donagrandi Richard Donagrandi is the Executive Producer of ArtScope.net, and an artist himself, with a BFA from Michigan State University, whose Department of Art is celebrating its 75th year anniversary.
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