Charles Sheeler: Across Media
by Charles Brock
from University of California Press
Charles Sheeler (1883-1965) is recognized as one of the founders of American modernism and one of the master photographers of the twentieth century. His work is synonymous with precisionism, a crisp, clean, hard-edged style that reconciled cubist abstraction and the machine aesthetic of Marcel Duchamp with American subject matter. Trained in industrial drawing, decorative painting, and applied art at the School of Industrial Art in Philadelphia, Sheeler also attended the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, where he learned an impressionistic, painterly style. He later embraced European modernism and taught himself photography. Sheeler fully absorbed the lessons of each discipline and forged his own singular approach.
This beautifully illustrated book, created to accompany a traveling exhibition of Sheeler's work, features detailed analyses of the artist's mediums and working methods. Focusing on the complex, often paradoxical, relationships among photography, film, drawing, printmaking, and painting that were central to Sheeler's art, this pathbreaking book traces critical points in Sheeler's trajectory, beginning with a small selection of Sheeler's seminal photographs, circa 1917, of the interior of an eighteenth-century Quaker fieldstone house in Doylestown, Pennsylvania. Sections are also devoted to the 1920 film Manhatta, made in collaboration with Paul Strand; a series of commercial photographs of the Ford Motor Company's River Rogue factory (1927); the enigmatic painting The Artist Looks at Nature (1943) and its related works; and finally a group of mill subjects from the 1940s and 1950s that experiments with photomontage.
Copub: National Gallery of Art
Drawing on America's Past: Folk Art, Modernism, and the Index of American Design
by Virginia Tuttle Clayton
from The University of North Carolina Press
This book presents watercolor renderings along with a selection of the artifacts in the Index of American Design, a visual archive of decorative, folk, and popular arts made in America from the colonial period to about 1900. Three essays explore the history, operation, and ambitions of the Index of American Design, examine folk art collecting in America during the early decades of the twentieth century, and consider the Index's role in the search for a national cultural identity in the early twentieth-century United States.
The Photography of Charles Sheeler: American Modernist
by Theodore E. Stebbins
from Bulfinch
Considered one of the most significant American painters of the period between the two world wars, and founder of the precisionist school, Charles Sheeler (1883-1965) was also one of the pivotal photographers of the modernist movement in this country. His direct style can be likened to that of contemporaries Paul Strand, and Edward Weston. Sheeler is perhaps best-known for documenting the transformation of the American industrial landscape (in both painting and photography), and for an early series of photographs of his Doylestown, PA, house. A major retrospective dedicated to Sheeler's work is being organized by the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and this book will serve as the catalog.
Charles Sheeler: American Interiors
The Shakes furniture Sheeler (18831956) collected, the spare rooms where he lived, his designs for objects and fabrics, the images he recylced in his art, his photography. Distributed by Woodstocker Books.
Charles Sheeler and Cult of the Machine (Essays in Art and Culture)
by Karen Lucic
from Harvard University Press
At the dawn of the twentieth century Henry Adams proclaimed that the machine was as central to our modem American culture as the Virgin was to medieval culture. We worshiped in our factories as our ancestors worshiped in cathedrals. In this century we also raised up bridges, grain elevators, and skyscrapers, and many were dazzled by these symbols of the Machine Age—from American presidents such as Calvin Coolidge to European artists such as Marcel Duchamp. Charles Sheeler (1886–1965) was one of the most noted American painters and photographers to embrace the iconography of the machine. But was he high priest or heretic in the religion of mass production and technology that dominated his era?
Karen Lucic considers this intriguing question while telling us Sheeler’s story: his coming of age, his achievement of artistic independence in the teens and twenties, and his later treatments of Machine Age subjects throughout the years of the Depression and World War IL The author shows us how—in paintings, drawings, and photographs depicting New York skyscrapers, Henry Ford’s automobile factories, and machine–dominated interiors—Sheeler produced images of extraordinary aesthetic power that provocatively confirmed America’s technological and industrial prestige in clear, vivid, and exact detail.
Do these compelling works establish Sheeler as a champion of the Machine Age? Most of the artist’s contemporaries thought so. “Sheeter was objective before the rest of us were,” claimed his friend Edward Steichen, and critics either lauded or assailed Sheeler for his seemingly straightforward acceptance of the machine. He is misunderstood today for the same reason. In the post–industrial era, Sheeler has been attacked for objectifying his subjects, for eliminating the human element from the modem landscape, and ultimately for complicity in the mechanization of the world he so accurately portrayed.
By closely investigating Sheeler’s social and aesthetic contexts and through exceptionally clear and convincing visual analysis, Karen Lucic reinterprets the work of this important modernist. She argues that his images do not celebrate the machine but question its predominance during his time. They provoke us to confront the social consequences of modern technology.
Sheeler appears in this book as neither believer nor heretic in the cult of the machine. Lucic asks us to grant Sheeler his ambivalence, for it was his ambivalence that enabled him to portray modernity so splendidly.
Charles Sheeler: The Photographs
Charles Sheeler: Modernism, Precisionism and the Borders of Abstraction
by Mark Rawlinson
from I. B. Tauris
Charles Sheeler was the stark poet of the machine age. Photographer of the Ford Motor Company and founder of the painting movement Precisionism, he is remembered as a promoter of--and apologist for--the industrialised capitalist ethic. This major new rethink of one of the key figures of American modernism argues that Sheeler’s true relationship to progress was in fact highly negative, his "precisionism" both skewed and imprecise. Covering the entire oeuvre from photography to painting and drawing attention to the inconsistencies, curiosities and "puzzles" embedded in Sheeler’s work, Rawlinson reveals a profound critique of the processes of rationalisation and the conditions of modernity. The book argues for a re-evaluation of Sheeler's often dismissed late work which, it suggests, may only be understood through a radical shift in our understanding of the work of this prominent figure.
Charles Sheeler in Doylestown: American Modernism and the Pennsylvania Tradition
Charles Sheeler: American photographer (Contemporary photographer)
The Sheeler Name in History
by Ancestry.com
from Ancestry.com
This book is part of the Our Name in History series, a collection of fascinating facts and statistics, alongside short historical commentary, created to tell the story of previous generations who have shared this name. The information in this book is a compendium of research and data pulled from census records, military records, ships' logs, immigrant and port records, as well as other reputable sources. Topics include:
- Name Meaning and Origin
- Immigration Patterns and Census Detail
- Family Lifestyles
- Military Service History
- Comprehensive Source Guide, for future research
About the Series
Nearly 300,000 titles are currently available in the Our Name in History series, compiled from Billions of records by the world's largest online resource of family history, Ancestry.com.
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