Charles Sheeler in Doylestown: American Modernism and the Pennsylvania Tradition
Category: Books,Arts & Photography,History & Criticism
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Karen Lucic, guest curator for the Allentown Art Museum’s 1997 exhibition “Charles Sheeler in Doylestown: American Modernism and the Pennsylvania Tradition” has done a superb job in describing and analyzing how Charles Sheeler used uniquely American in historic architecture and functional implements and put it in service of modernist movement in Art following the 1913 Armory Show. One could say that Sheeler helped make modern art palatable, even comprehensible to Americans during and following World War I . Contrary to the popular notion that Sheeler was an uncritical admirer of industry and the new technology, Sheeler’s primary objective was to meet the challenges of modern art in ways that respect his emphasis on rigor of design and craftsmanship and that were consonant with his own American heritage and cultural standards.In Kucic’s second chapter, The Doylestown House, we come to understand how the stone house he and Morton Schamberg shared during summers and weekends outside of Philadelphia provided him with direct, daily access to abstract elements he was able to find in nature. These elements –arrangement of stone, wood and shadow - Sheeler prized highly. They permitted him to start to bridge the gap between pure representation and pure abstraction. Somewhere near the middle of that bridge we find Sheeler’s best work. Doylestown is where it began, with the 1768 house and with Pennsylvainia Dutch barns in the surrounding countryside.Sheeler moved to New York after Schamberg’s untimely death in 1918, and became famous as the premier Precisionist painter of the New York skyscrapers and of industrial shapes and scenes. This is when his Upper Deck and his response to Ford’s River Rouge automobile plant – American Landscape and American Classic were completed. But as the Depression set in and advertising work dried up, he returned to the Doylestown photographs to produce drawings made with a finely sharpened Conte' crayon. The time and effort he took to do these works are rewarded by a viewer’s appreciation of their craftsmanship Kucic’s (and the reader’s) appreciation the fulfillment he found in revisiting the material that was so fundamental in helping him resolve the challenges posed by mopdernism in a way that was right for him and accessible to Americans. Kucic’s last chapter ,“Doylestown Revisited” covers this period in greater detail and with greater empathy than I have found in any other book on this pivotal pioneer in 20th Century American Art history. I heartily recommend it, especially after one has read a more general overview of Sheeler’s entire ouvre and his place in the Precisionist movement.