Arts and Letters

Charles Sheeler said what he himself wanted to say and not what others were saying. He said it in paintings and photographs with economy, with self-restraint, and with a precision that was inspired by the unflinching honesty of his vision. (Though he certainly had the temperament of an artist, I often saw him in imagination as a sort of hero-scientist.) His voice was always low-keyed, and therefore some thought him limited, in range of interest, or as colorist. But all his art reflects his courageous intelligence and his probing eye documenting nature, man's craftsmanship, and the environment of the Machine Age in America. Sheeler's work is pure enough, and no sermonizing about it; yet its intellectual overtones reverberate for us. He will be valued and revalued by the historians of our civilization, and in the end he will be placed in the front rank of those artists who helped create a distinctively American School some fifty years ago.

My friendship with Sheeler dates back to 1923, when I returned to New York after two Wanderjahre in Europe, bringing with me the expatriate review Broom: An International Magazine of the Arts. My youthful literary associates and I had been recently exposed to the adventurous artists of the School of Paris, and we were looking for modern men in our own country, men who had cast off from the old academic anchorages. We came across some bold unknowns whose work we reproduced, such as John Marin; then we decided to make up a "Sheeler number" of Broom with a few of his hard clean photographs, his paintings of Bucks County barn-abstractions, and his powerful conté crayon of a black telephone, 1923 model, entitled "Self Portrait."

Charles Sheeler at forty had come to New York a few years earlier from his native Philadelphia. He was a tall, spare man with even blue eyes, always clad in gray or brown, drily humorous of speech, and as pithy in his talk about art as were the lines of his drawings. At first glance he looked like a competent engineer or surgeon; there was nothing of the Bohemian about him, and his studio, around the corner from Washington Square, was as neat and precisely ordered as an operating room. Within the cool exterior, nevertheless, there was the playful, emotional Sheeler, who, after the proper study of art at the Pennsylvania Academy under William M. Chase, had made repeated voyages to Europe and, circa 1909, had caught the contagion of Cubism and Futurism. An abstract landscape of his was among several Sheelers exhibited at the Armory Show of 1913 in New York. Of late he had turned again to painting unreduced natural forms, especially still lifes of flowers, though with an eye for their delicate architecture that was informed with the abstractionist method. It was the same with his other pictures of houses or barns, done in the "precisionist" style for which he was to become famous, all of them ingenious studies in the dynamic relations of planes and masses.

In 1923 it was an act of revolutionary faith for young artists to go about saying that a red gasoline pump at a filling station was "more beautiful" than the Mona Lisa. Stuart Davis painted gasoline pumps. Sheeler's drawing of a telephone, treated as an objet trouvé, was something monumental; it was an event. Behind the telephone, reflected in a dark window, was a vague form, a shadow of the artist himself, hence the title: "Self Portrait." At a gallery where it was shown the Irish literary critic Ernest Boyd asked the artist: "Can you tell me why telephones are always black?" Sheeler, with a straight face, replied quickly: "Well, when they were young they must have been green, but after they grew old they all turned black."

At forty, Sheeler had but a small select following, few one-man gallery shows to his credit, and sparse sales at low prices. A shy and proud nature, he sometimes took offense at art merchants and even rich patrons, such as the notoriously close-fisted A. C. Barnes. Around 1912, he said, he took up commercial photography for a livelihood; and after several years became eminent in this field. The engineer-technologist in Sheeler came out strongly in his camera work. In New York he became the collaborator of Edward Steichen. Many of us preferred Sheeler's craftsmanlike photographs of African masks, Chinese jade, fashion models, motor factories, skyscrapers, barn walls, or glassware, to the work of any other living camera man. The photographer and the painter in him became alter egos, and it was sometimes hard to distinguish between them; some artists preferred his highly chiseled photographs to his paintings or drawings. The pitiless camera lens became his eye; and what it saw was of course different from the image caught by the human eye. Sheeler once remarked to me that he tried to use the camera to help him achieve in painting "the precise realism of Van Eyck."

His success as photographer accounts for the relative sparsity of paintings and drawings during the twenty middle years. The Great Depression of the thirties, however, ruinous for advertising and commercial photography, drove Sheeler back to full-time painting. In the spring of 1932 I found him stranded in a sumptuous skyscraper studio in New York, his savings gone, unable to pay his rent. He and his first wife Katherine had always in the past provided their friends with Lucullan feasts; now we had only beans for supper. All about that splendid high-ceilinged studio was a superb collection of Shaker furniture in pine and maple, early American glassware and china, African masks, and even some small pictures by Cézanne, Picasso, Gris, and Sheeler's friend Marcel Duchamp, a collection which some years later would have commanded fantastic prices. The Sheelers, one might say, were literally going hungry in the midst of artistic affluence. Sheeler was an eclectic in the best sense of the term, often enraptured by art works entirely different from his own. Moreover, he thought he could not live without being in daily communion with those marvelous objects he had gathered with his collector's passion and his faultless taste. Their forms, studied thousands of times, made up the subjects of some of his finest drawings and paintings.

At the moment I am speaking of he seemed in despair, and asked me, who was twenty years his junior, what on earth he should do now that all the banks were closing and no commissions for photographs came to him. I looked at his treasures, worth, even in those dark times, many thousands of dollars, and urged him to cut his losses, sell a few things, go to live in the country, and paint pictures. Since he could not bring himself to sell his art objects or Shaker furniture, he disposed of his few last stocks and bonds, and removed to a modest establishment near Ridgefield, Connecticut. There his spirits revived—and he painted some of the best canvases of his mature years, through the nineteen-thirties and forties.

It was at my home one evening that Sheeler met the poet William Carlos Williams, and the two great American artists were drawn together in a friendship that was to last as long as they both lived. Like Williams, Sheeler sought everywhere the "American grain," in the materials of the early craftsmen as in the giant Ford factories by the River Rouge. But Sheeler in general enjoyed seclusion and had relatively few intimates. His habitual reserve with persons he did not know well caused him to be misjudged by some as a bleak sort of fellow. In reality, he was romantic about women, passionate in his attachments to old friends, and generous to a fault.

Some of his paintings of the industrial scene, like "Upper Deck," and "River Rouge Plant," despite their reticence and their classical quality, have decidedly intellectual overtones. In both paintings mentioned he seems to break through into a mysterious, other-worldly environment of purely machine objects and transports the viewer into it. He had the powers of observation of some dedicated scientific searcher. I remember one of his visits to my home in Connecticut, when he awoke at dawn and began to walk about a huge old hourglass elm on the grounds which he observed from every possible angle during the course of two hours. From the windows of our house he could be seen moving now on one side of the tree, now on the other, oblivious to everything else, though he had eaten nothing. At last my wife called him to breakfast. What was he doing out there, she asked. "I was studying the genus tree," Charles answered. As I write these lines that hundred-year-old elm is gone; and just now its giant twin, also admired by Sheeler, a victim of the current blight, has finally been cut down. Good-bye old friends.