Grace Walker VCU Senior Port: Charles Sheeler

Charles Sheeler was born in Philadelphia in 1883. In 1903 he studied at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, with William Merritt Chase as his professor. After a trip to Paris in 1908 “he experienced his conversion to Cézanne, Picasso, Braque, and Matisse” (Artchive). After returning to Philadelphia, Sheeler began to do commercial photography to support his painting. During this time he worked with Morton Schamberg. It was then that Sheeler’s style began to emerge, he had a “talent for high-definition photography, with stark, plain, and well-Judged masses of tone, [he] shied away from human documentary: he avoided figures in favor of near-abstract subjects, images of anonymous architecture, such as the sides of barns in Bucks County, Pennsylvania - plain American vernacular” (Artchive). Sheeler’s preference of shooting anonymous architecture “came from his belief that a common line of empirical functionalism was the "unseen soul" of American tradition, linking the old barn to the new industrial plant” (Artchive). Sheeler had a long career in photography and painting. In 1927 he was hired by Ford Motor Company to photograph its River Rouge plant. Sheeler was obviously quite impressed with the factory, stating that “Our factories are our substitute for religious expression.” Sheeler photographed the factories in such a way that this could almost be true. “The interiors of the mighty factory buildings are high, clean, invested with a numinous light, and free of all human presences except when they are needed to give scale” (Artchive). Sheeler also expressed his feelings about big industry in his famous painting American Landscape done in 1930. “It holds no nature at all, except for the sky (into which a plume of effluents rises from a tall smokestack) and the water of a dead canal. Whatever can be seen is man-made, and the view has a curious and embalmed serenity, produced by the regular cylinders of silos and smokestack and the dark authoritarian arms of the loading machinery to the right” (Artchive). Charles Sheeler died in 1965, at the age of 81.