'Sheeler': Look Past the Perfection

By Michael O'Sullivan
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, May 26, 2006; Page WE47

In art-historical terms, the artist Charles Sheeler (1883-1965) is traditionally considered a precisionist, suggesting that his interests lay, at least partly, in the meticulous rendition of physical space. This has never been wholly true, as even the small and generally uncritical exhibition "Charles Sheeler: Across Media," on view at the National Gallery of Art, makes clear -- to those with the time and inclination to look deeply, anyway.

Many viewers, nevertheless, will come away from what Earl A. Powell III, director of the National Gallery, calls "a celebration of the formal clarity and beauty of the artist's works" impressed mostly by Sheeler's seemingly razor-sharp draftsmanship, as evidenced by his drawings and paintings of domestic interiors, the New York City skyline and industrial America, most notably the Ford plant in River Rouge, Mich. With the exception of Sheeler's quasi-abstractions -- based on architectural photographs taken by the artist and helpfully included in the show -- the exhibition barely acknowledges Sheeler's departures from photographic realism. "Visual puzzles" abound, we are told, in the 1943 painting "The Artist Looks at Nature," but the "discrepancies of scale" between the foreground self-portrait, the house in the upper left and the walled moat that runs between them are just the more obvious ones.

Elsewhere, shadows sometimes fall in subtly impossible ways. Single images -- such as the 1938 oil-on-canvas painting "The Upstairs," based on Sheeler's 1917 photo "Doylestown House -- Stairway With Chair" -- exhibit perspectives that follow multiple vanishing points, none of which exactly match those in the gelatin silver print. On cursory inspection, Sheeler's art looks perfect, but the math often doesn't add up.

That's because Sheeler, who was sometimes accused of being nothing more than a copyist of photographs, was using a calculus other than that of the eye, or even of the more clinical camera lens.

It's this all-but invisible illogic, more than the famous absence of people from Sheeler's pictures, that gives his art its not-of-this-world flavor. Aside from four pieces in which Sheeler himself appears -- a straightforward 1924 pastel self-portrait; a 1923 conte crayon, gouache and pencil drawing of a telephone (in which the artist's reflection can be dimly glimpsed in the background window); a 1931 photograph of the artist at his easel; and the aforementioned "The Artist Looks at Nature" -- Sheeler depicts virtual ghost towns. New York pedestrians may appear in "Manhatta," a short 1920 film collaboration by Sheeler and photographer Paul Strand that was made as a paean to the Big Apple, but they are antlike design elements as much as subjects.

"Photography is nature seen from the eyes outward," Sheeler noted in 1938, "painting from the eyes inward." From 1931 on, the artist, at the urging of dealer Edith Halpert, began to emphasize that distinction, devoting more energy to painting, and soft-pedaling its roots in his own photography. His art began to move more strongly in the direction of abstraction, even as it retained its ties to the real world. This is nowhere more true than in Sheeler's series of paintings and "improvisations" based on New England mill-town architecture, whose three-dimensional forms and shadows have been boiled down to little more than a geometric interplay of angles.

And yet the beginnings of that disregard for what might be called "factual" space can be seen in some of the earliest pictures on view. Take a look at Sheeler's 1920 "Church Street El," whose stark jumble of flattened forms, ostensibly representing an elevated New York train track and its surrounding skyscrapers, were lifted directly from a still in "Manhatta." It foreshadows the compositional discordances that Sheeler would be playing with almost 30 years later, in "Amoskeag Mill Yard #1" and "Amoskeag #2," both from 1948.

While less than photo-realism, "Church Street El" is still recognizably based on a movie still. At the same time, as with much of Sheeler's art, forms appear to have shifted ever so slightly, almost like a house that has settled.

There's a stillness in Sheeler's art that's haunting. Even in his pictures of inert factories and houses, their power doesn't lie in the stillness of photography, which often embalms its subjects, making them seem more dead than they were to begin with. Rather, it lies in the stillness of something hidden, something holding its breath for fear of being discovered, and that can be seen only by those willing to watch long enough to paint them.