Trading His Camera for a Brush

Throughout the 1920s Sheeler was making a decent living as one of New York's more successful commercial photographers. The River Rouge images, which won Sheeler worldwide recognition in advanced artistic circles, started out as part of a publicity campaign for Ford. (It was "the finest photographic commission anybody ever got," according to Edward Steichen, who helped launch Sheeler's commercial career.) The automaker used the deluxe pictures to gin up interest in its advanced manufacturing process, in anticipation of the launch of its top-secret Model A.

Then, in 1931, an art dealer named Edith Halpert got Sheeler to steer away from the low-status world of photography in favor of the high-prestige world of painting and drawing. Many of Sheeler's brilliant later photos and photomontages were treated as preparatory material for his paintings -- which were almost all based on photographs -- rather than works to be shown in their own right. Sheeler's one pioneering film, ignored by the artist himself, survived for decades as a single print buried in an English archive. Halpert's biggest Sheeler client, William Lane, went so far as to buy up Sheeler's entire photographic estate, to suppress and quarantine it. (Ironically, that helped it come down to us intact.)

Rather than go to bat for the new media he'd done so much good work in, Sheeler himself seems to have capitulated to the conservative realities of the American art market, and of bourgeois art appreciation. By aligning himself with the hallowed media of the old masters, and all they represent, Sheeler got to escape from the demanding -- and sullied -- world of modern commercial photography, and even from the questionable world of photographic art. Sheeler didn't repudiate photography. Instead, he positioned himself as looking kindly down on it from his safe perch high up in the "fine" arts: "Photography is promising as a child," he said in 1950, "and there are high hopes for it in its adulthood. Those of us who have been intrigued by acquaintance with a camera are happy to see the application of photography in constantly extended fields."

Instead of abandoning the superb images he'd made as a photographer, Sheeler chose to convert them into labored drawings and finicky, half-dead paintings.

A Doylestown photo like his "Open Door With Dark Mirror" gets some of its force from the sense that it captures a single instant, when the chaos of the world happened to have come together in the order of a modern composition. The enlarged drawing Sheeler made from the photo in 1932, laboriously stippled in black conte crayon over a period of weeks or months, has lost all of that modernist verve. It deliberately looks backward, to an almost medieval love of handicraft for handicraft's sake. Rather than documenting his subject, as his early photograph had done, Sheeler uses the meticulous stippling of early Italian religious art to try to hallow it. One critic declared him a 20th-century Fra Angelico -- not the most daring role to play in 1932.

That strait-laced sanctification also happens in Sheeler's paintings. The Doylestown photograph called "Stairway With Chair" becomes the 1938 oil called "The Upstairs." (Even the title has gained a portentous note in the intervening decades.) The photograph, for all its careful structure, preserves a slew of incidentals, and they speak of a haphazard moment, caught: badly nailed boards, a door whose edge is almost but not quite lined up with the viewer's eye, coarse whitewashing and scuffs. The painting loses almost all of those details: The door's aligned, the boards are flush, edges and surfaces are crisp and clean. Sheeler has turned artful observation into arty obfuscation. His art gets worse the more it's elevated -- and much of that deliberate elevation happens when he paints. In Sheeler's straight photography, even when a factory shot seems to promote boosterish ideas of the Industrial Sublime, there's always going to be dirt on view as well.

As Stieglitz recognized, Sheeler's photography embraces a new way of looking at things and at art. That embrace is part of what it is about. His drawings and paintings prefer to depend on accepted notions of what makes a fine picture fine, and of what might make it sell. That dependence is a big part of what they're about.

Curator Charles Brock argues convincingly that Sheeler wanted to make art for art's sake, divorced from the social world he made it in -- that he was an old-fashioned aesthete in the Whistler mode. Everything about Sheeler's pictures, and his life, proves that such divorces don't work out. The purest aesthetic urge has social meaning, too.