Trading His Camera for a Brush
Charles Sheeler Took Masterly Photos, and Then an Unwise Leap

By Blake Gopnik
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, May 7, 2006

Every last move an artist makes -- every last move -- has social and political implications. Draw a female nude, and you're not just depicting an attractive chunk of biomass. You're invoking the entire history of gender politics, and how that has panned out in art. Choose to paint in watercolor, and you're not just working in a pretty medium. You're calling to mind a whole bunch of associations that watercolor has with decorous gentility. You can fight those associations; your work might even manage to outshout them. But you can't pretend such social realities, or your struggle against them, simply aren't present in your art.

This notion has special traction in "Charles Sheeler: Across Media," an interesting new exhibition that opens today at the National Gallery. It shows one of this country's leading artists working in photography, film, drawing and painting, sometimes rendering precisely the same image in each medium. And it shows how much social baggage each one had, and has.

Until relatively recently, Sheeler was best known as a painter, one of the leaders of the precisionist school that held sway in American art between the two world wars. But for a couple of decades now, as painting has lost its lofty place as the artistic medium, he has mattered more as a pioneer of photographic modernism.

A photo such as his "Criss-Crossed Conveyors," shot in 1927 at Ford Motor Co.'s 1,100-acre River Rouge plant, is a great work of 20th-century art -- more significant, in the long run, than any Sheeler oil. It shows how photography, the signature medium of modern life, could apply the abstract principles and complexities of radical modernist painting -- all asymmetry, diagonals and freakish spatial games -- to some of reality's grittiest subjects. The modern world itself could be a source of modern forms; they didn't have to be abstracted out of it in paint.

Earlier Sheeler photographs are almost as important and innovative. By 1917, when he was 34, Sheeler had produced a series of photographs of the spare interior of a small whitewashed Quaker house in Doylestown, Pa. Alfred Stieglitz, the great photographer, art dealer and photographic publisher, championed -- and exhibited -- these pared-down images as part of a bold new push toward valuing straight photography as art. Artistic photography didn't have to try to look and feel like mushy, romantic painting (the pictorialist option that Stieglitz himself had once promoted). It could celebrate the directness, precision and completeness that was a special trademark of the photographic view.

Though Sheeler's Doylestown interiors are carefully staged and lit, they're piggybacking on the fact that photography, unlike other forms of art, can also pretend simply to document the world.

The most famous Doylestown photo, called "The Stove," is certainly a masterly example of modern composition, with its contrasting planes of white and gray, and its stove as a looming stripe of black that cuts the picture right in half. But it also is full of incidental details -- dirt around a door handle, cracks in the wood floor, a mucky pan under the stove -- that push against its artifice-filled paring down. That tension between document and art is one thing that makes a Sheeler photo great.

Sheeler's only movie, called "Manhatta," has some of those same qualities. He made it in 1920, in collaboration with Paul Strand, another of Stieglitz's stable of straight photographers. It is said to be the first self-consciously avant-garde film made in the United States.

The 10-minute movie consists of 65 separate shots that together build a composite image of a single day in New York. We get a view of commuters pouring off a ferry; of tugs docking an ocean liner; of skyscrapers and trains and rushing businessmen. The camera barely moves, and the cutting is surprisingly placid -- it has more in common with a slide show than with the kind of frantic editing that dada films were going for in the 1920s. (For a while, Sheeler moved in the most radical dada circles in New York, but he never really joined in their artistic chaos.)

To Sheeler and Strand, it seems to be the movement in the world that matters -- all those rushing feet and boats and scudding clouds of smoke, as unprecisionist as anything could be -- and their movie camera simply works to frame it in the most dynamic way.

Here's the strange thing: Had we left it up to Sheeler and his dealer and principal patron, we might never have seen much of this wonderful stuff.

Sheeler had started his career as a painter -- he showed Cezanne-ish oils in the famous Armory Show in 1913 -- and kept that identity intact even when his photographs were gaining recognition. In 1921, Stieglitz warned Strand that Sheeler would likely take -- or at least get -- all the credit for "Manhatta" because "it is one of those ticklish questions when one of two is an 'artist' and the other only a 'photographer.' " The tensions that resulted led to a break between Sheeler and the other two men, though he continued to take photographs.

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.