Charles Sheeler and the Cult of the Machine

Precisionism was a modernist art movement during the 1920s and 1930s in the United States, in which painters produced a ‘‘machine aesthetic’’ by rendering precise, geometrical forms in their works. A group of American painters originally called ‘‘The Immaculates,’’ the Precisionists celebrated new industrial landscapes of skyscrapers, factories, bridges, and other mechanized phenomena. Although they were never a formalized school and worked without a manifesto, Precisionism reflected both the exciting dynamism of the ‘‘Roaring Twenties’’ as well as the streamlined simplicity of the Great Depression. Their images produced an ambivalent attitude toward mechanization, at once praising its efficiency while condemning its dehumanization. Appearing immediately after a host of other influential modernist movements such as Cubism and Futurism, Precisionists merged the impulse toward abstraction with a photographically realistic eye. While no artist worked exclusively as a Precisionist, there were several for whom it was a formative style. Perhaps the most prolific artists who produced Precisionist works were Charles Sheeler, Charles Demuth, and Georgia O’Keeffe. Together, these three painters and several others created a distinctly American brand of imagery that was a celebration of nationhood as much as a celebration of mechanization.

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City Space, Technology, Popular Culture: The Modernism of Paul Strand and Charles Sheeler's Manhatta

Journal of American Studies ◽

10.1017/s0021875802006783 ◽

2002 ◽

Vol 36 (1) ◽

pp. 85-106 ◽

Cited By ~ 16

Author(s):

JUAN A. SUÁREZ

Keyword(s):

New York ◽

Urban Landscape ◽

Suspension Bridges ◽

Space Technology ◽

Avant Garde ◽

High Rise ◽

City Space ◽

Charles Sheeler ◽

History Of ◽

The City

Reputedly, painter Charles Sheeler and photographer Paul Strand's Manhatta is the first significant title in the history of American avant-garde cinema. It is a seven-minute portrait of New York City and focuses on those features which make the city a modern megalopolis – the traffic, the crowds, the high-rise buildings, the engineering wonders, and the speed and dynamism of street life. The film strives to capture rhythmic and graphic patterns in the movements and shapes of cranes, trains, automobiles, boats, steam shovels, suspension bridges, and skyscrapers. Due to the dominance of technology, the entire urban landscape appears in the film as a machine-like aggregate of static and moving parts independent from human intention.

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Charles Sheeler Reveals the Machinery of His Soul

American Art ◽

10.1086/424340 ◽

1999 ◽

Vol 13 (2) ◽

pp. 27-57 ◽

Cited By ~ 8

Author(s):

James H. Maroney

Keyword(s):

Charles Sheeler

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On the Threshold: Charles Sheeler's Early Photographs

Prospects ◽

10.1017/s0361233300006074 ◽

1995 ◽

Vol 20 ◽

pp. 227-255

Author(s):

Karen Lucic

Keyword(s):

Human Subject ◽

External World ◽

Charles Sheeler ◽

Rouge River

Charles Sheeler, like most American modernists of his generation, avoided the human subject. Instead his paintings and photographs focus upon inanimate objects that range from the Shaker furniture seen in Home Sweet Home (Figure 1) to the Ford factory buildings depicted in Rouge River Plant (Figure 2). These depopulated subjects have established Sheeler's reputation as an impersonal celebrant of the functionalist tradition in American design. But on close examination, the images also reveal understated longings and fears; they function as metaphors for a psychological confrontation with the external world.

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