CHARLES SHEELER AND THE MACHINE AGE.
Item
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Title
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CHARLES SHEELER AND THE MACHINE AGE.
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Identifier
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AAI8112353
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identifier
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8112353
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Creator
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YEH, SUSAN FILLIN.
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Contributor
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Milton W. Brıown
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Date
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1981
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Language
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English
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Publisher
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City University of New York.
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Subject
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Fine Arts
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Abstract
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From the 1920's to c. 1945, painter/photographer Charles Sheeler (1883-1965) produced paintings, drawings and watercolors that fused aesthetic concerns with his admiration for machinery and the industrial landscape, subjects he valued as examples of harmony in the universe. In these works, Sheeler consolidated his investigations into Cubism and the influence of paintings by contemporaries, especially the painters then called the "Immaculates," now known as the "Precisionists." He also drew on unconventional artistic sources, taking visual material from the worlds of advertising and engineering, as well as from his own photographs. Sheeler's paintings of 1929 to c. 1945 are perhaps the strongest and most original of his career. Earlier, he had experimented in a succession of avant garde styles deriving from Cezanne, Cubism and Synchromism. Later, in the 1940's and 1950's, the work was often a thematic reprise and took its semi-abstract style from accidents derived from Cezanne, Cubism and Synchromism. Later in the 1940's and 1950's, the work was often a thematic reprise and took its semi-abstract style from accidents derived from photographic techniques. Sheeler saw himself as living in an industrialized world: he felt a responsibility to come to grips with the "Spirit of the Age," and expressed it in his art as a "machine aesthetic." Hence his subjects of the 1920's and 1930's--factory scapes and interiors--were topical in their references. These images were embodied in a camera-based realist style, which like Sheeler's subjects, was his response to a Machine Age Zeitgeist. Style and subjects alike lend themselves to an iconographic analysis and iconological interpretation, an approach which points towards a new interpretation of Sheeler's machine, machine-derived and industrial themes.
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Type
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dissertation
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Source
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PQT Legacy CUNY.xlsx
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degree
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Ph.D.
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Program
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Art History
