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The Problematic Past in the Work of Charles Sheeler, 1917–1927

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 April 2011

DAVID PETERS CORBETT
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Abstract

This article examines the place of the past in Charles Sheeler's photographs and paintings made in Doylestown, Pennsylvania, around 1917, in New York City during the 1920s, and in the short film of New York, Manhatta (1921), which he made with the photographer Paul Strand. It situates these works in the context of the scholarship on Sheeler and on the art of New York in the early twentieth century, in particular that of the Ashcan School and of visual representation which attends to the architectural fabric of the city in preference to depicting its inhabitants. The article argues that although the scholarship has identified Sheeler's interest in making connections with the American past, it has not recognized the fraught nature of that relationship. By looking at the Doylestown and New York pictures, the analysis demonstrates how the problematic status of the past for Sheeler appears in these works as hauntings and absences.

Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of American Studies , Volume 45 , Issue 3 , August 2011 , pp. 559 - 580
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2011

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References

1 Jan-Christopher Horak, “Paul Strand and Charles Sheeler's Manhatta,” in Jan-Christopher Horak, ed., Lovers of Cinema: The First American Film Avant-Garde, 1919–1945 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1995), 267–86, 279.

2 On this and artistic approaches to Manhattan at this time see Wanda Corn's seminal article “The New New York,” Art in America, 61 (July–Aug 1973), 59–65Google Scholar.

3 Karen Lucic, Charles Sheeler and the Cult of the Machine (London: Reaktion, 1991), 51.

4 For an excellent contextualization of Sheeler in relation to representation of Manhattan around this time see Hirshler, Erica, “The ‘New New York’ and the Park Row Building: American Artists View an Icon of the Modern Age,” American Art Journal, 21 (Winter 1989), 4, 26–45CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

5 Thomas Bender, The Unfinished City: New York and the Metropolitan Idea (New York: New Press, 2002), p. 104. John Fagg's review essay, “Seeing History/Showing Seeing in Ashcan School Painting,” Journal of American Studies, 43 (2009), 3, 535–42CrossRefGoogle Scholar, which discuss Bender's ideas, also provides a helpful critical assessment of current thinking on this topic.

6 For Fagg's powerful reading of New York as “an attempt to depict the city in an anecdotal idiom,” see “Anecdote and the Painting of George Bellows,” Journal of American Studies, 38 (2004), 3, 473–88Google Scholar, 487.

7 On the attribution of specific stills and compositions in the film to Sheeler, see Karen E. Haas, “‘Opening the Other Eye’: Charles Sheeler and the Uses of Photography,” in Theodore E. Stebbins, Gilles Mora and Karen E. Haas, The Photography of Charles Sheeler: American Modernist (Boston: Bullfinch Press, 2002), 120–21.

8 On the visual culture of the El see Douglas Tallack, New York Sights: Visualizing Old and New New York (Oxford, Berg: 2005), chapter 3.

9 Rebecca Zurier, Picturing the City: Urban Vision and the Ashcan School (Berkeley, University of California Press, 2006), 103.

10 Hirshler, 35; Juan A. Suarez, Pop Modernism: Noise and the Reinvention of the Everyday (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2007), 50.

11 Wanda Corn, The Great American Thing: Modern Art and National Identity, 1915–1935 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), 166.

12 This is one of the images the still versions of which were in Sheeler's possession at his death, and which are accordingly attributed to him rather than to Strand. See Haas, 120–21.

13 Lucic, Charles Sheeler and the Cult of the Machine, 40. For a very recent example of this view, see Bernard Schultz, “National Identities: The Synthesis of the Urban and the Rural in the Work of Charles Sheeler,” in Barbara Haskell, ed., Modern Life: Edward Hopper and his Time (Munich: Hirmer Verlag, 2009), 62.

14 See Corn, Great American Thing, chapter 6.

15 See, for example, Casey Nelson Blake, Beloved Community: The Cultural Criticism of Randolph Bourne, Van Wyck Brooks, Waldo Frank, and Lewis Mumford (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1990); Richard H. Pells, Radical Visions and American Dreams: Culture and Social Thought in the Depression Years (New York: Harper and Row, 1973).

16 The painting was in a private collection in Bryn Mawr, PA in 1923. See Catalogue of an Exhibition of Portraits by Charles Willson Peale, and James Peale, and Rembrandt Peale (Philadelphia: Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, 1923), 204.

17 Karen Lucic, Charles Sheeler in Doylestown: American Modernism and the Pennsylvania Tradition (exhibition catalogue) (Allentown, PA: Allentown Art Museum), 1997, 13.

18 See Charles Brock, Charles Sheeler: Across Media (Berkeley: National Gallery of Art, Washington, in association with University of California Press, 2006), 23.

19 In a very rich discussion of these photographs Karen Lucic notices these “haunting” qualities, attributing them to “reflections on a condition of existence that hovers between a sense of homelessness and secure dwelling.” Karen Lucic, “The Present and the Past in the Work of Charles Sheeler,” Ph.D. dissertation, Yale University, 1989, 67.

20 Jeffrey Andrew Weinstock, ed., Spectral America: Phantoms and the National Imagination (Madison WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 2004), 7–8; 14.

21 Avery Gordon, Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 8, cited in Weinstock, 7.

22 Van Wyck Brooks, “On Creating a Useable Past,” in idem, Van Wyck Brooks: The Early Year, A Selection from His Works, 1908–1921, ed. Claire Sprague (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1968), 223.

23 Van Wyck Brooks, The Wine of the Puritans: A Study of Present-Day America (London: Sisley's, 1908), 141.

24 Ibid., 142.

25 Casey Nelson Blake, Beloved Community, 76.

26 Ibid., 77.

27 Susan Hegeman, Patterns for America: Modernism and the Concept of Culture (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999), 70.

28 Brooks, “On Creating a Useable Past,” 223.

29 The outcry over the vast, seven-acre, shadow cast by the Equitable Building at 120 Broadway was directly responsible for the city's 1916 zoning laws. See Hirshler, 45 n. 20.

30 Dana Luciano, Arranging Grief: Sacred Time and the Body in Nineteenth-Century America (New York: New York University Press, 2007), 2.

31 See, for a helpful recent discussion, Mark Rawlinson, Charles Sheeler: Modernism, Precisionism, and the Borders of Abstraction (London: I. B. Tauris, 2007).

32 Schultz, “National Identities,” 62.