Charles Sheeler American, 1883-1965
Philadelphia-born Charles Sheeler was a well-known precisionist painter and photographer. After studying at the School of Industrial Art in Philadelphia (1900-3), he spent the next three years as a student of painter William Merritt Chase at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts. Around 1910 he took up photography as a way to support himself.
Sheeler began as an architectural photographer, documenting buildings for Philadelphia architects, but was soon taking pictures of paintings and other works of art. He continued to paint (in 1913 a group of his works were exhibited in the famous Armory Show in New York) and to photograph, often using his photographs as the basis for paintings. In 1917 his photographs were included in a three-person show along with Paul Strand and Morton Schamberg at Marius de Zayas's Modern Gallery in New York.
Two years later Sheeler moved to New York and in 1920 collaborated with Paul Strand on the avant-garde film Manhatta (originally titled New York the Magnificent). In 1923 he began working as a staff photographer for Condé Nast publications. Four years later he received his most important commercial commission when Ford Motor Company hired him to photograph its River Rouge plant. A powerful series of images celebrating American industry resulted and were widely published. They also served as an inspiration for a number of his paintings.
In 1939 a small group of Sheeler's photographs were included in a retrospective of his work organized by the Museum of Modern Art, New York. Over the next decade he worked as staff photographer for the Metropolitan Museum of Art and focused primarily on painting in his own work, especially during the late 1940s and 1950s. In 1959, after suffering a stroke, Sheeler stopped painting and photographing; he died six years later from a second stroke. M.M.
