Charles Sheeler (1883–1965) is recognized as one of the founders of American modernism and one of the master photographers of the twentieth century. His work is synonymous with precisionism, a crisp, clean, hard-edged style that reconciled cubist abstraction and the machine aesthetic of Marcel Duchamp with American subject matter. This beautifully illustrated book, created to accompany the exhibition of Sheeler's work, features detailed analyses of the artist's media and working methods. Focusing on the complex, often paradoxical relationships among photography, film, drawing, printmaking, and painting that were central to Sheeler's art, the book traces critical points in his trajectory, beginning with a small selection of his seminal photographs, circa 1917, of the interior of an eighteenth-century Quaker fieldstone house in Doylestown, Pennsylvania. Sections are also devoted to the 1920 film Manhattan, made in collaboration with Paul Strand; a series of commercial photographs of the Ford Motor Company's River Rouge factory (1927); the enigmatic painting The Artist Looks at Nature (1943) and its related works; and, finally, a group of mill subjects from the 1940s and 1950s that experiments with photomontage.
240 pages, 49 color, 171 duotones | 8 x 11.5 inches
