Charles Sheeler: Modernism, Precisionism and the Borders of Abstraction

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Charles Sheeler

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Charles Sheeler Modernism, Precisionism and the Borders of Abstraction

Mark Rawlinson


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Published in 2008 by I.B.Tauris & Co Ltd 6 Salem Road, London W2 4BU 175 Fifth Avenue, New York NY 10010 www.ibtauris.com In the United States of America and Canada distributed by Palgrave Macmillan, a division of St Martin’s Press 175 Fifth Avenue, New York NY 10010 Copyright © Mark Rawlinson 2008 The right of Mark Rawlinson to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patent Act 1988. All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in a review, this book, or any part thereof, may not be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, eletronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the proior written permission of the publisher. ISBN

970 1 85043 901 1 (hb) 970 1 85043 902 8 (pb)

A full CIP record for this book is available from the British Library A full CIP record is available from the Library of Congress Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: available Typeset by JCS Publishing Services Ltd, www.jcs-publishing.co.uk Printed and bound in Great Britain by TJ International Ltd, Padstow, Cornwall


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Contents

List of Illustrations

vii

Introduction

1

1

Musing on Primitiveness

8

2

A Photograph, a Drawing and a Painting: Sheeler’s New York Series

44

3

The Disappearing Subject: Self-Portrait

77

4

Is it Still Life? Sheeler, Adorno and Dwelling

99

5

Between Commission and Autonomy: Sheeler’s River Rouge

128

6

Late Work/Late Style

164

Afterword

180

Notes

182

Index

207


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Illustrations

Black and White Figures

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25


Side of White Barn, Bucks County 9 Barn Abstraction 10 Doylestown House: Stairwell 36 Doylestown House: Stairway with Chair 37 Doylestown House: Interior with Stove 40 New York, Park Row Building 46 New York 47 Dan Mask, Female Style, Ivory Coast 56 Frances Picabia, Here, This is Stieglitz Here (Ici, C’est ici Stieglitz) 82 Morton Schamberg, Mechanical Abstraction 84 Morton Schamberg, Telephone 85 African Musical Instrument 105 Still Life and Shadows 107 Cactus 108 Tulips and Etruscan Vase 115 Criss-Crossed Conveyors – Ford Plant 130 Ingot Molds, Open Hearth Building – Ford Plant 131 135 Ingot Molds, Open Hearth Building – Ford Plant detail Upper Deck 149 Canal with Salvage Ship – Ford Plant 157 Rolling Power – Power-series 167 The Artist Looks at Nature 171 Ballardvale Mill, Close Up with Raking Shadows 174 Counterpoint 177 Ore into Iron 178

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viii

Illustrations

Colour Plates appearing between pages 88 and 89

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12


Flower Forms Church Street El Skyscrapers (formerly known as Offices) Self-Portrait View of New York Interior Home, Sweet Home American Landscape Classic Landscape Ballardvale New England Irrelevancies Aerial Gyrations

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Introduction

The identification of familiar objects comprising a picture is too often taken for an appreciation of the work itself and a welcome opportunity for a cessation of investigation. Charles Sheeler1

Charles Sheeler’s work has been lauded as exemplary and Precisionism, the art historical category with which his work is synonymous, occasionally accorded the distinction of being the first original modern art movement in twentieth-century American art. Equally, Sheeler’s precisionist art and Precisionism as a wider art historical movement have been derided as derivative; a weak and stylised interpretation of Cubism, bereft of the latter’s intellectual core, and too much in the sway of the culture industry’s mythologising of American monopoly capitalism. Situated somewhere between these oppositional accounts is yet another Sheeler: avant-garde in his principles, yet resolute in the pursuit of a form of realism over pure abstraction; unashamedly bewitched by the technological advances of his age, yet fearful of their consequences; a man with one eye on modern design and architecture, the other fixed on traditional crafts and architecture, especially those of the Shaker communities. Consequently, what distinguishes the artist’s attitude towards American modernity is neither criticism nor hyperbolic proselytising but ambivalence. And this seems a fair assessment. Sheeler’s selfcommentary reveals an artist often conflicted, unable to resolve fully the more incompatible aspects apparent between his intellectual position, aesthetic sensibilities and working practices. On paper, the tensions across Sheeler’s work and practice seem suggestive of a more complex series of issues at work in the works themselves. And actually, when one looks very closely at Sheeler’s work, it is exactly these tensions that, I will argue throughout this book, reveal the works themselves as being far from ambivalent. My emphasis in this volume, then, is not to offer yet another critical biography of Sheeler but to focus much more on the

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Charles Sheeler

works themselves in order to move beyond an ‘appreciation’ of the work and towards further investigation. The majority of Sheeler criticism shares one thing: the emphasis on contextualising the artist’s career in terms of his engagement with industrial subject matter or, more obviously, the machine age. Sheeler’s career highpoint is conceived to be around 1931, the period in which he produced those works most readily associated with the artist, and the works that have come to define an American appreciation of the industrial landscape; namely, Classic Landscape and American Landscape. These paintings in particular have become one-stop illustrations of the so-called machine-age aesthetic, a style and approach that tends also to be referred to as Precisionism. And though Precisionism is characterised most ably by works such as American Landscape, similar characteristics can be found in the work of other artists from the period, including Charles Demuth, Georgia O’Keeffe, Elsie Driggs, Ralston Crawford and even Joseph Stella, to name a few. None of these artists ever considered themselves as part of a group, so the longevity of Precisionism as a means to link these artists through an interest in a specific type of content – industrial subject matter – and a shared style of artistic form, which Karen Tsujimoto calls ‘reasoned abstraction’, is interesting.2 The initial association between precision and Sheeler’s work came about simply because his work was visually precise in comparison to the ‘still popular works of Lawson, Chase, Redfield, or Warner’.3 From the 1920s onwards, the relationship between precision and Sheeler’s style was cemented almost inevitably as links between his practice – painting from photographs – and his subject matter – skyscrapers/factories/ machines – determined. The similarities between Sheeler’s technique and his subject matter not only compounded the image of the artist’s work as precisionist but became the blueprint for Precisionism: Sheeler’s industrial works become archetypal. Clearly, there are reasons for such a sustained conflation of an artist’s practice with a cultural period like the machine age, the most obvious being that modern artists are expected to be engaged with the most pressing issues of their day: in this case, the impact of technology and the machine on American culture. For Milton Brown, the predominance of industrial and mechanical forms in America meant it was a logical and natural home for the artist alive to ‘the material results of this development visible on all sides and integral to normal existence’.4 Similarly vocal were European emigrés Marcel Duchamp and Francis Picabia who, on their arrival in America during the early part of the twentieth century, confirmed Brown’s observation. ‘Since machinery is the soul of the modern world and since


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Introduction

the genius of machinery attains its highest expression in America,’ Picabia argued, ‘why is it not reasonable to believe that in America the art of the future will flower most brilliantly’. The 1939 retrospective of Sheeler’s work at the Museum of Modern Art was in recognition of Sheeler’s ‘unique contribution to American art’, particularly his ‘industrial scenes which were felt by many to be the complete summations of American environment and sensibility’.5 Simply put, Sheeler was at the forefront of this future when he found his major subject in the industrial landscape of America. How true is this? Is Sheeler’s major subject the industrial landscape of America? Is his work the archetype of Precisionism? These questions might seem rather obvious but they are seldom articulated, let alone answered in relation to Sheeler. This is because criticism of the artist and his work often satisfies itself with addressing only the most obvious aspects of the work, rarely questioning the core principles on which most critical accounts are set. Analysis begins with an assumption that Sheeler is solely an artist of the machine age and that his work and career can only be interpreted from the perspective of a machine-age aesthetic. This book challenges these first principles for several reasons. The diversity of Sheeler’s work and practice extends far beyond that which a machine aesthetic can account for. And whilst Sheeler’s work is often identifiably precisionist in terms of both subject matter – architectural, machinic and/or industrial – and form – the emphasis on design and geometric precision – these works seem also to resist their categorisation. The paintings, drawings and photographs that Sheeler made of those most modern entities like New York skyscrapers or of Henry Ford’s River Rouge Plant might share the clean, precise and angular representation of their subject matter, but his style enables the inclusion of objects definitively not modern. These include the architecture of Pennsylvania barns, the Doylestown House and also pre-modern subject matter like Etruscan vases and the traditional crafts of the Shakers. The most significant aspect of this book’s analysis, though, is the focus upon the imprecision and formal dissonance in so many of his works. From Constance Rourke to Wanda Corn, attention has been drawn to anomalies in Sheeler’s work; Sheeler’s windows are rarely transparent and shadows exist in impossible formations. In the past, these have been viewed as cryptic elements, something akin to visual puzzles, but little more. I argue that these anomalies, whether imperfections in representation or quite drastic alterations to the properties of objects like glass, are significant and crucial for the re-imagining of Sheeler’s aesthetic and his work. This re-imagining will draw on the aesthetic


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Charles Sheeler

theory of Theodor Adorno, a philosopher who insists that inconsistency, error and failure in a work – dissonance – should draw closer attention rather than encourage its glossing over. In this way, the book’s critical framework is mainly drawn from the aesthetic theory of Theodor Adorno. The reasons for this are straightforward, unlike Adorno’s writings themselves. From the outset it was clear to me that Adorno’s writings on aesthetics and modern art resonate with Sheeler’s work. Most obviously there are Adorno’s criticisms of the culture industry and Fordist/Taylorist doctrine explored in Dialectic of Enlightenment, co-authored with Max Horkheimer; these are impossible to ignore in respect of an artist commissioned by the Ford Motor Company to photograph the River Rouge. If this was not concern enough, then Sheeler’s later paintings of the Rouge, shown as a gleaming industrial landscape, evoking an impossible serenity and produced at the height of the Depression, are highly problematic. Adorno’s writings offer the chance to re-imagine Sheeler’s work because of his emphasis on the artwork and its modes of production rather than on biographical interpretation or as seeing artworks as a means to psychoanalyse their makers. Adorno’s rigorous analysis of the role of the artwork in society and the capacity of art to critique industrial society, mostly written after his own experience of exile in America, are extremely relevant for an analysis of Sheeler. Central to this study is the attention Adorno pays to the role and means of artistic production, especially his re-evaluation of Walter Benjamin’s concept of mimesis. Adorno’s focus in his aesthetic theory on the production of the artwork rather than on the artist provides a more systematic and theoretical interpretation of Sheeler’s work and its relationship to American modernity. This approach is useful for several reasons. It avoids drawing conclusions based on the artist’s self-commentary, although many are extremely insightful, and places the emphasis on examining what factors shape the construction of the particular artwork. This book argues that the more formal aspects of Sheeler’s constructive technique are loaded with references to the process of rationalisation, the working principle powering all spheres of American modernity, including mass-production and architecture. Crucially, Sheeler’s work is not a simple replication of the techniques of rationality transferred into art but a form of critique that reveals the contradictions inherent in the processes of rationalisation. From the collapse of geometry in his depictions of buildings or the denial in scale of the production process at the River Rouge, Sheeler’s work takes a dissenting line, both literally and metaphorically. In simple terms, the forms and content of Sheeler’s


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Introduction

work are not governed by a geometrically precise technique as is often believed; on the contrary, many works are riddled with imperfections and moments of imprecision that not only question Precisionism as a category but suggest a more negative rather than ambivalent encounter with American modernity. Adorno’s aesthetic theory allows connections to be made between the artwork and its relationship to these ongoing processes in American society, and Sheeler’s artworks’ immanent critique of them through the dissenting line has been unacknowledged or insufficiently developed in previous critiques. On saying this, one of this book’s aims is to re-evaluate Adorno’s aesthetic theory, particularly its emphasis on the autonomous artwork. Sheeler’s work for the culture industry and that related to it are not autonomous in the Adornian sense and might well be judged as incapable of critique. This is because Sheeler highlights how Adorno is wrong about the non-critical nature of art of the culture industry. Instead, the example of Sheeler merely goes to prove that Adorno’s concentration on the larger processes of the culture industry, rather than individual instances of cultural production, excludes work such as Sheeler’s; work that is critical according to Adorno’s own aesthetic theory. Sheeler’s work, therefore, opens one of the more rigid aspects of Adorno’s aesthetic theory to scrutiny and revision. Chapter One, ‘Musing on Primitiveness’, outlines the development and cultural context of Sheeler’s early work and introduces a key theme, namely the problematic status of home. Sheeler’s early period is to a large degree beset by a series of challenges, which include the process of redefinition as a modern artist. As part of this process, Sheeler begins a lifelong engagement with photography and finding a subject for his art; this chapter follows the artist’s break with his education under William Merritt Chase in pursuit of not only a new subject but also a new way of making work. The early period, dominated by imagery of Pennsylvania barns and the Doylestown House, can be defined by Sheeler’s concerted effort to achieve both, drawing on Cézanne, cubism and photography. I argue that this shift in aesthetic sensibilities produces a series of works linked by their engagement with primitive forms, and that these forms are Sheeler’s first philosophical reflection on dwelling. Chapter Two, ‘A Photograph, a Drawing and a Painting: Sheeler’s New York Series’ explores the continuing importance of photography in Sheeler’s work. Through the close examination of three works, a photograph, a drawing and a painting of the same scene – the rear of the Park Row Building, Manhattan – the idea of Sheeler’s work as


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Charles Sheeler

precisionist is examined. All three images reveal a flattening of space and reveal a stripping of extraneous detail through the process of abstraction, a technique that earned Sheeler a reputation as an artist who employed the language of the architect and engineer. But Sheeler’s painting and drawing are riddled with imprecision. Here Adorno’s critique of rationalisation and the principles of modernity, epitomised by functionalism, show how the artwork is able to adopt the language of rationalisation whilst remaining critical of it. In Chapter Three, ‘The Disappearing Subject: Self-Portrait and View of New York’, I advance the critique of Sheeler’s work through the exploration of two images: Self-Portrait (1923) and View of New York (1931). The chapter introduces two important Adornian concepts: the constellation and mimesis. Both these concepts help clarify how the artwork is both constructed and experienced. Adorno’s theory of mimesis explains how the modernist constructed artwork production and aesthetic experience. The chapter studies closely the dialectical relationships in the works between photography and painting, realism and abstraction and subject and object that emerge from Sheeler’s photographic vision, and the surrendering of the self to the work. Chapter Four, ‘Is it Still Life? Sheeler, Adorno and Dwelling’, considers the inadequacy of machine-age readings of Sheeler’s still life works. Through a materialist critique of the genre of still life, I argue that Sheeler’s work engages with the modernist philosophical preoccupation with dwelling and the inability to dwell under the conditions of modernity. Throughout the 1920s, Sheeler’s still life work extends its focus beyond the tabletop and into the interior of the artist’s home. Sheeler engaged with a radical revision of the genre through formal experimentation. Their construction and imprecision complicate the ‘naturalistic’ appearance of the interior images through the sustained experimentation with form and perspective that alludes to a harmonious whole, which is on closer examination an illusion. Chapter Five, ‘Between Commission and Autonomy: Sheeler’s River Rouge’, discusses the impact on Sheeler’s aesthetic of the Ford Motor Company commission to photograph the River Rouge Plant. Despite being produced in the pay of Ford, I argue that both Sheeler’s commissioned images and the later paintings of the Rouge are not, as Karen Lucic suggests, ambivalent in their response towards their industrial subject matter but extremely negative and critical of Fordist rationality. Reading Adorno’s theory of the culture industry against the grain helps disrupt the exclusive concept of the autonomous artwork, the only truly critical artwork, to reveal the capacity for Sheeler’s work to


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Introduction

retain their negatively critical aspect. Close readings of the breakthrough work, Upper Deck (1929), and the Rouge-inspired American Landscape (1930), indicate a level of complexity in the works’ aesthetic beyond an uncritical or ambivalent representation of a technological utopia. I conclude that Sheeler’s work is far from a glorification of American industrial might or an ambivalent response to American modernity but a genuine critique of the rationalisation of culture and society. The final chapter, ‘Late Work/Late Style’, argues for a re-evaluation of Sheeler’s work of the 1940s and 1950s. Criticism of Sheeler’s late period rarely asks difficult questions of works which appear rather staid repetitions of themes and subject matter drawn from earlier works. Recent criticism has, it seems, respectfully disengaged from a more thorough appraisal in order to preserve the reputation of an important artist of the machine age. In this chapter, I argue that the lack of consistency evident in the late works is not necessarily a problem with the artist’s work but rather with the critical expectation. Drawing on Adorno’s work on late Beethoven, this chapter shows that there is much more to Sheeler’s late period than has previously been imagined, but such an understanding requires a significant shift in critical perspective and expectation. In all chapters it is evident that Sheeler’s work is a refined realism that operates at the borderline of abstraction; drawing on photographic realism and cubist abstraction, the tensions inherent in Sheeler’s practice collide to produce works that present an outward appearance of harmony, of precision, but, in the interplay of form and content, the imprecise qualities of Sheeler’s images reveal something disturbing and odd. In the end, Sheeler’s work resists its categorisation and reveals itself to be the undoing of Precisionism.


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Chapter One


Introduction Forming Charles Sheeler’s earliest identifiable aesthetic style are the photographs, drawings and paintings of the Doylestown House and Bucks County barns he produced from c.1915. These works appear towards the end of the artist’s early period; one that begins with his graduation from the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts in 1906, followed by a period of re-education, artistic appropriation, and culminating with arguably his most abstract work, Flower Forms (1917) [Plate 1]. The level of abstraction evident in Flower Forms marks the work out as an anomaly in Sheeler’s oeuvre. However, tracing the development of Sheeler’s aesthetic from its beginnings, through works such as Side of White Barn (1917) [Figure 1] and Barn Abstraction (1917) [Figure 2], to the more abstract Flower Forms reveals the opposite. As an expression of primitive form, or ur-formen form, Flower Forms is an extension of rather than a diversion from the aesthetic Sheeler developed through his Doylestown House and Bucks County barn works.1 Because of the status of Flower Forms, emphasis in the past has dispensed with the need to situate the work in a critical framework, evading the necessity of addressing issues that arise when one considers its similarity to previous work. As an integral part of Sheeler’s aesthetic development, one has to ask why the artist withdrew and retreated from the seemingly inevitable pursuit of pure abstraction. Sheeler’s aesthetic is made up of a combustible mix of primary and secondary elements; one might say that both the foundations and building blocks of his aesthetic are contradictory and, sometimes, counter-intuitive. For example, his works are more than suggestive of an avant-gardist frame of mind – exploring and experimenting in abstraction across media – and yet they appear resolutely traditional, drawing on a recognisable ‘real’ world, one rooted in the vernacular and the commonplace. The point is that beyond, say, a simple dialectical tension at work between painting and photography in Sheeler’s aesthetic, or between European modernist theory and American realism, there are several other tensions

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actively playing out in the artist’s early work. For one, the defining of one’s self as a ‘modern’ artist in America at the beginning of the twentieth century was highly problematic, a problem compounded by the artist’s interest in the relatively new field of artistic photography. Moreover, Sheeler’s modernism is complicated by his active engagement with decidedly non-modernist interests and practices, the most obvious being his studies of the vernacular architecture of Bucks County, Pennsylvania. In essence, Sheeler’s aesthetic is structured around and built on conflict; this chapter argues that what gives Sheeler’s work its dynamism are a

1. Charles Sheeler, Side of White Barn, Bucks County (negative date 1917) Photograph, gelatin silver print Sheet: 20.3 x 25.4 cm (8 x 10 in.) Mount: 50.8 x 38.1 cm (20 x 15 in.) © The Lane Collection Courtesy, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston


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Charles Sheeler

2. Charles Sheeler, Barn Abstraction (1917) Fabricated black chalk on Japanese paper 36.3 x 49.5 cm (14 1⁄8 x 19 1⁄2 in.) Philadelphia Museum of Art: The Louise and Walter Arensberg Collection

series of dialectical tensions, the syntheses of which, and this is crucial, rarely if ever find resolution in harmonious synthesis. This chapter discusses Sheeler’s concentration on so-called primitive forms, the ways in which he ‘discovered’ and then re-presented them, and how we should re-imagine the significance of primitive form in Sheeler’s early work. The aim is to read Sheeler against the grain and argue that there exists a dimension to Sheeler’s work long unacknowledged in criticism.

Appropriation Influence is a rather vague term to describe the kind of debt one artist owes another. It can be a case either of straightforward appropriation, which is something every young artist does, even has to do, in one way or another, to


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get started at all; or a two-sided relationship in the sense that you recognise in another artist something that you have long been searching for without being able to identify or articulate the need. The discovery may relate to only one aspect of the other artist’s work, but it will be central to you. Bridget Riley2

As Benjamin Buchloh notes, ‘all cultural practice appropriates alien or exotic, peripheral or obsolete elements of discourse into its changing idioms’.3 Sheeler’s own early aesthetic appropriations are numerous, but before discussing these specifically, the importance of the appropriation of Sheeler’s work itself requires several lines. The proselytisers of early American modernism, William Carlos Williams and Constance Rourke, are crucial figures in the identification and articulation of an American type of modernism. Their influential criticism of both American modernism and the work of Sheeler was invaluable in creating a blueprint for an understanding of the artist – as well as the historical period of early American modernism – one that continues to influence the reception of his work. Buchloh defines this exact mode of appropriation as ‘motivated by a desire to establish continuity and tradition and a fiction of identity’,4 which in part explains why early American modern artists like Sheeler relied upon figures like Rourke and Williams to explain and justify their modern art. Between Rourke’s biography of Sheeler published in 1938 and Williams’ various contributions to exhibition catalogues, Sheeler’s identity as an American modern artist is born and his work situated within an American artistic tradition. But the birth of the American modern artist had its complications, as Rourke and Williams’ texts reveal. Perhaps the greatest obstacle facing both artists and critics was striking a balance between the theories of modern art coming out of Europe at the turn of the twentieth century and a desire to make an identifiable and specific American modern art. As Arthur Wertheim explains, those artists in New York who saw themselves as moderns, ‘rebelled against the past century’s genteel artistic standards and wanted to replace the older culture with a new indigenous American art and literature more representative of their generation’.5 Modern artists sought to reject the so-called genteel tradition promulgated by the American academies. A major hurdle was the trenchant position of the academies, which remained impervious to the radical changes taking place in European art. The most influential of the academies, the New York-based National Academy of Design, founded in 1825, stuck to its belief in a strict classical education of life drawing and anatomy classes for its students, placing ‘a


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premium on the imitation of nature’.6 For the academies, art was meant to ‘express permanence and continuity – embody divine moral truth and abstract spiritual values’, and to offer a ‘certitude that seemed lacking in a world that was undergoing extensive economic expansion and social change’.7 For the newly formed American moderns, such an attitude was akin to barbarism, and they argued art should above all represent the contemporary world of uncertainty and chaos. However, the chaotic nature of the contemporary world brought about by America’s transition from the production economy of the nineteenth century to the new consumer economy of the twentieth was yet another concern for American moderns. For Lewis Mumford, this new economy affected every aspect of society and culture, making the individual ‘dependent on the market for the satisfaction of his needs, on advertising and mass culture for instruction in the art of living, and on manufactured images for the illusion of reality’. The overall cost was the ‘atrophy of competence, the invasion of everyday life by expertise, and the growth of the universal market that assimilates everything – even art and love – into the apparatus of commodity production’.8 However, Mumford’s criticisms of modernity are not necessarily a straightforward rejection of modernity itself. Rather, Mumford saw a perversion of the principles of modernity, principles lost amongst the rationalised ethos of the pursuit of profit. The core of the problem was the ways in which Henry Ford’s system of mass production (Fordism) and F.W. Taylor’s ‘Scientific Management’ (Taylorism) had inverted the potential of rationalisation toward profit and away from social equality. The problem facing Mumford and Bourne et al. was the fact that the rationalised order of Fordism and Taylorism had strong allies amongst those in power. Calvin Coolidge was a particularly vocal supporter of Ford and his expansionist form of capitalism. ‘Wealth is the chief end of man’, he observed and, more famously, in reference to Ford, he proclaimed: ‘The man who builds a factory builds a temple, the man who works there worships there’.9 Such rhetoric was anathema to many progressive reformers who were actively seeking new ways of thinking about and knowing the world; the adaptation of forms of rationalisation for the public good appeared the most attractive and sensible way.10 Such broad-based interest in the ‘positive’ qualities of rationalisation seemed to suggest that, rather than being blind to the incumbent social antagonisms intrinsic to monopoly capitalism, rationalisation possessed within itself its own remedy. At the forefront of this intellectual movement was the radical publication, The Seven Arts magazine, with which Randolph Bourne was actively involved along with other New York-based radicals.11 Like Mumford, The


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Seven Arts intellectuals believed politics was directly related to culture and that the free enterprise system was antithetical to artistic creation. They were disaffected by a growing culture of rationalised production and consumption, which many saw as detrimental to America’s cultural development; The Seven Arts magazine carried their dissenting voices.12 A key voice in this movement was that of Van Wyck Brooks, who summed up the attitude of the group towards a culture based on consumption and the drive for profit in ‘Young America’. Contra the gushing rhetoric of Coolidge, Brooks described Henry Ford as one of America’s ‘bewildered men’.13 Brooks’ criticism of figures such as Ford was ultimately a concern for an American culture out of step with the real America. ‘I am aware, of course,’ said Brooks, ‘that we have had no cumulative culture, and that consequently the professors who guard the past and the writers who voice the present inevitably have less in common with this country than anywhere in the Old World’.14 Those self-appointed guards of the past, such as the National Academy of Design, were accused of betraying the present and future of modern American culture. Questioning exactly where America was heading, both politically and culturally, the pre-war intellectuals looked to Europe and European modernism. However, the radicals were not interested in importing European culture wholesale; rather, they sought a home-grown American culture, as Brooks’ ‘On Creating a Usable Past’ essay suggested. The development of an American culture was the common goal for political activists, intellectuals and artists. It is the avant-garde movements of experimental artists that are of real interest here, especially in their formulation and prescription of what kind of artist might contribute and develop this American modern culture. ‘Stieglitz was’, as Wertheim notes, ‘interested in creating an indigenous American modern art movement’ and so, too, was William Carlos Williams, who was associated with the Others Group.15 As part of the growing number of experimental artists in poetry, art, literature and theatre, all were related through various groups, such as the Stieglitz and Others Groups, and the salons of Mabel Dodge and Walter and Louise Arensberg. It was Stieglitz who acted as link between Sheeler and the New York scene, but it was William Carlos Williams, the doctor-poet immersed in the New York scene, who discovered in Sheeler and his work the promise of the true modern American artist. As a response to the factors outlined above, Williams identified within Sheeler’s work and practice the ability to represent America through the most modern means. Sheeler as a modern artist aims at ‘Driving down for illumination into the local’, Sheeler ‘gives us . . . a world, of elements


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we can believe in’, according to Williams. Distinguishing Sheeler’s talent is ‘this eye for the thing’, a directness of vision that allows Sheeler to separate ‘the valuable from the impost and to paint that only’. Out of the blur of the real, Sheeler presents to us a world we recognise but do not properly understand. And whilst ‘Pictures are made with paint and a brush on canvas’, Sheeler makes ‘use of the photographic camera in making up a picture’; in doing so, his pictures are deceptively simple objects, strange but familiar: they are enigmatic objects that hold the viewer’s attention because they speak of a place that Americans recognise but are no longer able to experience or engage with in a genuine way.16 If one untangles Williams’ web of simple but cryptic sentences an image forms of Sheeler’s centrality in the development of an Americantype modernism.17 To modern ears, the phrase ‘American modernism’ sounds over-familiar but Williams’ critique of Sheeler is as much about defining the grounds of what constitutes American modern art more widely as it is specifying exactly what is American and modern about Sheeler. ‘There is a source in AMERICA for everything we think and do’, says Williams, whose argument articulates at once frustration with, and an implied solution to, the dilemma facing the American artist at the turn of the twentieth century.18 In short, one can resolutely choose modernism and be modern whilst exploring America or, as Williams would have it, the ‘local’. Time and again, Williams presents Sheeler’s work as an example of this solution: an American artist able to bridge the gap between modernist formal experimentation and the representation of an explicitly American subject matter or content. Likewise, Constance Rourke’s biographical analysis of Sheeler echoes and reinforces Williams, but in less esoteric terms. Rourke’s book, with its rather unsubtle title – Charles Sheeler: Artist in the American Tradition – consistently draws attention to what she argues is the inherent Americanness of Sheeler’s experimental, modernist artworks. Perhaps what are most significant, and which garner considerable acclaim and attention, are the ways in which Sheeler’s practice overwhelms the ‘French influence within his own expression’.19 Neither capitulation to, nor a negation of, European influences, Sheeler’s work answers decisively a key question for Rourke: ‘could [American artists] appropriate these influences and transform them into terms which were genuinely our own’?20 For Rourke, Sheeler symbolises exactly the artist able to translate, assimilate and transform the influence of high European modernism into the language of American art. She concludes in a somewhat familiar tone that Sheeler ‘was working in the American grain, not against


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it’.21 The construction of Sheeler’s aesthetic identity as a vanguard American artist by Rourke is underscored with a determination to write a history of American art in which the turn to modernism is not seen as a radical break from, or a rejection of, American artistic tradition but as a necessary and, to an extent, inevitable facet in American art’s continuing development. In this sense, Sheeler becomes a conduit, receptive and sensitive to European art – whether the Masters or the moderns – as well as rooted and educated in American art, to draw on in America.22 Of course, Rourke’s biography and Williams’ articulation of an American type of modernism serve to reveal that to be modern during this period was, by definition, problematic. This was in part due to the influence of the academies on what constituted art but was also due to the extensive definition of the term ‘modern’ artist. According to Douglas Tallack, the ‘right to be called modern was being contested in the years up to and beyond the Armory Show of 1913 . . .’.23 So the group of artists known as the ‘Eight’,24 realists whose attention found clearest focus on the new urban world, and those associated with Alfred Stieglitz’s gallery, 291,25 could both be called modern. The problem here is that their respective philosophies and approaches to the production and display of their work represent very different means and forms of expression. Being ‘modern’ was, therefore, a rather general state of affairs, where to self-identify as a modern artist meant a public rejection by the artist of the genteel tradition of portraiture, landscape and American impressionism’.26 What initially marks out Sheeler’s work as ‘modern’ is his rejection of his own artistic education under American impressionist William Merritt Chase. Chase taught that true art was about spontaneity, catching the moment, and ‘that great artists painted only from inspiration, a process akin to magic’.27 The result was that ‘the idea of function or use never entered our heads’.28 The realisation that art could be something other than what he had been taught occurred to Sheeler on his return from Europe in 1909. Speaking about the effect on both himself and his travelling partner, Morton Schamberg, Sheeler says: We began to realise that forms could be placed with consideration to their relationship to all other forms in the picture, not merely to those adjacent. We began to understand that a picture could be assembled arbitrarily with a concern for design, and that the result could be outside time, place, or momentary considerations.29

Besides the overt rejection of Chase’s impressionism, Sheeler’s comments are suggestive of new kind of awareness at play in his attitude towards


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producing pictures, an approach that combines the cosmological (‘outside time and place’) and the material. Between 1913 and 1916 Sheeler painted only landscapes and his expressed aim was to ‘communicate his [the artist’s] sensations of some particular manifestation of cosmic order’.30 Troyen and Hirshler identify a work like House with Trees (1915) as the clearest indication of a new direction in Sheeler’s work. Neither a slavish copy of cubism nor traditional realism, the house is rendered simply without ornamentation, a disarticulated row of boxy forms compressed between an enveloping tree line behind and abstracted trees to the front. Within two years, Sheeler replaced the fauvist-coloured densely populated canvases with line drawings on bare white Japanese paper, along with a series of photographs of barns and the interior of the Doylestown House. The source of this inspiring revelation relates to Sheeler’s time spent in Paris, in January–February 1909, where he at once failed to attend any of Leo and Gertrude Stein’s soirées but did manage to see first-hand the work of the early European moderns. Sheeler writes: It was at this time I first saw the paintings of Picasso, Matisse, Braque and Derain . . . and of van Gogh and Cézanne among their immediate predecessors. They were very strange pictures which no amount of description, of which I had considerable in advance, could prepare me for the shock of coming upon them for the first time.31

The ‘shock’ of seeing such ‘strange pictures’ hints at epiphany, but the ‘French influence’, to which Rourke attends such weight, affects Sheeler’s work in a typically refined manner. As one can see in Landscape (1915),32 Sheeler’s appropriation of Cézanne is formal, but his interest in the French artist extends to include the issue of colour, the role of light and also the significance of the way in which space is articulated on the canvas. It is this latter aspect that I want to consider here. Cézanne’s notion of espace, where ‘painting becomes a space . . . a laboratory of productive investigation and experiment, which had less and less relation to the literal spaces of modern life’, is crucial for Sheeler. Abandoning the production in paint on canvas of a world we can see, Cézanne’s paintings are to be judged on their ‘capacity to produce a visual truth’ within the parameters of the frame.33 Here, the work of art emphasises its status as an object in itself, one that does not pretend to be anything other than a work of art and not some window on the ‘real’ world. Free from the constraints of having to perform a role, the artwork as object necessarily reconfigures the parameters of experience and the work


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of art. The redefinition of aesthetic experience as one in which the aim is deciphering a form of ‘visual truth’ requires a productive imagination. Cézanne’s emphases on the experience of the artwork as object and abstract pictorial space in the production of truth resonate with the aesthetic theory of Adorno, where aesthetic experience is determined by a combination of the primacy of the object and an authentic and spontaneous subjective response to the artwork. Adorno’s interest in the artistic process is predominantly oriented towards the activity of art rather than the artist, and with production rather than the producer. Primarily opposed to what he calls the ‘primacy of the subject’ in Enlightenment thought – that the thinking subject can fully comprehend the world in which it exists – Adorno mobilises the ‘primacy of the object’. Although produced by the subject, the artwork is non-subjective, that is, it is not an expression of unique genius because the ‘subject denies its own spontaneity by projecting rational experiences’.34 However, the ‘objectivity of the artwork is nevertheless mediated both by the subject who produces it and by the subject who experiences it’.35 In this way, the primacy of the object is a reformulation of the concept of experience, one that prioritises the object and leads ‘towards experience that really would be experience of the object itself, in all its qualitative complexity’.36 If Cézanne’s notion of espace appears somewhat idealistic, then the term ‘primacy of the object’ is a materialist defence of the possibility of the experience of objective artistic truth. Williams and Rourke’s critiques of Sheeler the artist only hint at the radical nature of his aesthetic; Adorno, however, is more forthcoming when discussing Arnold Schoenberg. For Adorno, Schoenberg’s major accomplishment was the construction of a musical system that ‘self-consciously [drew on] the consequences of music’s historical trajectory’ whilst objectively criticising the social antagonisms inherent in capitalism.37 The antagonisms of capitalist society are for Adorno expressed through artistic form – or more precisely the forms of musical composition – an approach to be explored in greater detail later with regard to Sheeler and cubism/photography. Schoenberg’s work presents itself as a solution to these social antagonisms because it can be seen as a cultural response to a specific stage in the history of capitalism. Reading Schoenberg’s work as cultural critique, Adorno identifies the factors crucial to the composer’s development, factors that also have direct resonances with Sheeler’s work. The advent of Schoenberg’s twelve-tone system marks the great breakthrough in his work, as well as the history of modern music, because ‘the subject dominates music through the rationality of the system, only


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in order to succumb to the rational system itself’.38 Schoenberg’s work on the twelve-tone system is radical because ‘it refuses to perpetuate the myth that autonomous subjectivity any longer exists’.39 Adorno goes as far as to say that ‘Schoenberg’s string quartets and Paramount Pictures’ blockbusters alike manifest in their structures the virtual extinction of critical reason under late-capitalism’.40 The major difference, however, between Schoenberg and Paramount Pictures is that the composer possesses a historical awareness, a self-consciousness, that preserves utopian hope. From an Adornian perspective, Sheeler’s appropriation of Cézanne and cubism combined with photography seem radical to a great degree. However, when Adorno argues that the ‘liberation of modern painting from objectivity (“realism”) . . . was determined by the defensive against the mechanized art commodity – above all, photography’, the issue of appropriation and production in Sheeler’s aesthetic, selfconscious or otherwise, becomes more problematic.41 If Adorno is correct in his identification of the years surrounding the First World War as being ‘nothing more than the history of decline, a retrogression into the traditional’, then, contra Rourke and Williams, Sheeler’s early aesthetic appears a feeble effort.42 One can read Sheeler’s appropriation of Cézanne as straightforward borrowing, his engagement with cubism as subjectively imposed on the form of his work, and the inclusion of photography as regressive anti-modernism rather than progressive modernism. In binding Sheeler so tightly to American tradition, the critiques of Williams and Rourke seem to restrict rather than enhance the artist’s credibility as a modernist. But Adorno’s bias towards pure abstraction does not necessarily discount Sheeler’s formal appropriation of Cézanne, cubism and photography. In fact, it is possible to read Adorno against Adorno, as it were, in order to readdress the genuine significance of Sheeler’s aesthetic and to re-inscribe his modernist credentials.

Adorno and the Form of the Artwork Adorno contends that artworks or, more specifically, autonomous artworks – as socially produced artefacts – are imbued through their production with the negative capacity to reveal the injustice, or in more Adornian terms, the social antagonisms intrinsic to capitalist society. It is worth noting Adorno’s clear distinction between what he sees as the various stages of capitalism: liberal capitalism, monopoly capitalism and late capitalism. Adorno argues that the products of the culture of liberal capitalism actually serve some true or actual need. It is with the advent of


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monopoly capitalism and late capitalism, with the accompanying culture industry, where the nature of the cultural artefact changes irrevocably, serving no cultural function other than the satisfaction of false needs. In Dialectic of Enlightenment, Adorno and Horkheimer argue further that the culture industry defends itself on the basis that its products reflect ‘consumers’ needs’. Invoking Weber, Adorno and Horkheimer claim consumers are caught in ‘a cycle of manipulation and retroactive need’.43 Only the autonomous artwork survives the total onslaught of the culture industry. Adorno explains: The aesthetic force of production is the same as that of productive labour and has the same teleology; and what may be called aesthetic relations of production – all that in which the productive force is embedded and in which it is active – are sedimentations or imprintings of social relations of production.44

The connotations between aesthetic and industrial production in the phrasing are obvious, but simply aligning aesthetic and industrial forms of production reduces the complexity of Adorno’s conception of aesthetic production. Lambert Zuidervaart suggests that Adorno’s model of art as social labour is more nuanced than the above analogy initially suggests. He notes: ‘Artworks arise from society through a dialectic of subject and object. The polarities within autonomous works are thought to stem from a struggle between artists and the materials of art, and to carry the imprint of a general societal conflict between forces and relations of production.’45 Zuidervaart argues that Adorno’s aesthetic theory must account for the interrelation of three dialectical relationships: a dialectic between forces and relations of production in society, within artistic production between artist and materials, and one within artworks between their content and their form. Aesthetic theory is a challenge both to conventional aesthetics and to traditional Marxist definitions of the role of art in society. Adorno redefines rather than abandons the aesthetic categories of ‘beauty’, ‘expression’ and ‘meaning’ through a sociological framework that historicises these categories.46 As noted earlier, what distinguishes Adorno’s understanding of culture and society from the American cultural critics is his Marxism. Adornian Marxism, however, also distinguishes itself from its Marxist contemporaries because of the significance that Adorno attaches to the role of cultural criticism for the critique of capitalist society. As for Marx and Marxism, Adorno shifts the analysis of Marx’s commodity fetish from labour to commercial exchange values in twentieth-century consumer


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society.47 Central to all these concerns, though, is society. In turn, Adorno’s shift away from political economy and towards cultural critique introduces the aesthetic realm that replaces the Marxist revolutionary subject with the autonomous artwork.48 For Adorno, unlike traditional Marxists, art is not simply ideology; it doesn’t just reflect the economic base; it is neither an instrument nor in the service of class domination. The reasons for Adorno’s position, as Paul Apostolidis highlights, lies in the belief that ‘it was both intellectually axiomatic and historically imperative to recognise that theory which dismissed intellectual and artistic phenomena as “mere ideology” . . . was itself ideological’.49 In order to free critique from this crude Marxist position, Adorno calls for an understanding of the subjective experience of the cultural object, an experience that is both empathetic (mimetic) and spontaneous. The reason for this goes to the very centre of Adorno’s thinking and represents a touchstone of his philosophical thinking. In ‘The Actuality of Philosophy’ Adorno argues, ‘whoever chooses philosophy as a profession today must first reject the illusion that earlier philosophical enterprises began with: that the power of thought is sufficient to grasp the totality of real’.50 No other category demonstrates this more obviously for Adorno than the notion of society, which ‘can neither be defined as a concept . . . nor empirically demonstrated’.51 By this, Adorno means that the rational conceptualisation of society results in the necessary exclusion of what is considered irrational. Despite the tone of criticism, Adorno does not suggest that the concept of society should be abandoned. On the contrary, the essay ‘Society’ is an undisguised call for the concept of society to be retained because of its power as a critical tool. As Peter Hohendahl notes, Adorno ‘does not understand the term society [Gesellschaft] as merely empirical and descriptive; rather, he invokes the concept of society to signify the totality of all social relations’.52 In short, society as a category is both dynamic and functional, and as such allows theorisation of the interdependence of the system and the individual. This notion of society links with Adorno’s notion of a sociology of art that ‘embraces all aspects of the relationship between art and society’. Adorno’s aesthetic theory can be seen as the ‘struggle between artists and the materials of art’ that consequently effects ‘the imprint of a general societal conflict between forces and relations of production’ within the artwork to which Zuidervaart drew our attention. Somewhere between these two antagonistic relationships, between the subject and the object, is the act of aesthetic production where art, according to Adorno, becomes ‘a form of knowledge’ and which, crucially, ‘implies knowledge of reality, and there is no reality that is not social’.53 In this sense, artworks ‘know’


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or ‘understand’ the world that forms them because the world imprints itself on the artwork. Adorno ‘holds onto the concept of forces of production as the primary and decisive category for the understanding of social systems, placing his emphasis on the limitations that result from the crystallisation of these forces in specific relations of production’.54 Taking this distinction further, Adorno addresses aesthetic production itself as subject to those same forces, suggesting aesthetic production can be made intelligible through the understanding of it as a form of social production. This is because ‘social struggles and the relations of classes are imprinted in the structure of artworks’;55 the evidence of this can be seen in the fact that ‘new art is as abstract as social relations in truth have become’.56 In order to understand the artwork, Adorno rejects art history in favour of the sociology of art because such an approach to art ‘contains all aspects of the relationship between art and society’.57 Art, for Adorno, operates on two distinct levels that may be described as the textual (art’s language character) and the institutional (the production/reception of the work of art). For Adorno, the social meaning of the work is only accessible through the institutional forces that configure the work of art. In this sense, the artwork is an object, derivative and superficial, and because the artwork is such an object – one that emerges from society through the act of making – Adorno necessarily emphasises production over reception. The category of mediation, which helps Adorno explain the relationship between art and society, becomes mediation between the artist and society where the artwork is seen as a form of social production. This distinction is crucial because, rather than locating art in some transcendent realm, it roots the production of the artwork in the category of social. Aesthetic production, therefore, is both specific and part of the larger process of social production: an individual act of making related to the productive practices found in society’s other institutional practices.58 Artistic production, then, is not simply a mirroring of industrial production, nor is it driven by innovation for the sake of it. Art, if it is to remain autonomous of society as a whole and retain the power of critique, must exist both inside and outside society. What interests Adorno is quite simply the historicity of art, its part in human history and art’s own intrinsic history: ‘the immanence of society in the artwork . . . not the immanence of art in that society’.59 The history of art has reached a point where modern art must be understood in terms of exchange value because ‘the autonomy of art is the equivalent of a split between exchange value and use value in a capitalist economy.


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Such a split creates a world of fetishised objects (commodities) – among them, works of art.’60 The artwork, then, finds itself inside and outside, as a commodity to be exchanged and as an almost cultish object, not reducible to profit but ‘meaning’ something more, something that market capitalism cannot exploit. The ‘something more’ of aesthetic production is the imprint of the truth of society formally manifest in the artwork through artistic production. Adorno believes that ‘artworks organise what is not organised’ through form, suggesting that aesthetic production has the power and ability to harmonise disparate elements of subjective experience that somehow capture an objective, historically bound, truth.61 Bearing in mind that Adorno sees society as an antagonistic whole, it follows that the subject’s or, more specifically, the artist’s experience of society is itself fragmentary and antagonistic. Adorno argues that ‘there is an affinity between the formal configuration of the artwork and the structure of the social system’, an affinity that ‘is grounded in the dialectical relations between forces of production and relations of production’.62 For Adorno, artworks have become commodities in a system governed by the principles of the market and instrumental rationality, a consequence he both laments and accepts as a necessary condition of the Enlightenment’s unfolding. The significance of the commodification of art represents the extent to which all spheres of human life and experience bear the stamp of the dialectic of enlightenment. More than this, though, the commodification of art, and by this Adorno also means the collapse of so-called high art into low art, is a historically specific and unavoidable consequence of the forces of scientific rationality and its influence on society. Adorno argues ‘That artworks are offered for sale at the market – just as pots and statuettes once were – is not their misuse but rather the simple consequence of their participation in the relations of production’.63 Adorno elicits from this situation an understanding of the artwork as both a commodity and a participant in the relations of production. Consequently, the autonomous artwork possesses the ability to critique the rationalised society in which it was produced. As Simon Jarvis notes: ‘Modern works of art are products without an obvious purpose, in a world where everything is presented as existing not for its own sake but for the sake of something else. They thus point to the fact that production is becoming the production of exchange-value for its own sake.’64 It is because artworks fail to offer any kind of answer as to their overall function in society that they should by all accounts disappear.65 The fact that art still exists, despite its uselessness, intrigues Adorno. Taking the precarious position of art as a clue, Adorno attributes


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the continuance of art to the liberation of form in modernism. According to Adorno, ‘The liberation of form, which genuinely new art desires, holds enciphered within it above all the liberation of society, for form – the social nexus of everything particular – represents the social relation in the artwork’.66 Slowly emerging is a picture of the artwork that is at once complicit with bourgeois culture – the artwork as commodity – whilst simultaneously liberating itself from the status quo through form rather than content. Adorno calls this art’s ‘double character’, which, ‘as both social and fait social is incessantly reproduced on the level of its autonomy’.67 Adorno explains that ‘Art’s double character . . . is expressed ever and again in the palpable dependencies and conflicts between the two spheres’.68 As a product of capitalist society, modern art mirrors the system of rationalisation on which it is grounded and can therefore be read as the rationalisation of art. The term rationalisation, with its industrial overtones, imports another concern from Adorno and Horkheimer’s Dialectic of Enlightenment: technology. If modern art – the art of modernity – represents a rationalising aspect in art’s development, then a definite link can be seen to exist between artistic and technological progress (here we might recall the centrality of technology – photography – to Sheeler’s aesthetic development). Before the close reading of Adorno’s strategy of immanent critique, I want to discuss his concept of Cubism in light of the above, with reference to Sheeler’s early work.

Cubism as Critique The nuances of Sheeler’s appropriation of Cézanne have been somewhat overlooked in favour of more obvious formal similarities, which are often categorised as cubist. Just like the use of ‘modern’ in the compound phrase ‘modern artists’ in America at this time, so Cubism found itself a catchall for abstract art of any kind, including Futurism and Fauvism. As Barbara Rose explains, the American public around the time of the 1913 Armory Show had a flimsy grasp of Cubism: ‘Cubism [in America]’, she says, ‘meant little more sharp lines and acute angles. Cubism was seen, not as a new attitude of mind, but in terms of its surface effects.’69 Moreover, at this time in America, Cubism was more readily associated with Cézanne, and not Picasso and/or Braque, a more than helpful observation when it comes to identifying Sheeler’s appropriation of Cézanne and a particular kind of Cubism.70 The most important early works engaged in a mature dialogue with a form of Cubism are the paintings, drawings and photographs of the


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Doylestown House and Bucks County barns. Works like Barn Abstraction and Side of White Barn display a straightforward concern with the underlying formal relationships of the subject matter, tied to varying degrees of disorienting and flattened perspectives. The end-point in this period of experimentation, Flower Forms, reveals, however, that Sheeler’s formal experimentation extends only so far. The drive toward total abstraction – any overwhelming urge to become a Cubist or fully fledged abstract artist – reaches its apogee in Flower Forms. Sheeler, if Rourke is to be believed, mounted a form of psychological defence against the submission of his art to a purely European theoretical movement.71 The need to draw a line, as it were, is evidenced by American versions of Cubism; for Rourke, ‘Our Cubism tended to be studious, literal, ponderous’.72 American Cubism is lacking because, as an approach imported from Europe, American artists tended to submit completely to a ‘style’ of making art only to produce pictures incongruous with American culture. On the genesis of Cubism, Adorno says the following: Cubism could be interpreted as a form of reaction to a stage of the rationalisation of the social world that undertook its geometrical organisation; in these terms Cubism was an attempt to bring within the bounds of experience what is otherwise contrary to it, just as impressionism had sought to do at an earlier and not yet fully planned stage of industrialisation. By contrast, what is qualitatively new in Cubism is that, whereas impressionism undertook to awaken and salvage a life that was becoming numb in the commodity world by the strength of its own dynamic, Cubism despaired of any such possibility and accepted the heteronomous geometrisation of the world as its new law, as its own order, and thus made itself the guarantor of the objectivity of the aesthetic experience . . . It was through Cubism that art for the first time documented that life no longer lives.73

Cubism therefore replaces the Renaissance representational schema, which itself had ‘abandoned the medieval way of representing reality, by means of experiential conceptions [relying] instead on visual perception, one-point perspective and natural light’.74 For Cooper, Cubism disrupts almost four hundred years of the artist painting ‘only what the eye sees of things, incomplete and deceptive as this may often be’.75 In the end, this principle ran its course and exhausted its own possibilities. Its replacement in Cubism, though, surprisingly appeals to an earlier conceptual principle, one in which ‘the artist assumed the right to fill gaps in our seeing, and to make pictures whose reality would be independent of, but no less valid than, our visual impressions of reality’.76


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For Adorno, the perspectival challenges inherent in Cubism, as a distinct artistic movement, are embroiled in the production of the social; as such, Cubism is a mediated dialectical response to changes in the relations of production. The impact of industrialisation and rationalisation on society produces an artistic dialectic that, in the Cubist artwork, reflects the fragmentation of industrial society. This fragmentation of society Cubism captures and expresses through the form of the artwork. Adorno’s argument highlights the distinguishing feature of Sheeler’s formal experimentation with Cubism that, I think, requires a more theoretical consideration. Whereas European Cubism is seen as the end of one visual regime – replacing single-perspective Renaissance visual representation – Sheeler’s appropriation of Cubism apparently resists the wholsesale inclusion of a multi-perspectival visual regime. The reason: the overt influence of photography. At the start of the twentieth century, photography was not considered a legitimate form of expression worthy of the name ‘art’. The photograph, unlike the painted canvas, was considered the result of a different creative process altogether. The photographer merely pointed the camera and released the shutter. The art collector, gallery owner and supporter of the avant-garde, Marius de Zayas, claimed candidly in a 1913 edition of ‘Camera Work’ that ‘photography is not art. It is not even an art. Art is the expression of the conception of an idea. Photography is the plastic verification of a fact.’77 Within just a few months of contending that photography was the ‘mere verification of a fact’, de Zayas modified his position somewhat, asserting instead that ‘Photography is not Art, but photographs can be made to be Art’.78 In his separate statements, not only does de Zayas articulate the major criticisms haunting photography and the photographer throughout its early history – namely, that as a machine, the camera recorded fact and nothing more – but also the speed with which theories of art were evolving during this volatile period. Finally, there is also the point that photographs can be made into art either through an artistic approach when producing the image or when using the photograph as a source or catalyst from which an artist produces art in different media. As part of Sheeler’s rehabilitation post-Chase, he soon recognised that he could not afford to live solely on his earnings as an artist. After considering his options, Sheeler bought a camera and found himself work as a commercial photographer. The appeal of commercial photography was simply that the work ‘appeared to be far removed from art’.79 Working for architectural clients in Philadelphia, photographing houses from 1910 onwards affects Sheeler’s art profoundly. The work/art split


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is underscored geographically with Sheeler living in Philadelphia during the week for his day job, and escaping on the weekends to Doylestown, Bucks County where he rented a small house with Schamberg. The isolation of the house was felt doubly because of the distance of Bucks County from the developing art scene in Manhattan, but also because of the attitudes toward modern art of those in the local area. Sheeler recalls, ‘Modern art was considered there on the same status as an illegitimate child born into the first families, something to live down rather than providing opportunity to introduce new blood’.80 The remoteness of the Doylestown House amplifies the demarcation in Sheeler’s life between work and art, a split he later argues that exists between his photographic art and painting/drawing. The buildings of Bucks County became the subjects of Sheeler’s art after he and Schamberg started to rent the Doylestown cottage in 1910.81 As Rourke observes, this part of America is dominated by buildings built for practicality of use rather than display, they are ‘provincial, severe, without ornament, distinctive yet conforming to no strongly marked style . . .’.82 It was during the time spent at the Doylestown cottage that Sheeler first encountered the crafts of the Pennsylvanian Shakers. The buildings and objects the Shakers produced were themselves ‘endless studies in vigorous form, achieved with a minimum of means’.83 As noted, Cézanne was Sheeler’s major influence during the early 1910s, but exposure to the environment of the Doylestown cottage provoked a shift in his aesthetic. According to Rourke, Sheeler dedicated himself to Cubism at this time in order to ‘apply its underlying principle, not to follow the special forms defined by any one of the greater figures in French art’.84 By 1917, Sheeler had produced a series of barn abstractions in various media. These works are recognisably Sheeler’s first true exploration of an American context through the application of Cubism’s underlying principles. Rourke describes the photograph Side of White Barn as ‘a simple poetry of surfaces, light and line’.85 The radical nature of such simplicity might have lost its impact on the modern viewer but attention must be drawn to the fact that this image, as well as the other barn images, would have appeared quite unlike any other kind of photograph at that time. In 1917, photography was still dominated by the soft-focus and idealising visions offered by pictorialist photography. In contrast, Side of White Barn, an image dissected by hard lines, illuminated in bright light to reveal sharp, rugged textures, combined with a concentration on strong, bold forms was a photograph strikingly different from its contemporaries. Side of White Barn was quite unlike anything seen before.


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Photography and a form of Cubism collide in Side of White Barn. The concentration on surface and texture, revealed through the play of light and form, manages to hold together two contradictory visual paradigms. Clearly, Side of White Barn, in dealing extensively with tone and surface textures, does not rely upon a viewer filling in visual gaps. Instead, the artwork’s abstract quality relies upon the cropping of the image, with the barn filling the frame of the image, the lighting revealing texture in scene. For Catherine Scallen, Sheeler takes advantage of the way in which light plays on the surface of the barns, [and] by removing the barn from context, by concentrating on specific parts of the barn rather than the whole, these sections transcend themselves and reveal themselves as something else, something other than, something expressive and beautiful.86

On one level, Sheeler is playing a game, at once giving us an object we recognise but presented to us in fragments that suggest totality or wholeness but in a manner that is unsettling or confusing. On another, taking the vernacular and revealing it as spectacular, as something more than a barn, an object whose function is inscribed in every plank, nail and tile, is not to deify its functionality but to find the sublime in the everyday. Wrenching the barn out of its environment, to the point of denying the existence of a contextualising landscape, gives us the barn as an object worthy of contemplation in itself. The barn is as much a part of the landscape as the trees or grass around it but Sheeler’s photograph saves it from its habitual ‘invisible’ character. Removing the barn from its context not only enables one to consider the beauty of its form, or the imagination and workmanship of those who constructed it. On the other hand, it also reveals that a barn without a context is not much of a barn after all: its function is negated. Compounding the functionlessness of the barn are other factors. All the doors are closed, the windows obscured, the framing is tight, which presses in on the side of the barn like a four-sided clamp, squeezing the life out of it. Here the barn’s form and function are recognisable but are rendered functionless and unusable. This is all very different to the Bucks County barns that Rourke describes thus: ‘Sensuous quality belonged to them; the very absence of ornament permitted a directly sensuous expression through beautiful surfaces, fine line, well-wrought structure. In these buildings nothing was created for its own sake; all was a means to an end, a portion of the whole.’87 And whilst Sheeler’s photograph echoes in part with Rourke’s observations, the artist’s aesthetic conjoining of cubist and photographic elements also turns on its head the received


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notions of the barn. The photograph brutally de-emphasises any essence of beauty emerging from function whilst re‑emphasising an aesthetic of beauty that is at once historical – a beauty drawn out through modern means with a modernist sensibility – as well as timeless – the recognisable object re-presented as shape, texture and form. Rourke’s description of the formal construction of these buildings applies equally to Sheeler’s aesthetic of the period: one of simplification and emphasis on line, form and tonal balance, but the results are not as Rourke imagines. If the plain, functional buildings of Bucks County represent for Rourke ‘one of the most fundamental human impulses: to find roots, an abiding place’, then why do Sheeler’s renderings of them consistently absent human habitation and use? Barn Abstraction further underlines Sheeler’s aesthetic of Cubist formal concerns combined with photography’s capacity for flattening the visual plane; once again Sheeler demolishes the functional utility of the barn in order to rebuild the structure as a rhythmic pattern of shaded squares and oblongs suggestive of three-dimensional structure. Pared down to the barest intimation of solidity, Sheeler denies access to environmental context or entry to the barn itself, the windows and large opening shaded darkly. Even the later colour renderings with greater detail of other barns on paper in combinations of watercolour, black and coloured chalk, conté crayon and gouache consistently resist showing these structures as places for human work and human life. If these images are about that most fundamental human impulse, finding roots, then the significance of the relationship between Sheeler’s aesthetic and this human impulse are worthy of more thought. With Barn Abstraction in mind, I want to introduce another series of key concepts for this exploration of Sheeler’s aesthetic. In this section, I examine the claims made for Sheeler’s art by Rourke and Williams in relation to Adorno’s notion of cultural criticism, especially that of immanent critique. For Adorno Immanent criticism of intellectual and artistic phenomena seeks to grasp, through the analysis of their form and meaning, the contradiction between their objective idea and their pretension. It names what the consistency or inconsistency of the work itself expresses of the structure of the existent. Such criticism does not stop at a general recognition of the servitude of the objective mind, but seeks rather to transform this knowledge into a heightened perception of the thing itself.88

Immanent critique, therefore, can be defined as a dialectical reflection on the viewer’s spontaneous perception of the artwork’s immediate appearance in light of an analysis of the artwork’s structural composition.


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Adorno’s immanent critique can therefore be seen in terms of the critique of ideology. Adorno’s call for the retention of the category of society is given credence when one considers that, if ideology is ‘defined as socially necessary appearance’, then ‘ideology today is society itself’.89 An immanent critique of Barn Abstraction requires a consideration of the experience of the artwork and the way in which the artwork is constructed. Both these themes are explored in later chapters, so the aim here is to outline briefly the notion of construction for the moment. Construction describes not only the process of bringing the various aspects of an image together through composition, technique, and the choice of materials but also the other elements of artistic production such as style, experimentation with form, and even the size and shape of the canvas, for example. Adorno considers all these aspects as artistic material. In fact, Adorno’s notion seems far from exclusive; ‘material . . . is what artists work with. It is the sum of all that is available to them, including words, colours, sounds, associations of every sort and every technique ever developed.’ Moreover, Adorno adds that ‘form too can become material’, suggesting that material amounts to anything and everything the artist makes a decision about.90 The goal of immanent criticism is to analyse the ‘contradiction between [the] objective idea and [the object’s] pretension’. This is because artworks necessarily present themselves as a harmonious whole; they offer themselves as complete, without flaw or contradiction, as finished objects. However, ‘a successful work, according to immanent criticism, is not one which resolves objective contradictions in a spurious harmony, but one which expresses the ideas of harmony negatively by embodying the contradictions, pure and uncompromised, in its innermost structure’.91 The title, Barn Abstraction, like that of Flower Forms, suggests to the viewer that amidst the abstract forms in the artwork there exists or at least, once existed, something tangible, a recognisable and knowable source or origin for the abstracted elements in the work. Though clearly abstract, the barn is saved from the threat of complete abstraction because unlike the flora in Flower Forms, the barn retains its recognisable barn-like form. In falling short of, or avoiding the complete immersion into total abstraction, Sheeler’s work preserves the conscious movement towards an end, of stripping an image of its everyday shell of appearance to reveal its essence. Or so Williams claims. It is in this act of revelation or ‘illumination’, as Williams describes it, that Sheeler comes close to destroying the object whose very essence he sought to express. When Williams speaks of Sheeler’s ability to ‘illuminate’ the object, he appeals in much the same way as Adorno to aesthetic experience; an


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experience that lifts the veil of ideology from the objects of the world and reveals them as they truly are. And although Rourke’s critique of Sheeler merely hints at the critical potential of Sheeler’s work, William Carlos Williams offers, in his own particular style, some indication that Sheeler’s work is engaged in a form of ideology critique brought about by the ‘bewildering directness of his vision’.92 As oxymoronic as the association of bewilderment and clarity might appear, Williams’ sensorial juxtaposition perceptively captures an air of strangeness that permeates Sheeler’s work, where the visual simplicity of an image – such as Barn Abstraction, for example – appears somewhat disconcerting. The initial encounter with the artwork apparently offers a straightforward experience, but the visual incongruities of the work soon begin to undermine our early visual security. The content of this experience allows the extension of my critique of those notions of form, especially those moments of contradiction in Sheeler’s aesthetic, as well as the possibilities that his art offers as cultural critique. Williams defines the act of viewing Sheeler’s work as a moment of revelation: a process of coming to terms with that disconcertingly different element in Sheeler’s art, an experience that reveals our own shaky grasp of the real. Williams’ articulation of aesthetic experience is similar to that of Adorno, but there are major differences. Williams and Adorno share a common concern with subjective aesthetic experience where, in the process of communication between viewer and artwork, the truth of the external world is somehow revealed. Williams credits Sheeler with the ability to see and represent the world around him ‘without blur, through the fantastic overlay with which our lives are so vastly concerned’.93 What provides Sheeler with his opportunity to expurgate that which conceals the real – ideology – is the ‘measurable gap between what a man sees and knows’ combined with an ‘eye for the thing’.94 Sheeler’s engagement with the ‘thing’ or the object shares with Adorno the belief that in no way does a conceptual knowledge of an object manage to capture its essence. The viewer’s aesthetic experience is a revelatory experience, but this experience is reliant upon the construction of the artwork. Sheeler begins with a photograph of a barn, for example, and then, through drawing or painting he breaks down the image into its isolated forms, reproducing the photographic image in different media, slowly reconstituting the isolated forms, abstracted piece by abstracted piece, into a whole image. There is more than a hint of rationalisation in the breaking down of tasks as on the assembly line. However, it would be misleading to suppose Sheeler was blindly copying Fordist notions of assembly-line abstraction.


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Any conception of the simple articulation of social production in artistic production means that the artwork would simply fail as art. This is because, for Adorno, no matter how commodified the social sphere, the autonomous work of modern art must retain its critical capacity through a mediated replication of dominant social forms. For Williams, Sheeler’s artworks rail against the processes of rationalised production. Barn Abstraction, especially, represents a moment of realisation on Sheeler’s part that he could go no further without sacrificing the object of his art to a non-representative abstract nothingness. With Flower Forms, Sheeler apparently arrived at a vanishing point and he retreated from it before the real collapsed into an abyss of non representation. In short, Sheeler had gone as far as he could go so that he might comprehend what would be lost forever and, therefore, what needed to be rescued. For Williams it was this journey, an act of discovery, that produced the genuine and true American artist. For Williams, Sheeler’s work represents a critique of modernity’s unreflective drive towards complete abstraction because it is a self-reflective form of the principles of modernity. In this instance, Sheeler’s work is an artistic expression of the aims of Adorno and Horkmeimer’s critique of Enlightenment in Dialectic of Enlightenment: the realisation of the hopes of Enlightenment.95 It is through Adorno’s aesthetic theory that we can find support that relies less on the conscious construction of an American artistic tradition and more on the actual artwork. The starkness of line in Barn Abstraction can be described as an abstraction on two levels. On one hand it is a mimetic rendering of the functionality of the barns themselves through the eradication of superfluous ornament that serves no functional purpose; on the other, it is a continuing formal experimentation through the reinterpretation of the photographic image on paper or canvas. However, the mimetic aspect of Sheeler’s representation does not faithfully re-present the image of a working barn. Sheeler’s barn, despite its retention of the basic functional elements, is far from functional. The harmonious vision of a functional and practical object is undone in Sheeler’s work. The irregular, hand-drawn walls and eaves, roofs and windows, are reduced to rectangular and square forms, some blank, others shaded or scored by vertical lines. The windows and the large opening into the barn are shaded heavily, but inaccurately, in black. These openings, the windows, the open door, much like the open door and the window in Doylestown House: Stairway with Chair (c.1917) [Figure 4], defy expectation of where these thresholds should lead. The black hole left by the door


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becomes an impenetrable darkness rather than an opening into the building and there appears no actual space to move into. If we recall Side of White Barn, the openings in this photograph echo those in Barn Abstraction. Doors, windows, or shutters, which should offer access to a structure with depth, do not. All points of access or entry are firmly closed and the window appears not to possess the functional qualities of a window, a typical feature of Sheeler’s work from this period onwards. It has a frame and glass but remains opaque: we cannot see into the barn (and, one suspects that if Sheeler was painting the reverse view, from inside out, one couldn’t see out of the barn, either). These works possess an overt sense of imperviousness, a resolute determination not to reveal the interior of the structures they depict. There is severe denial of three-dimensional space. It is possible to read into the images Sheeler’s own sense of isolation during this period, far away as he was from the art scene in Manhattan. This approach rather limits an understanding of Sheeler’s work to concerns with the American tradition and usable past. Of course, these arguments were crucial to Rourke and Williams and serve the aims of their critiques well. However, this thesis seeks to explore Sheeler’s work in a much broader context. Whether the works act as an outward manifestation of Sheeler’s insecurities or not, what is interesting is how these works operate on the level of access. Side of White Barn and Barn Abstraction refuse access to what lies either behind or inside them respectively and, in doing so, shift attention towards the forms of object within the works. Recalling Williams’ reading of Sheeler’s abstract leanings, the concern of both works with the Americanness of their subject is taken to its extreme, admittedly, for laudable reasons. Barn Abstraction is ripped from its context, and is no longer surrounded by the Pennsylvanian landscape, as one might expect, but the whiteness of the Japanese paper on which it is drawn. For Troyen and Hirshler, Barn Abstraction becomes ‘an iconic image of the harmony and beauty he [Sheeler] perceived in all these simple buildings’.96 Again, the relationship between beauty and function is highlighted, but in conjunction with harmony. I draw attention to these aspects because ideas of harmony and the notion of function are important for the artwork in Adorno’s aesthetic theory, a subject discussed in later chapters. An immanent critique of Barn Abstraction asks, does this image really express the ideas of harmony and beauty? As Adorno says, the successful artwork according to immanent criticism does not resolve the objective contradictions into ‘a spurious harmony’. Instead, the contradictions find themselves mediated in the artwork’s ‘innermost structure’. This image


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is rife with contradictions that question any conceptions of harmony in particular. There are dysfunctional entrances and windows and the inability to see inside the structure when quite obviously one should be able to. Any overall consideration of these elements does not add up to any kind of harmonious whole and, hence, denies the correlation between beauty and harmony. These images may well be beautiful but their beauty cannot be conceived of as connected to any sense of coherence or harmony. What is baffling is that critics are well aware of the formal discrepancies within the work. Troyen and Hirshler note that Barn Abstraction is a more subtle work than first appears. For example, the modernist flattening of space is not so straightforward, and Sheeler’s hand-drawn lines are not so precise; they vary in tone and quality, as do the forms they articulate. The complete depthlessness is not quite so easy to account for when one notices the ‘slight variations, as well as the tension between recession and surface pattern’, all of which ‘animate the composition’.97 Slowly the block-like forms of the structure no longer appear as intersecting flat planes but take on a layered appearance. The stark blackness of the windows and opening to the barn are foils to the more gradual and silvery grey shaded tones of the other architectural aspects of the building. In much the same way, the concentration on surface of Side of White Barn maintains the eye’s interest in the surface details of the wood, stone and stucco, all of which come alive and demand attention as objects worthy of contemplation in their own right. As Rourke observes, the theme of this photograph was ‘simple, prosaic even, yet not stark; here is simple poetry of surfaces, light, line, and volume’. Such simplicity belies the fact that the photograph, as we have seen, was a revelation in its own right through its rejection of the soft-focus photography fashionable at the time. Not only this, but ‘the palpable light, narrow shadows, the rise and strength of the planks, their splits and knotholes, the fine gradations of white’ visually impart a visceral experience that suggests ‘the substance of wood as it feels to the hand’.98 Inherent in Rourke’s lively description of the photograph is a clear indication of her own, more or less explicit, programme of slotting Sheeler into an American artistic tradition. Sheeler’s ability to capture the very ‘woodiness’ of wood, of representing the physicality of his subject through the employment of an essentially modernist artistic technique, is evidence for Rourke that Sheeler’s work remains in an American tradition. In fact, the modernist aspect of Sheeler’s work can be seen as actually developing American tradition through the partial negation of European


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abstraction, a belligerent voice of resistance fighting in the name of America, embodied in Sheeler’s choice, but – more importantly – a representation of an indigenous American subject. This subject reflects the continuing process of America freeing itself from its cultural ties to Europe and its ongoing struggle to control and conquer the natural vastness of America itself. In rather less grandiose terms, Sheeler photographs a typical American object and is concerned with revealing its construction, as well as its iconic status. Hence, the wood on the walls is portrayed through the beauty of its form, a visual and intellectual experience that also recounts the physicality of actually touching, shaping and handling wood. The analyses of Rourke, Williams and Troyen and Hirshler all maintain the view that Sheeler never employed European modernism to the detriment of the American scene. Rourke’s analysis is an astute reading of Sheeler’s work but fails, overall, to question the more negative aspect of these representations. The blackened entrances and windows that refuse access to rooms and buildings or flights of stairs that lead into nothingness are rarely explained. With these points in mind, the concluding section in this chapter offers a reappraisal of Sheeler’s Doylestown House images.

Charles Sheeler: Musing on Primitiveness Alfred Stieglitz condescendingly referred to the interior arrangement of Charles Sheeler’s Doylestown House as his ‘Pennsylvania Hut aesthetique’.99 Gaston Bachelard, in The Poetics of Space, is rather less disdainful of the hut, arguing that: ‘a dreamer of refuges dreams of a hut, a nest, or of nooks and corners into which he would like to hide away like an animal in its hole’.100 Likewise, Walter Benjamin emphasises the ancient need to find comfort: ‘the original form of all dwelling is’, he says, ‘existence not in the house but in the shell’.101 But modern human beings are not able to return to the shell, so make the house their refuge, the space in which to burrow, where each room wears the traces of occupancy. And Sheeler, who once referred to himself as ‘the hermit of Doylestown’, for all the world seems in tune with Benjamin and Bachelard.102 The dreamer of refuges lives, according to Bachelard, ‘in a region that is beyond human images’ and it is through the medium of the image – in this instance, the photograph – that Sheeler ‘dreams’.103 It is poetry and not the image which is Bachelard’s privileged mode of representation, but I will argue throughout this essay that Sheeler’s images of the Doylestown House, besides their obvious engagement with a photo-cubist


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aesthetic, reflect another of Bachelard’s claims, namely that ‘we must start musing on primitiveness’.104 To muse on primitiveness is to access the very beginnings of our Becoming, it is to trace most poignantly the relationship between the individual and the home. Contrary to Stieglitz’s disdain of Sheeler’s primitive retreat, it is precisely the inclusion of the primitive in these images that marks them out for attention. These works explicitly reveal the primitive function of the hut, they generate a region ‘beyond human images’ in the dialectical interplay between the realism of photography and the abstraction of formal experimentation. In each of Sheeler’s Doylestown photographs, entry and exit, the flow between boundaries and over thresholds, is restricted; access to those spaces beyond the frame (or plane) of the image is barred, limited to the point of self-imprisonment. In the end, however, I want to argue that Sheeler’s series of Doylestown photographs – repeated images of darkened windows, silhouetted stoves, shady stairwells and half-open doorways – allow us to access something fundamental, something ancient. These rooms are monadic, literally windowless because the windows are no longer transparent, where the truth of the monad lies in its self-containment. Taken from Leibniz, the notion of the monad recurs in the work of both Benjamin and Adorno. For Adorno, ‘the interpretation of an artwork as an immanent, crystallised process at a standstill approximates the concept of the monad’; the importance of this is that the ‘monadological constitution of artworks in themselves points beyond itself’.105 These images of restrained access, of barred thresholds, are themselves thresholds that allow access to the world in miniature. Between 1910 and 1926 Charles Sheeler rented the Doylestown House, a colonial cottage in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, built by Jonathan Worthington in 1768. The house, shared with fellow artist, Morton Schamberg until his death during the influenza epidemic in 1917, was a place to escape to, a retreat where both men could produce art. The hostility Sheeler obviously felt towards his growing modernist influences did not discourage him from exploring them explicitly in relation to the house itself, a risky venture, one might presume. As Karen Lucic notes, the choice of subject is unusual for an artist determined to be modern. Sheeler could quite easily have been accused of nostalgia and the betrayal of his avant-gardist principles. Yet, Sheeler’s Doylestown images avoid both with some skill. For Lucic this is because ‘Sheeler aimed to synthesize past and present in a new way’; a formula that he was to repeat over and again throughout his career.106 This neat equation, though, should not foreclose the analysis of the Doylestown images. According to Theodore Stebbins, Sheeler


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3. Charles Sheeler, Doylestown House: Stairwell (c.1917) Photograph, gelatin silver print 24.5 x 16.9 cm (9 5⁄8 x 6 5⁄8 in.) New Century Fund, Image © 2007 Board of Trustees, National Gallery of Art, Washington


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4. Charles Sheeler, Doylestown House: Stairway with Chair (c.1917) Photograph, gelatin silver print 23.5 x 16.9 cm (9 ¼ x 6 5⁄8 in.) Gift of the Brown Foundation, Inc., Houston, Image © 2007 Board of Trustees, National Gallery of Art, Washington


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saw in these photographs ‘something personal’, but evades the issue of what this might have been in favour of questions and not answers, provisional or not.107 But what was the personal element Sheeler saw in these photographs? In Doylestown House: Stairwell (c.1917) [Figure 3], we see the twisting risers of the staircase caught between a whitewashed wall and the edge of the frame of the door, both brightly lit. The lighting catches the underside of the rising stairway, the stairwell illuminated enough for us to distinguish the space beneath and the pattern of the stairs themselves. But two vertical stripes of murky darkness frame these thin interjections of light, pressing in on the scene. On one level, the photograph abandons content in favour of formal composition, a photo-cubist rendering of the space in terms of geometric line and tonal pattern. On another, one literally can identify a doorway, a stairwell, the underside of the stairs rising up and into an unseen space above. In Doylestown House: Stairway with Chair (c.1917) [Figure 4], a similar arrangement of forms presents itself to us: strong verticals, this time in white, frame a black/grey oblong that contains the stairs coiling diagonally to the right, continuing upwards into darkness. The door at the bottom of the stairs is open, extending out toward the viewer, concealing a window to the left. Next to the window, nearest the viewer is a small mirror that is countered bottom right by a sliver of a chair and its shadow. The door is open, so one can ascend the stairs, but the darkness is forbidding; the window and mirror are redundant, as is – because of the little we see of it – the chair. Together this reordering of the visible and the imagined space exposes Bachelard’s dreamer of nooks and crannies to a degree of critique. What lurks in those dark spaces under stairs, or behind the door? What has happened to the world beyond the window pane? For whatever reason, Bachelard does not find darkness in nooks and crannies, only adventure, anticipation, discovery. The home is seen as the source of happy memories; it exists as a place that returns to us in dreams as we sleep or in daydreams when our minds wander. But, as Rachel Bowlby argues, there is something troubling about Bachelard’s untroubled home.108 For Bowlby, Bachelard’s view of the home is overly optimistic, reminding us of Freud’s notion of the Unheimlich. The house can also be the opposite of the home: a place of darkness, fear and hostility. Freud’s nightmarish vision of the familiar made unfamiliar is all about fear, peril and the loss of the sense of security in that place where it matters most, the place where one must always feel at home: in one’s home. Bachelard’s eulogy on nooks and crannies and Freud’s willingness to find horror in them, however, does not fully account for the feeling


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Sheeler’s photographs generate. One can argue that the Doylestown House is not a homely place at all, there’s nothing subtle about the place, hard whitewashed walls, harshly lighted with excessive bright spots and deep, deep shadows, all add up to an uncomfortable place to be. One cannot help but note the staged-ness of each image. These photographs are full of dark spaces, looming silhouettes; there are thresholds that cannot be crossed, stairs that cannot be climbed and windows that cannot be seen through. The interior thus becomes a site of containment, a claustrophobic space with harsh, unpredictable lighting and deep dark shadowy areas into which one dare not venture. Lucic argues, with justification, that these images are a series, or with Adorno in mind, a constellation. As such, one can piece together the house, as it were. In spite of the house’s residual closedness, the viewer begins to recognise latches, doorways, fireplaces, windows and other objects that act as visual clues and in turn form a mental map of the space. But what a flattened space it remains, even with this acquired knowledge. The fragmentary forms of the individual images themselves, though, make for an unstable constellation. Rare are the images that offer more than a doorway or a corner for us to peer into, the most Sheeler gives us is Doylestown House: Interior with Stove (c.1917) [Figure 5]. Here is a wider perspective on a room with a door to the right – which is cropped – the white beads of the window bright against the blackened window panes, to the left another closed door, and in the middle a glowering silhouette of the stove, light bursting from its belly through an open door. But this image is hardly panoramic. Interior with Stove is illuminating for a number of reasons. As part of a series or constellation, Interior with Stove appears like a sun, not only providing light but acting as a forcefield that binds the constellation of other photographs together. The importance of Interior with Stove is underscored by its reappearance in Sheeler’s self-portrait, The Artist Looks at Nature (1943) [Figure 22]. Here Sheeler sits at an easel working on a re-rendering of Interior with Stove in conté crayon. But the artist is not in the studio, he is working au plein air and the scene before him a montage of a home from the artist’s past, Ridgefield Connecticut, and the Boulder Dam.109 The ‘something personal’ is again invoked and I want to suggest here that it is the work of light in Interior with Stove that makes it such an important image. It seems possible to imagine that in the other photographs in the constellation the light source is not a strategically placed photographic lamp but the light from this stove emanating through the house. Granted, the light in the stove is a lamp and not a fire, but Sheeler’s imagery seeks to make the analogy.


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5. Charles Sheeler, Doylestown House: Interior with Stove (c.1917) Photograph, gelatin silver print 23.7 x 17 cm (9 5⁄16 x 6 11⁄16 in.) Pepita Milmore Memorial Fund, Image © 2007 Board of Trustees, National Gallery of Art, Washington


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Sheeler says ‘Light is the great designer’ and in these photographs light works to outline or abstract form, it is used both to illuminate surface texture and to obliterate texture.110 Constance Rourke writes: With Sheeler light becomes a palpable medium through which form is apprehended to the full, through variations in its quality, through contrasting shadow, through modulations of tone within shadow . . . A full perception of the use of shadow in his art may lead to an understanding of its most fundamental qualities, bringing the spectator back finally to the constant use of light itself as a dimensional force.111

I would argue that in the case of the Doylestown photographs Rourke is only half right. Locked as we are in the monadic house, imprisoned amongst its nooks and crannies, pushed into its corners, thresholds barred and our sense of space impeded, we see only the interior. Light blackens the windows, denying them their transparency, making this house a windowless place: from inside we cannot see outside. What we forget in this confusion is that we can be seen from the outside of the house, from the other side of the blackened glass. This is the illuminated hut in which Bachelard finds poetry. Referring to Henri Bachelin’s novel, Le Serviteur, Bachelard claims the author finds the root of the hut dream in the house itself. He has only to give a few touches to the spectacle of the family sitting-room, only to listen to the stove roaring in the evening stillness, while an icy wind blows against the house, to know that at the house’s centre, in the circle of light shed by the lamp, he is living in the round house, the primitive hut, of prehistoric man.112

Bachelard makes much of the image of the lamp in the window as a vigilant and safeguarding eye of the house, and in turn relates an anecdote about Rilke. One dark night, Rilke and his friends were about to cross a field when they saw ‘the lighted casement of a distant hut, the hut that stands quite alone on the horizon before one comes to fields and marshlands’. They felt like ‘isolated individuals seeing night for the first time’.113 The dark background of our lives is assumed as inevitable until a flash of insightful light is seen. As Bachelard puts it One might even say that light emanating from a lone watcher, who is also a determined watcher, attains to the power of hypnosis. We are hypnotized by solitude, hypnotized by the gaze of the solitary house; and the tie that binds us to it is so strong that we begin to dream of nothing but a solitary house in the night.114

This is what Bachelard means when he says ‘we must start musing on primitiveness’.115 The Doylestown House was a retreat from the world.


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The isolation of the place is evident in every photograph of every room. To picture the landscape in which the house sits would make this no more obvious, but to imagine the lighted house as a beacon in the darkened landscape or as a place into which we can peer and watch unseen provides an altogether different perspective. The house as a monad is an object blasted free of time for the purposes of analysis – it is concentrated time, pre-history, the present, and post-history are crushed together there . . . It is an important moment of the past that can explain the present and the possibilities of the future. An image of a greater totality – the experience of an historical era – can be found there. It is a threshold.116

As a threshold the viewer can imagine looking into the Doylestown House from outside, rather than from inside out, and by doing so gain access to this pre-history, present and future time. The blackened windows and non-reflective mirrors, the closed or half-open doors, the lack of furniture all evoke an uncomfortable sense of a place; yet from the other side of the window this place and space become timeless, evocative, and dream-like. The Doylestown House is a burrow, a place to hide, a bolthole, a place we search out for in the darkest dreams, a miniature world that lies beyond the unhomely.

Conclusion For all Sheeler’s clarity of vision, the sharpness of his line, the contradictory contexts, the modern and pre-modern, as well as the wedding of photography and painting/drawing, there is, as the brief readings of Side of White Barn, Barn Abstraction and the Doylestown constellation of photographs show, something inherently contradictory about the artist’s work and practice. All are connected by an interest in rudimentary or primitive forms, something that connects them with Flower Forms. Constance Rourke’s early critical account might well offer astute observations on the subtle changes in textures and rhythms, form and content in the barn works and paintings such as Flower Forms, but the analysis is more concerned with the conscious choices made on the part of the artist. Adorno shifts such emphasis away from the biography of the artist and toward the artwork’s cultural role in society; this necessitates a recasting of the role of the artist in the production of the artwork. As Russell Berman notes Whenever Adorno discusses the artistic process, his orientation is not toward the artist but the activity; not toward the producer but the production. The individual artist, only to the extent that he overcomes


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his accidental particularity, is the agent of a social force whose objective development appears in the artwork as the sundial of history.117

As I shall argue throughout the book, there is much in Sheeler’s work to define it as the ‘expression of the crisis of experience’, a crisis that continued to grow as capitalism developed.118 As Adorno notes, the art of Cubism captures an existence that is no longer extant and represents an agreement to make the world subject to geometrisation. By adopting this system as its own, Cubism takes up a position of critique. Because ‘art, like knowledge, takes all its material and ultimately its forms from reality, indeed from social reality, in order to transform them, thereby becomes entangled in reality’s irreconcilable contradictions’.119 These irreconcilables find their way into the work of art through its production. If Cubism reflects in its forms the breaking down of the world into geometric shapes, Sheeler’s artistic practice captures the antagonisms of his own historical position in an American, rather than European, context.


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Chapter Two

A Photograph, a Drawing and a Painting Sheeler’s New York series

Charles Sheeler has lived in a mechanical age. To deny that was to lose your life. That, the artist early recognised. In the world which immediately surrounded him it was more apparent anywhere else on earth. What was he to do about it? He accepted it as the source of materials for his compositions. William Carlos Williams, ‘Charles Sheeler – Postscript’

Introduction William Carlos Williams describes the art of friend and fellow modern artist, Sheeler, as a search for ‘illumination’ through the ‘use of the photographic camera in making up a picture’.1 But the use of the camera to aid the ‘making up of pictures’ was neither exclusive to Sheeler, nor unusual in American (or European) painting at the beginning of the twentieth century. What differentiates Sheeler’s work is, according to Williams, the way in which the photograph emphasises the artist’s work as a painter.2 This, however, does not imply that Sheeler is a painter first and a photographer second. Instead, paintings with a direct relationship to a specific photograph are a complex investigation of mechanistic visual representation and human experience: a perspective lacking in most contemporary critical accounts of Sheeler’s work. Throughout this chapter, I argue there exists a dialectical tension between photography and painting, and between competing modes of representation that reveal Sheeler’s aesthetic as highly critical of the notions of rationalisation and efficiency, so crucial to the development of American modernity. Williams’ implicit and my explicit critique of the artist argue that Sheeler’s work should be viewed as central to the development of a critical rather than ambivalent American modernism. I intend to discuss these issues through a variety of works that Sheeler


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produced during the 1920s but which can be divided into two sets: those concerned with the exterior architecture of the city and those with architectural interiors.

A Photograph, a Drawing and a Painting In 1919, Sheeler moved from Philadelphia to Manhattan, New York and between 1919 and 1926 the artist produced a small but significant body of work whose subject matter was his new urban environment. These images of New York City are a continuation of Sheeler’s interest in the local environment; epitomised by his series of photographs of the Doylestown cottage. As such, Sheeler’s choice of New York subject matter is unsurprising; a concentration on those facets of the metropolis, its skyscrapers, its bridges and elevated railways that proved inspirational for artists of all denominations. But, as his Doylestown works reveal, Sheeler readily turns his attention to the interior spaces of these architectural icons, too; I will go into more detail on this later. What differentiates Sheeler’s work as unusual, though, lies in his approach to and subsequent depiction of this subject matter. During this period Manhattan’s skyscrapers and elevated railroads replace the Pennsylvania-based images of Bucks County barns and the Doylestown House that are representative of the artist’s earlier work. Between 1920 and 1923 Sheeler completed a series of images of the Park Row Building – a photograph, New York, Park Row Building (1920), New York (1920), and, Skyscrapers, (formerly known as Offices) (1922) [Figures 6 and 7 and Plate 3].3 Sheeler’s city is miles away from the lively and expressive Manhattan of John Marin’s Lower Manhattan (Composing Derived from Top of Woolworth Building) (1921), or the gritty reality of John Sloan’s El train scene, Six O’Clock Winter (1912). Sheeler’s urban landscapes lack the swirling menace of Joseph Stella’s Brooklyn Bridge (1919–20), the piercing ray-lines of Elsie Driggs’ Queensborough Bridge (1927), or the frenetic movement of Max Weber’s Rush Hour, New York (1915). And whilst Sheeler’s connected series of images of Manhattan’s Park Row Building share a visual similarity with Georgia O’Keeffe’s Shelton Hotel, New York, No. 1 (1926) they are not so alike that one cannot tell them apart. These three artworks are unique in the artist’s oeuvre because at no other time did Sheeler produce such an interconnected series of images.4 As an exploration of a single image in various media they afford the clearest insight into the interrelationship between American modernism, photography and traditional forms of art in the construction of Sheeler’s aesthetic. The New York series of works established the aesthetic fusion


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6. Charles Sheeler, New York, Park Row Building (1920) Photograph, gelatin silver print Sheet: 25.4 x 20.3 cm (10 x 8 in.) Mount: 47 x 36.8 cm (18 1⁄2 x 14 1⁄2 in.) © The Lane Collection Courtesy, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston


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7. Charles Sheeler, New York (1920) Graphite on cream Japanese vellum 55.1 x 39.8 cm (21 7⁄10 x 15 1⁄2 in.) Friends of American Art Collection, 1922.5552 Reproduction, The Art Institute of Chicago


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of photography and painting/drawing in Sheeler’s work, which he had been developing throughout the 1910s. Such a definitive aesthetic programme helped to construct and provide the visual support necessary for the art historical category with which the artist and his work are synonymous: Precisionism.

A Short History of Precisionism Wolfgang Born is credited with first coining the term Precisionism in 1948 to account for a stylistically similar body of work produced by American artists working from the early 1920s onwards.5 For Born, the identifiably Precisionist artwork’s key characteristics are the stripping away of ornament, a preoccupation with the angular qualities of modern structures, and a cool, detached manner. The Precisionist artist removes ornament through abstraction in order to accentuate the angularities of a typical subject matter – the factory, the modern city and the skyscraper – through a geometrically precise technique. As a result, Precisionist buildings are smooth and angular, factories and cities appear pristine, ordered and, often, devoid of human life.6 Precisionism, as a stylistic approach, appears clinical in its interpretation of the city, the factory, and the landscape: cold, objective, and emotionless. It is a style that in one sense epitomises the ethos of rationalisation and efficiency at the heart of American modernity and the machine age. In this way, the Precisionist artwork has long been considered as a truly American response to modernity.7 Precisionism, as with all ‘isms’, seems at once arbitrary and restrictive but also instructive and useful. For Theodor Adorno, the ‘programmatic’ and ‘self-conscious’ aspect of an ‘ism’ – which is usually associated with a collective of artists – helps draws attention to itself. However, Adorno notes that whilst ‘the quality of individual artists can be clearly distinguished . . . those who most explicitly draw attention to the peculiar characteristics of a school tend to be overrated in comparison with those who, like Pissarro among the impressionists, cannot be reduced so conclusively to the program [sic]’.8 As Adorno observes of ‘isms’, there is a specific programme to adhere to, a series of recognisable attributes (or attitudes) that help define and sustain it. In the case of Precisionism, Born’s observations are acute. But of all the artists considered to be working under the rubric of Precisionism, it is Sheeler whose work is seen as irreducibly Precisionist.9 As evidence, Born privileges a series of paintings that Sheeler produced in the early 1930s whose origins are a photographic commission the artist


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received in 1927 from the Ford Motor Company.10 Two of these paintings – Classic Landscape and American Landscape [Plates 8 and 9] – mark for Born a new dimension in American landscape painting, the depiction of the ‘technocratic landscape’, or, as Leo Marx puts it, the ‘Machine in the Garden’. Sheeler’s ‘machine’ – the River Rouge plant – was at the time the largest industrial complex that the world had seen, and Sheeler’s garden the sublime American landscape, both fused in some kind of pristine harmony: the consonance of the technical and the natural. Since Born’s convincing commentary on the artist as Precisionist, criticism of Sheeler appears intractably yoked to conceiving his work solely in terms of the machine and the machine age. Even contemporary criticism of Sheeler – for example, the work of Miles Orvell or Karen Lucic – appears unable to consider Sheeler’s work in terms other than as a machine-inspired aesthetic.11 Born’s laying out of Sheeler as pre-eminent Precisionist appears to have foreclosed ongoing critical commentary about his work, putting the artist in both an unenviable and damaging position as the artist ‘who most explicitly draws attention to the peculiar characteristics of a school’. Following Adorno, then, is Sheeler’s work overrated, or has contemporary criticism ignored other avenues of enquiry regarding the artist’s body of work?

Charles Sheeler’s Precisionist New York The persuasiveness of Born’s argument is, again, at once evident in Sheeler’s Skyscrapers and New York. These works are a clear expression of the Precisionist removal of ornament in order to reveal the angular and geometric forms beneath. In fact, all of the New York series of images are in some senses a systematic expunging of detail, including the photograph. Where Skyscrapers and New York erase detail from the original photograph through re-representation of the image, New York, Park Row Building is in itself an attempt to emphasise the structural forms of the building. The photograph does this in a number of ways. Firstly, it avoids the ‘rigorously frontal’ highly decorative façade of the Park Row Building, concentrating instead on its rear and less expressive side and rear walls.12 Secondly, perspective and framing flattens space in the image, which denies depth, and effectively emphasises the geometric forms of the New York skyline over specific ornamental content. What we have here in the New York series is a significant example of Precisionism at work. Accordingly, Sheeler’s artworks have come to be recognised for not only unveiling structural form through a process of


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abstraction but also for the inherent geometric accuracy of their forms and construction. In his 1896 essay, ‘The Tall Building Artistically Considered’, Chicago School architect, Louis H. Sullivan, says of the tall building: It must be tall, every inch of it tall. The power and force of altitude must be in it. It must be every inch a proud and soaring thing, rising in sheer exaltation that from bottom to top it is a unit without a single dissenting line – that it is the new, the unexpected, the eloquent peroration of most bald, most sinister, most forbidding conditions.13

As the title of Sullivan’s essay suggests, the skyscraper was a wonder of architecture and engineering worthy of aesthetic response. And, as the portrayal of loftiness in the earliest images of Manhattan’s first skyscrapers demonstrate, artists did find the building’s height their most ‘thrilling aspect’.14 Whatever the expressive media – photography, drawing or painting – and whatever the attitude of the artist towards the new urban structure, positive or negative, the loftiness of the skyscraper held rapt attention. Images such as Alfred Stieglitz’s The Flatiron (1902–3) exemplify the focus upon the sheer scale and imposing nature of the new skyscraper. If one artist and his work has been assumed to encapsulate the positive attributes of the tall building in art, it has been Sheeler. Typical of this view is Merrill Schleier’s summary of Sheeler’s New York series of images, where she argues that ‘Sheeler’s city views convey perfection, all ills ameliorated by the mechanical precision of the skyscraper’, and adds that Sheeler’s skyscraper artworks are ‘unequivocally favourable’.15 Schleier concludes with a flourish, referring to Sheeler as the ‘quintessential optimist of the urban scene’.16 But the embellishments do not end there. Schleier goes so far as to claim that the images of New York skyscrapers are ‘visual equivalents to the logic of the skyscraper itself’, suggesting the conscious adaptation of the principles of rationality and efficiency on the part of the artist.17 What Schleier suggests is that the New York series of works illustrate rather than critique these principles of modernity and modernisation. As such, Sheeler’s images of New York skyscrapers are nothing but an uncritical illustration of modernity and its principles. According to Schleier, the artist employs ‘a formal vocabulary inspired by the pristine geometry of the machine’; a formal vocabulary that allows Sheeler to construct ‘his compositions architectonically’.18 Schleier’s observations are convincing, but only up to a point. I would agree that Sheeler is using the vocabulary of architecture but with one notable difference: the New York series is not just a copying


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or straightforward re-articulation of the vocabulary of architecture and ‘pristine geometry’, as Schleier suggests. In fact, to imply as much is to miss an important distinction between these images as works of art and as mere visual illustrations. However, beyond this distinction there are other inconsistencies. A closer examination of the New York series images reveals, in fact, a lack of geometric precision in the representation of the Park Row Building; there is a serious and definite slide into imprecision. From a more nuanced critical perspective, Troyen and Hirshler, in their analysis of Skyscrapers, argue: ‘For Sheeler the skyscraper image was neither a paean to the efficiency of modern architecture nor a protest against urban fatigue. Rather, by choosing undistinguished buildings, and by eliminating all incidental and peripheral detail and signs of decay, Sheeler wanted to portray a timeless, eternal city.’19 For Troyen and Hirshler, there is an ambivalent, rather than purely positive, attitude to modernity in this work. If, as they suggest, the artist wanted to portray a timeless city, then photography, with its ability to freeze a moment in time, is the most obvious medium. Sheeler’s New York works are, though, a series with a photographic origin. As a series, the works suggest movement, reinterpretation and change, and this is exactly what occurs as Sheeler reinterprets the original photographic image. I would argue that the tension between permanence and change is related to the tension between form and content in Sheeler’s work. The portrayal of an eternal, timeless city through photography is a straightforward enough idea; the scene is fixed in the image and becomes impermeable to change. However, Sheeler’s work concentrates on revealing the underlying forms in the scene at the expense of the works content. But at what point does the skyscraper become irrelevant as an identifiable object, as content, for the work? Through the concentration on forms, the skyscraper must, in some senses, disappear. The reduction of the city and the skyscraper to their elementary forms negates both, erasing any qualities of timelessness or eternity that the content of the images supposedly seek to immortalise. Capturing the image of a timeless eternal city has more in common with the experimental film, Manhatta (1920). Considered the first experimental film made in America, Sheeler produced Manhatta in collaboration with fellow photographer, Paul Strand, a native New Yorker and member of the Stieglitz circle.20 Originally entitled New York the Magnificent, Manhatta opened on 24 July 1921 at the Rialto Theatre on Broadway, where it played as part of a larger programme and was accompanied by an orchestra playing popular music from New York. The film was an attempt to


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‘define New York City through its modernity (rather than its history or its human diversity), and to do so grandly, in a sweeping work of distinct parts that gave the illusion of comprehensiveness’.21 Marcel Duchamp and Man Ray also showed the film in Paris – accompanied by the music of Erik Satie – under the title of Smoke of New York, as part of a Dada film festival. As Ben Andrews notes, the film is not easily categorised as either ‘avant-garde’ or ‘city film’. This is in part because Manhatta ‘does not use the narrative techniques of rapid editing or montage, distortion or visual trickery characteristic of the modernist avant-garde’.22 The short film, seven minutes in length, cuts together a variety of shots taken from unusual, often perilously high, perspectives of a day in the life of Manhattan and its working population. The film has no identifiable plot and has many things in common with ‘the actuality films of the previous two decades’.23 As Lucic observes, the ‘disconnected and jumbled temporal progression . . . disorient and dazzle the viewer, and the vortex of spectacular images stimulate intense, constantly changing impression of the urban environment’.24 Between ‘natural’ breaks appear captions of quotations taken from Walt Whitman’s 1860 poem Mannahatta. Lucic argues that Manhatta represents Sheeler’s ‘most positive treatment of a machine-age subject’ and that after producing the short film Sheeler ‘never again expressed a Whitmanesque optimism towards his subjects, nor did he repeat the use of nature to soften his depiction of urban modernity’.25 The production of Manhatta revealed to Sheeler the aesthetic possibilities of New York’s architecture and a number of stills taken from the film form the basis for several of the artist’s New York paintings, most notably Church Street El (1920) [Plate 2]. Church Street El is a striking work, both in terms of the levels of geometric abstraction and in its use of colour. Less striking, because it is visually less obvious, are the imprecise elements of the painting: the dissenting lines. The image looks down from the Empire Building at 71 Broadway onto the elevated railroad at Church Street and Sexton’s office of Trinity Church (upper centre). On one level, the image presents the clash of the old and the new, but, on another, this work also highlights aspects vital for the interpretation of Sheeler’s New York series. Most architectural detail has been erased in Church Street El. The only real detail that remains – the windows in the left of the image, the slatted aspect of the top of the steeple, and the tracks, but no sleepers, of the El – is abstracted. The windows are dark, irregular rectangles that reflect no light and fail to adhere to conventional perspective. The same is true of the El lines, which do not recede but remain parallel to each


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other, despite the true perspective of the image plunging to a vanishing point to the bottom left, somewhere way off the canvas. On top of these abstracted elements is Sheeler’s choice of subject matter. The architectural masterpiece that is the Trinity Church is ignored in favour of the more mundane Sexton’s office, in much the same way as Sheeler ignores the recognisable façade of the Park Row Building. Contrary to the claims of Troyen and Hirshler, the tall buildings populating Sheeler’s New York series are in no way ‘undistinguished’. Rather, the photograph New York, Park Row Building differentiates itself in the first instance by choosing to ignore what, in 1920, would still have been one of the most recognisable façades of any building in Manhattan. Far from lacking distinction, the Park Row Building was the tallest building in the world on its completion in 1899, a record it held until the Singer Tower was completed in 1908. As a structure, the Park Row Building was a formidable twin-towered office building, thirty storeys high and 391 feet tall.26 However, the New York series manages to dispossess the Park Row Building of its identifying principles: its height and its most recognisable feature, its ornamental façade. Sheeler’s series of works, in fact, render the Park Row Building undistinguished. As Landau and Condit note, the ‘Park Row’s formal design is rigorously frontal and confined to the 104-foot-wide main facade and 20-foot-wide Ann Street front’.27 The highly decorative façade was a common feature of architecture during this period and portrayed the building’s individual ‘character’ or exclusivity. However, on completion, the Park Row received a mixed reception. The Record and Guide of the time expressed the hope that ‘no more [such] monsters will be allowed to rear themselves in New York’ and described the Park Row’s façade as ‘capricious’ and without ‘rhyme or reason’. Its highly visible blank sidewalls, which attracted Sheeler’s attention, were written-off as ‘inexpressive and vacuous’.28 Ten years before Sheeler, Alvin Langdon Coburn also chose to ignore the ornamental façade of the Park Row Building, photographing the ‘inexpressive and vacuous’ sidewalls instead. Coburn’s The Park Row Building (1909) uses to stunning effect the building’s height and pale walls punctuated by the geometrically precise rows of blackened windows. The building appears through a smoky veil as an immense and spectacular addition to the skyline, starkly contrasting with its neighbours, both in height and in its translucent quality. Sheeler’s works offer a similar perspective on the Park Row Building but the differences between the works of the two photographers is conspicuous. Whilst Sheeler’s focus is trained on the anonymous rear elevation of 15 Park Row, the perspective is one that looks down upon rather than up, as in Coburn’s print. And


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unlike Coburn’s Park Row Building, which is situated amongst other buildings, Sheeler’s tight framing removes the structure from its context in the city, reminiscent of Side of White Barn.

Charles Sheeler’s Im-Precisionist New York A more sustained analysis of the New York series reveals not only the abstraction of the building’s ornamental features but the breakdown in the geometric construction of the building through its re-presentation. As Sheeler re-presents the photograph New York, Park Row Building in pencil and oil, the geometric grid of the building’s windows is progressively translated with less accuracy. For example, in Skyscrapers, the windows in the top left of the image fail to recede true to the norms of threedimensional perspective, and those in the bottom right of the image ‘fall’ out of perspective. Although Sheeler maintains the overall regularity of window size, their three-dimensional perspective is warped to such an extent that, towards the bottom right of the building, the windows seem to wrap around the structure in a cubist style. Sheeler’s nod toward Cubism in the drawing appears purely stylistic. However, the influence of Cubism on Sheeler’s work is more than stylistic quotation, as I shall discuss later. Clearly, the imprecision of the geometric line in New York and Skyscrapers undermines any notion of precision and also problematises Schleier’s idea that Sheeler’s work is an uncritical employment of architectural pristine geometry. In what follows, I will argue that Sheeler’s use of the language of architecture is critical, a form of critique, as well as being crucial for our understanding of how imprecision appears and operates in the New York series.29 To do this, it is helpful to draw on the aesthetic theory of Adorno. Adorno’s work offers possibilities for interpretation and critique lacking in what is a predominantly American body of criticism on Sheeler, one with inherent biases and exceptionalist tendencies.30 Adorno’s notion of the technological work of art avoids locating the critical power of Sheeler’s work in the notion of Americanness. Instead, it becomes possible to account for Sheeler’s incorporation of photography, the adoption of modernity’s principles of rationality and notions of design so crucial for his aesthetic in terms that reveal a critical dimension to the artist’s work.

The Technological Work of Art: Photography as Catalyst The technological work of art is defined not only by its use of technology, in Sheeler’s case, photography, but also through the incorporation of the principles of technology – technique – in the artwork’s construction.


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In this section, this analysis will be extended to account for Sheeler’s technological work of art, an analysis that will consider more carefully the adoption and incorporation of photography and its impact on Sheeler’s aesthetic. For Sheeler, photography adds ‘to our knowledge of which we would have remained ignorant if we were dependent on the eye’.31 As a frozen moment in time, the photographic image affords a privilege that the artist’s eye and memory cannot. It remains static and unchanging. The eye of the camera and the recorded image enable the artist (or any viewer) to study what the eye might have seen but the memory can never accurately recall: transitory conditions, such as the fall of natural light, cloud formations, or facial expressions that would be lost forever. As Victor Burgin notes, the photograph ‘acts as a catalyst – exciting mental activity’.32 New York, Park Row Building parallels Burgin’s observation and acts as the catalyst for the other works of the series. Burgin’s work on the theory of photography also highlights another difficulty facing photographic modernism. Cubism may have freed modernism from its obligations to represent, but ‘photography . . . was unable to follow painting into modernist abstraction without the appearance of straining after effect: the unprecedented capacity of photography for resemblance seemed most appropriately to determine its specific work and distinguish it from painting’.33 As an aesthetic heavily reliant both on modernist theory and photography, Sheeler’s work is a complex amalgam of the representational and the abstract. Caught between photography’s capacity for resemblance and the gravitational pull of non-representational modernism, Sheeler develops a hybridised aesthetic: combining the technology of photography, classical notions of painting and drawing, and theoretical modernism. Sheeler’s decisive move to introduce a photographic element into his aesthetic was, as noted previously, radical because at the time photography was not seen a a legitimate art form. Stebbins and Keyes describe Sheeler as a ‘journeyman’ photographer in the early 1910s. Sheeler recognised that he had a talent for the medium but he also realised photography’s artistic possibilities, as shown in the prints he made of the John T. Morris Collection of classical and Oriental objects at the Pennsylvania Museum. The images of the collection possess a strong compositional element and an inventive use of lighting. For example, this is evident in two images of Dan masks; both entitled, Dan Mask, Female Style, Ivory Coast (c.1918) [one reproduced here as Figure 8]. In these images, the masks are treated more like portraits than museum pieces. Sheeler’s prints present both masks full-face, the lighting accentuating


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facial features and the masks’ more decorative and textural elements through the interplay of contrasting shadows, similar to those of Side of White Barn. Crucially, Sheeler’s photographs not only record the contents of the collection but also actively present themselves as artworks. They are made to be art. Sheeler’s realisation and subsequent investment in photography as an artistic form is largely defined by its ability to record precisely the view through the lens of the camera. But this precision, the objective or factual principle of photography, as Burgin remarked, is complicated by the malleable nature of the photographic process itself, revealing a dualism in Sheeler’s aesthetic. As Susan Fillin-Yeh observes, ‘Photography is a precise technology. But there is a contingency at the heart of its precision’, and it is this contingency that affords a degree of insight into Sheeler’s aesthetic.34 In respect of photography, the artist is involved in innumerable decisions, such as the composition of the image, choosing the lens, the depth of field/focus, and deciding whether to use natural or artificial lighting. Further possibilities for manipulation also exist in the processes of developing both the film and image in the darkroom.

8. Charles Sheeler, Dan Mask, Female Style, Ivory Coast (negative date c.1918) Photograph, gelatin silver print Sheet: 22.8 x 17.5 cm (9 x 6 7⁄8 in.) Mount: 25.4 x 20.3 cm (10 x 8 in.) © The Lane Collection Courtesy, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston


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These kinds of decisions should be acknowledged, according to Adorno, as artistic material. As introduced in Chapter One, Adorno defines artistic material as the sum of everything available to the artist, from colours to every artistic technique and anything about which the artist must make a decision. Artistic material is, therefore, ‘an essential element of production’ that ‘is not natural even if it appears so to artists; rather, it is thoroughly historical’.35 The material available to Sheeler included tones, colours and forms, and, following Adorno, also the principles of rationalisation and the vocabulary of architecture. For example, Sheeler’s contemporaneous series of photographs of New York – New York, Park Row Building, New York, Temple Court (1920), New York, Towards the Woolworth Building (1920) and New York, Buildings in Shadows (1920) – were all taken using slow film, a tight aperture, and a relatively slow shutter speed.36 Such decisions irrevocably affect the final prints. Consider the plumes of smoke in all the images: they are not frozen and static but loose and fluid, made possible by manipulating shutter speed and aperture. The flattened perspectives in the images was also controlled by the technical choice of aperture setting, which compresses the perception of depth, creating a sense of claustrophobia in the images. Furthermore, Sheeler’s choice of vantage point enhances this collapse of depth. By looking down upon the Park Row Buildings the works deny the skyscraper’s most ‘thrilling aspect’: its loftiness. It is interesting to consider Sheeler’s manipulation of artistic material, and its effects on the final print, in light of Burgin’s claim that photo graphy has never ‘succeeded in breaking clear of the gravitational field of nineteenth century thinking: thinking dominated by the metaphor of depth, in which the surface of the photograph is viewed as the projection of something which lies “behind” or “beyond” the surface’.37 Although a photograph can be made to be art, seemingly it cannot break free of the conception that it is a window on the world. It appears even when an image disrupts all sense of a true, visual resemblance through the collapse of depth, as with New York, Park Row Building, this expectation persists. Conventional photography can only abstract form to a point, and, because of this, Sheeler develops an interrelationship between painting and photography rather than choosing one over the other. Adorno’s notion of material and Burgin’s comments on ‘depth’ are helpful when analysing the use of shadow and the collapse of depth in New York, Park Row Building. The photograph was taken from the fortyone-storey Equitable Building at 120 Broadway, opposite the Park Row


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Building and, importantly, is in itself unusual. Rather than focusing upon the recognisable and highly ornamented façade of the Park Row Building, the photograph is a concentrated study of the anonymous rear elevation of 15 Park Row. In New York, Park Row Building, what appears to be a windowless structure on the right-hand side of the frame actually has a series of windows, concealed by a large shadow, which Sheeler replicates in Skyscrapers as a solid block of colour. In the drawing, however, these windows are made visible as Sheeler renders the shadows in lighter tones. In New York, Park Row Building, the shadows to the left of the frame and between the buildings are practically black. The depth of shadow confronts the viewer as an impenetrable darkness obstructing and foreclosing the view of the buildings within the frame and what lies ‘behind’ or ‘beyond’ the surface. Infusing this work is an air of ‘urban anonymity’ achieved through the concentration on the rear, rather than the façade, of the building.38 However, anonymity is undermined somewhat by the naming of the building in the work’s title; without which identification would be difficult. One could add that the title appears to be one of the few enlightening moments in a work whose claustrophobic tension is compounded by the restrictive visual effect of light and darkness. This combination of anonymity, half-clues and claustrophobia practically bars the viewer access into the city. The monolithic structures of the Park Row Building and its surrounding neighbours obscure New York’s organisational grid, thereby literally and metaphorically barring any access or connection to the city beyond and behind Park Row. In contrast to the photograph, the light in the drawing, New York, exudes a kind of haziness. The shadows are lighter and are not dense enough to appear as solid forms. They retain the ephemeral nature of a shadow. Unlike the depth of shadow in the photograph, the drawing’s lightness of shading and the non-shaded areas accentuate rather than obliterate surface detail and the geometrical shapes that make up the overall structures. The drawing, like the photograph, presents these formal concerns before its content. The artworks invite the viewer to see form through the geometric structure rather than content; the subject of the work is skyscrapers. Sheeler’s use of artificial and natural lighting is extremely important here. What is most striking about the photograph is its reliance on natural light to expose the forms of the ‘anonymous’ rear elevation. The same is true of Side of White Barn. This is in complete contradistinction to the Doylestown works where awareness of the formal aspects of


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the rural, pre-modern interior are heightened through strong, artificial photographic lighting. This was a technique Sheeler used to great effect when photographing the Dan masks and, as we shall see in Chapters Three and Four, his interior and still life works. The collapse of perspective in the drawing is not so marked in Skyscrapers. The handling of shading and colour in the painting, however, sustains the interest in form over content through the manipulation of shadow. The painting echoes the extreme contrast between light and shade in the photograph, which defines the structural aspects of the building. And, like many of the photographs of the Doylestown House, the contrasts between light and dark visually project structural forms out from ‘behind’ their conventionally defined visual meaning. In many respects, Sheeler is indulging in the identifiably modernist modus operandi. No longer is it important to recognise what we are looking at in terms of the object’s name – a staircase at the Doylestown House or the rear of the Park Row Building. What they are is not as important as the shapes, contours, shades or colours defining each object. It is their formal constitution with which Sheeler’s work is engaged, not the accurate representation of the object, although this realist impulse often survives despite abstraction.39 Sheeler reveals this formal constitution using technology and techniques that manipulate both the natural and the artificial.

The Technological Work of Art: The Rational Removal of Ornament According to Adorno, the technological work of art faces a critical problem: that in the adoption of the technological model of rationality, the artwork reproduces itself as ornament. The reason for this is that the technological artwork’s function as art is lost through its appropriation of the principles of rationality. This point is inherent, but unacknowledged, in Schleier’s reading of Sheeler’s skyscraper works. As Adorno says, the beauty of the autonomous technological artwork becomes problematic, a beauty that its model – the functional work – renounces. The beauty of the work suffers from functionless functioning. Because its external terminus ad quem atrophies, its internal telos wastes away; functioning – as a forsomething-else – becomes superfluous, an ornamental end in itself.40

In terms of the skyscraper and the New York series, the illusion of the functioning or functional whole breaks down somewhere between the idea and the reality of Sheeler’s aesthetic practice. Between the expressed desire to capture the facts and the reinterpretation of these


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facts, either through the more contingent aspects of photography, or the representation of the photograph in other media, the artwork reveals its own functionlessness. However, the re-presentation of the photographic image through the process of abstraction and repetition produces an artwork that possesses something more than its photographic correlate because, as Burgin notes, the meaning of a single photograph far ‘exceeds that which the photograph itself provides’.41 From the objective to the contingent, photography poses a number of interpretative problems, each compounded by the intervention of the artist. As I noted earlier, if we are to consider Sheeler’s aesthetic afresh using Adorno’s aesthetic theory, the questions that are asked of the artist’s work must be directed toward the relationship between his work and society. In Chapter One, I introduced Adorno’s notion of the artist as producer and the way in which the antagonisms of capitalist society manifest themselves through the form of the artwork. For Adorno, the artwork, as a form of mediation between the artist and the social, is inscribed with social history. Aesthetic production conceals ‘art’s social character’ which ‘can only be grasped by its interpretation’.42 Through the process of re-presenting the photographic image, Sheeler engages with the social and cultural practice rationality, in this case, of the rational removal of ornament. The conceptual framework of Adorno’s sociology of art – the reading of the social and society in the production of the artwork – shifts the emphasis of critique from the artist and towards the works themselves. Consequently, the field of enquiry widens. The re-presentation of images in other media requires an examination of what changes in the artworks within the series, other than the medium itself. On the one hand, the literal differences between the photograph, the drawing and the painting have been identified, but what can account for these differences? Abstraction, repetition, rationalisation, these terms all apply to Sheeler’s aesthetic and, as has been noted, Schleier claims the artist’s work actually employs an architectural vocabulary complicit with the aims and objectives of the machine age. Accordingly, notions of functionalism and ornament suggest that a theoretical connection can be made between Sheeler’s modernist aesthetic and socio-cultural thinking at the end of the nineteenth century and beginning of the twentieth. What follows is an analysis of the critique of ornament prevalent during this period that makes explicit reference to the work of Adolf Loos, Louis Sullivan and Frank Lloyd Wright on the rise and decline of ornament. I also discuss the American desire to decorate machines in the nineteenth century as well as considering Thorstein Veblen’s notion


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of waste and his ideas, as well as those of Jane Heap, on the role of the engineer. Toward the end of the nineteenth century, architects on both sides of the Atlantic began seriously to question the purpose and use of ornamentation in architecture. In his 1908 essay, ‘Ornament and Crime’, the Viennese architect, Adolf Loos, argues against the ‘slavery of decoration’, claiming to ‘have discovered the following truth . . . cultural evolution is equivalent to the removal of ornament from articles in daily use’.43 Some twenty years or so earlier, Louis H. Sullivan, was of the opinion that it would be ‘for the aesthetic good if we should refrain entirely from the use of ornament for a period of years, in order that our thought might concentrate acutely upon the production of buildings well formed and comely in the nude’.44 Sullivan’s pupil, Frank Lloyd Wright, similarly echoes his mentor’s sentiments in the essay ‘Ornament’: ‘We are a living body encrusted with dead things, forms from which the soul is gone, and we are devoted to them, trying to get joy out of them, trying to believe them still potent’.45 Loos, Sullivan and Wright consider the history of ornament a natural and organic form of human expression, but the European and the Americans disagree on the condition of ornament and its relationship with modern architecture For Loos, ornament is no longer necessary for humanity. Having served its historical and cultural purpose, ornament is redundant. Wright and Sullivan agree, in principle, with Loos that most architectural use of ornament in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was discordant with culture. But, rather than consign ornament to history, both make it plain that ornament is far from redundant and that modern forms could and would evolve. Sullivan was clear that ‘a decorated structure, well considered, cannot be stripped of its system of ornament without destroying its individuality’.46 Ornament should not appear to be merely ‘stuck on’ to the building’s exterior. It should appear, ‘when completed, as though by the outworking of some beneficent agency it had come forth from the very substance of its material and was there by the same right that a flower appears amid the leaves of its parent plant’.47 Wright, too, agrees: ‘True ornament is not a matter of prettifying externals. It is organic with the structure it adorns, whether a person, a building, or a park. At best it is an emphasis of structure.’48 The works of the New York series, when read in light of Loos, Wright and Sullivan, seem to have most in common with the ideas of Loos. The eradication of ornament aligns Loos and Sheeler, and in contradistinction to Sullivan, who would be appalled at the removal of a building’s character-defining decoration. However, with the emphasis on the surface


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of the walls of the building, Sheeler renders the windows, in both the New York series and Church Street El, as no longer perceived as windows but as aspects of the building’s design. Remarkably, the function of the windows emphasises structure precisely as Wright suggests above, the windows appearing to have ‘grown’ with the overall structure. Sheeler’s experiences in Europe, of the Armory Show and the avantgarde salons in New York introduced the artist to new ways of thinking about and producing art, resulting in Sheeler’s rejection of the teachings of his mentor, William Merritt Chase. One can appreciate Barn Abstraction as Sheeler’s first successful attempt at incorporating the principles of design into an artwork. All the work’s forms operate in some kind of relationship with all other forms in the work. Furthermore, with its unusual flattening of space and the imprecise hand-drawn lines, which vary in tone and quality (as do the forms they articulate), Barn Abstraction like Church Street El, can also be seen as a precursor to the New York series of works. As in Barn Abstraction, the functionality of the windows in the New York series is denied when stripped of their normal function. When represented through abstraction as elements of design, the windows are set to work with the other formal concerns within the work, functioning within a nexus of other formal concerns. The identity of the building is substituted for a consciously designed and assembled articulation of forms (though the skyscraper remains recognisable as a tall building). These windows do not function as windows do in ‘real’ life, a subject I discuss in Chapter Three. The viewer is unable to see ‘beyond’ or ‘through’ the glass and into the structure, and as such, there are no signs of life or clues as to what goes on inside the rooms of the skyscraper. Just as New York, Park Row Building refuses to follow the photographic convention of a window on the world, so New York disrupts the accepted function of the window in traditional art. Any sense of ‘urban anonymity’ is consequently altered somewhat. The clarity of New York reduces the imposing shadowy menace of New York, Park Row Building. However, in contrast, New York’s reduction exchanges one set of disconcerting formal features for another: the structure’s grid of windows. The windows are transformed into a formal element of design, drawing attention to the blankness of the building’s exterior and denying them their status and function. They become a rhythmical pattern or, as Adorno’s comments on the technological work of art suggest, a new form of ornament. The windows come to represent the irrational element in rationality, where the removal of one form of ornament is replaced by another through the same processes of rationalisation.


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However, the windows, in terms of the work’s formal construction, are in no way functionless. They not only accentuate the surface of the building but also represent the conscious incorporation of design into the artwork. This process reveals the artificiality and the constructedness of the work itself. The collapse of perspective in the drawing and painting stands as a clear example of Sheeler’s imprecise Precisionism, the conception of which cuts against the grain of the majority of criticism associated with his work and many of his own assertions as to the production of art. The kinds of imprecision evident in Barn Abstraction and the New York series co-exist alongside precise interpretations of line and perspective. But what is the significance of the dissenting line’s occurrence amongst the hard order of geometry, notably the organising grid of both the windows of the Park Row Building and the more expansive ordering grid of Manhattan itself, in Sheeler’s work? And what does the intrusion of the dissenting line say about Sheeler’s modernist representation as a response to a set of specific social relations?

The Eradication of Waste/The Incorporation of Design Sheeler’s realisation that artworks could be designed marks an important connection between his aesthetic and the work of Thorstein Veblen. Summarising Veblen’s conception of culture, Cecelia Tichi writes: ‘On the one side are the archaic, pre-industrial-minded businessmen and their minions, the attorneys, clerks, sportsman and military. On the other are the engineers, scientists, technicians and industrial workers, a confederation whose thinking accords with evolutionary change and has been shaped by the machine process itself.’49 Tichi identifies the progressive aspect in Veblen’s thought as related to ‘engineers, scientists, technicians and industrial workers’, whose function is to shape the world through technological means. In many respects, Veblen’s views on technology and society are anathema to Adorno, who is ever doubtful of the relationship between progress, technology and humanity.50 Adorno, too, is concerned that ‘Even the highly cultivated aesthetic allergy to kitsch, ornament, the superfluous, and everything reminiscent of luxury has an aspect of barbarism, an aspect – according to Freud – of the destructive discontent with culture’.51 Adorno’s concerns aside, Veblen’s idea of the engineer and his concept of waste does allow the connection between modernity’s concept of rationalisation and its manifestation in Sheeler’s aesthetic to be contextualised. Recalling Adorno’s reading of Cubism, I want to suggest Sheeler’s aesthetic is informed by conceptual resonances of


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Veblen’s engineer. However, Sheeler’s work is not a straightforward appropriation of the notion of the engineer and the associated concepts of waste and rationalisation, but a critique of them. Describing how such a cultural turn against waste found an aesthetic outlet in the first part of the twentieth century, the photographer Paul Strand deliberately tries to nullify what he considered the ‘the wholly fictitious wall of antagonism between science and expression’.52 Strand and Sheeler’s work developed in parallel and their individual aesthetic experiments provided the basis for the collaborative work, Manhatta. Although Sheeler and Strand might have shared an ambition to develop a technological aesthetic, it must be acknowledged that crucial differences exist between their works. What does connect Sheeler and Strand is that their depictions of the machine and the products of the machine age capture the hidden imaginative force behind these objects: the engineer. The expression of awe at the precision and the accompanying pseudo-spirituality of the skyscraper seems all the more understandable when one considers that ‘in its most extreme, the work of industrial construction was itself viewed as the highest art, with the engineer as the new artist’.53 As both John A. Kouwenhoven and John F. Kasson observe, the elevation of engineer from designer of objects to creative artist presents a peculiarly American perspective on the historical public distrust of the fine arts. For Kouwenhoven, the achievement of artists, poets, painters or architects in America suffered because they were regarded as ‘a somewhat crude dispersal of western European tradition’.54 Strangely, this is ‘in spite of [a] distinctively American element’ that nevertheless has been ‘inadequately representative of our national character’.55 Kouwenhoven identifies a desire on the part of the new American republic to distance itself culturally from Europe. Kasson, in Civilising the Machine: Technology and Republican Values in America 1776–1900, also recognises an American trend of distrust toward the arts. Unlike Kouwenhoven – of whom he is critical – however, Kasson traces the origins of the desire to be culturally distinct from Europe to a complex socio-political context. The fundamental aims of republicanism seemed at odds with those of the arts, and Kasson plots a course from 1776 to 1900 that examines the role of the aesthetic in ‘civilising the machine’. Kasson carefully pieces together the processes of rationalising not only the machine’s cultural context through an aesthetic of the machine but also the concomitant rationalisation of the arts and the artwork. Kasson says,


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the machine aesthetic implicitly threatened the emergence of the fine arts in America, and some of its stronger advocates challenged the aesthetic priority of the fine arts directly. At a time when the artist was struggling to develop a sense of professional identity and social respect, to distinguish himself from the mere craftsman, so were the inventor and the engineer.56

The elevation of the engineer from mere designer of ‘things’ into the realm of aesthetics – as the originator of objects of beauty, to be experienced as art, as well as used functionally – brings to life Veblen’s revolutionary vision of a technologically determined future. Just as the political progressives, mentioned in Chapter One, were arguing in favour of the social and cultural benefits of rationalisation at the beginning of the twentieth century, so too were elements of the artistic community. Jane Heap’s comments in a special edition of The Little Review dedicated to a machine-age exposition, is written in this same spirit: There is a great new race of men in America: the Engineer. He has created a new mechanical world, he is segregated from men in other activities . . . it is inevitable and important to civilisation today that he make union with the architect and the artist. This affiliation will benefit each in his own domain and will become a new creative force.57

Heap’s words are loaded with a utopian vision of the future. The cooperation of the engineer and the artist will create a world transformed by technology and aesthetic beauty. Heap, however, is well aware that America’s new found economic dominance is due in no small part to the brilliance of the engineer but also to the capitalist. ‘The legitimate pursuit of the Western world’, says Heap, recalling the words of Calvin Coolidge quoted in Chapter One, ‘has been the acquisition of wealth, enjoyment of the senses, and commercial competition’.58 The utopian vision of Heap relies much more upon commercial acumen than it does upon the aesthetic imagination. The role of the artist, it seems, is secondary to the successful formula of the engineer and the forces of capitalism that will bring forth this modern paradise. Outside this loop, the artist appears redundant. However, Heap’s polemic can be seen to secure the role of both the artist and the artwork. Sheeler’s work is interesting in this context because it absorbs and operates the work ethic of the engineer, and hence modernity’s principles of rationality. The aim here is not to re-cast Sheeler as an engineer, as Schleier’s critique might, but explore in what ways the principles of the engineer are expressed through the artist’s aesthetic practice. Sheeler’s work is both


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a conscious and unconscious manipulation of those profound cultural differences that existed with respect to the machine and technology identified by historian Siegfried Giedion. For Giedion, the distinction between mechanisation in Europe and the United States can be related specifically to the mechanisation of crafts. The Industrial Revolution in Europe ‘began with mechanising the simple craft: spinning, weaving, iron making . . . [whereas] America began with the mechanising of the complicated craft’.59 The vastness of the American continent and the limited numbers of European settlers meant in turn a limited number of workers. Of course, the opposite was true in Europe, where the problem was one of moving large numbers of people out of villages and into the developing towns, as well as the mechanisation of the cottage industries on a massive scale. The division of labour between agriculture and industry in Europe was not true of America. The shortage of labour in the States meant that a different kind of mechanisation forced itself to the fore, as necessary to complete agricultural tasks. According to Giedion, ‘the dimensions of the land, its sparse population, the lack of trained labour and correspondingly high wages, explain well enough why America mechanised the complicated craft from the outset’.60 Obviously, a horse and plough were inadequate for the size of the farmer’s task, so the mechanisation of tasks became an imperative function of the developing culture and society of America. The speed of technological development was rapid because the settler had nothing to fall back on: ‘They had to start from scratch’, observes Giedion, and accordingly, ‘imagination was given scope to shape reality unhindered’.61 The reliance upon the imagination and invention is central to both Heap’s and Veblen’s similar conceptions of the engineer. The engineer is conceived of as an individual who possesses the power and ability to eradicate waste from everyday life systematically through design. But what exactly is the engineer removing from social life that Veblen, for example, finds so distasteful? Throughout Theory of the Leisure Class, Veblen, in much the same vein as Adolf Loos in ‘Ornament and Crime’, exposes the social manifestations of what he calls ‘barbarian’ culture. The focal point of Veblen’s critique is the role of consumption and the display of the commodities consumed, which act as symbols of social standing. Veblen ridicules the psychology of conspicuous consumption/ leisure and pecuniary emulation because neither advances the progress of human civilisation. Culture is driven, for Veblen, by a false set of ideals related to the accumulation of property and wealth. Conspicuous leisure and consumption are nothing but a means of expressing wealth,


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and nowhere is this expressed more obviously than in the architecture commissioned by the leisure class. For Veblen, both conspicuous leisure and consumption are wasteful, because they are a waste of time and effort, a waste of goods, and a waste of an individual’s labour. Veblen notes that common to these commissioned structures is: the construction of an edifice face with some aesthetically objectionable but expensive stone, covered with grotesque and incongruous details, and designed, in its battlemented walls, and turrets and its massive portals and strategic approaches, to suggest certain barbaric methods of warfare. The interior of the structure shows the same pervasive guidance of the canons of conspicuous waste and predatory exploit. The windows, for instance, to go no farther into detail, are placed with a view to impress their pecuniary excellence upon the chance beholder from the outside, rather than with a view to effectiveness for their ostensible end in the convenience or comfort of the beneficiaries within.62

Cynical as Veblen’s view may be, his ‘gloomy gaze’ illuminates the ideological intentions behind the commission.63 As Adorno says, ‘In Veblen’s eyes the ornamentation becomes menacing as it becomes increasingly similar to old models of repression’.64 Waste, for Veblen, is more than a metaphor for a social condition but a concrete societal ill requiring eradication. ‘To call it wasteful’, notes Tichi, ‘is to say that it needs to be redesigned, and the critic who thinks and judges in this way is working de facto as an engineer’.65 For Veblen then, edifices of buildings similar to that of the Park Row Building or simple objects such as ornately crafted cutlery are wasteful. Veblen charges the engineer with the task of stopping the further deterioration of culture and halting the proliferating cultural submission in the face of consumer society. Veblen’s unrelentingly gloomy gaze limits his theory of ornament and architecture solely to display, but the history of ornamental cultural products, whether in architecture or in manufacturing, has a more complex genesis. As Kasson argues, nineteenth-century American engineers and manufacturers in attempting to make their products more artistic, ‘frequently resorted to ornamentation’.66 The study takes as a critical starting point the question: ‘Why . . . did Americans decorate machines?’ This question can easily be extended to include architectural structures. The functional simplicity that allegedly lies at the heart of American manufacturing during the nineteenth century (and the more general psyche of the designer and engineer) is regularly and publicly despoiled by embellishment. As to why ornament and functionality clash in what


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appears to be an unholy union, Kasson suggests that we must consider the machines’ appearance in relation ‘to both immediate purchasing audience and their broader social milieu’.67 The introduction of the commercial sphere allows Kasson to conclude that as machinery became more complex and less easy for the viewing public to understand or evaluate on a purely mechanical basis, so the masking of working parts resulted in an urge to decorate the covering panels. For Kasson, ‘One is compelled to conclude that machine ornamentation was more than a refuge for the second-rate, that it ultimately sprang from far greater depths than simple exigencies of marketing. It reflected profound aesthetic and social needs.’68 Wily manufacturers did not foist forms of embellishment upon the public; instead, manufacturers were responding to consumer demand. The nineteenth-century consumer demanded ornamentation. In this respect, ‘ornamental machinery appealed strongly to Americans’ desire for emotional expression’.69 Kasson’s conclusion draws on the inability of those ‘outside’ the world of manufacturing to understand what goes on ‘inside’, in this case, machines. Although architectural, the Park Row Building is an example of such a principle. The achievement of being the tallest building in the world is not enough; the exterior of the building must itself make an impression as lasting as that made by the structure’s vertical presence. Sheeler’s rejection of the ornamental façade and his further abstraction of the geometrical forms of the rear of the building conjoins an aesthetic eradication of waste similar to that of the Veblen and Heap’s engineer. It also simultaneously divides Sheeler’s aesthetic from the more functionalist concerns of the engineer because the artworks refuse to represent a working, functional machine. The dysfunctional windows, the collapse of the geometrical grid, and the fact that forms exist outside any relationship to their content, serve to create a radically negative view in the New York series. In many respects, the ornamental façades of the building appear as socially necessary cultural products, drawing attention away from what goes on inside the buildings. The ornamental façade is a form of distraction, which replaces the questioning of capitalism’s organising principles with the experience of awe at its physical achievements. Sheeler’s Park Row images are a rejection of this attitude. Sheeler’s images retain the impenetrability of the structures but, through their technological construction, the depiction of the rear elevation, and a perspective that looks down upon the Park Row Building, these works negate the unknowability of the system they represent.


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The Concept of Construction Adorno’s notion of construction offers a framework for reading the tension in Sheeler’s aesthetic between complicity and critique. For Adorno, Art is a stage in the process of what Max Weber called the disenchantment of the world, and it is entwined with rationalisation; this is the source of all art’s means and methods of production; technique that disparages its ideology inheres in this ideology as much as it threatens it because art’s magical heritage stubbornly persisted throughout art’s transformations. Yet art mobilises technique in an opposite direction than does domination.70

Art’s entwinement with rationalisation reintroduces the issue of the principle of construction in the artwork. For an aesthetic reliant upon the mechanised – photography – and the cultural – the notions of waste, ornament and the engineer – Sheeler’s technological work of art most definitely ‘mobilises technique in an opposite direction than does domination’. And, in keeping with Adorno’s interpretation of Cubism, separating the artwork from other cultural products is its ability to say something ‘more’ than merely reflect the system of a planned and preformed culture. For Adorno, the something ‘more’ of the artwork is necessarily presented through the ‘primacy of the sphere of production in artworks [which] is the primacy of their nature as products of social labour, by contrast with the contingency of their subjective origins’.71 The artwork, then, is a subjective and non-subjective product, a combination of construction and expression, the constructed and the expressive. Adorno describes the constructive element of the artwork in terms of the technologisation of the artwork, the adoption of the rationality of the totalising system in order to critique that same system. The incorporation of the technological into the work of art is both necessary and unavoidable; it is also extremely problematic, for reasons discussed below. In Adorno’s view, Paul Klee, as a ‘member of the technologically minded Bauhaus’, embodies the technologisation of modern artworks, a change that does not disrupt the power or the quality of the completed work.72 According to Adorno, the technological requirements drive out the contingency of the individual who produces that work. The same process which traditionalists scorn as the loss of soul is what makes the artwork in its greatest achievements eloquent rather than merely the testimony of something psychological and human . . . Emphatically modern art breaks out of the sphere of the


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portrayal of emotions and is transformed into the expression of what no significative language can achieve.73

For Adorno, Klee’s work combines these principles and successfully incorporates the technological without being swamped and destroyed by it. Sheeler’s work offers some comparative ground, especially with regard to the erasure of the artist through the use of technology, as well as the apparent emotional emptiness that figures in so much of his work. Sheeler’s combination of technology and traditional forms of artistic production is technique in the broadest modernist sense. For Sheeler, the production of a painting or drawing from a photographic origin adheres to the notions of rationalisation. Sheeler exercises the power of expression over the photograph. There is an element of Veblen and Heap’s engineer in this aspect of Sheeler’s aesthetic, the stripping away of ornament and the rationalisation of the photographic image through abstraction. However, there is a divide between the means and ends of the process: the engineer’s interest is categorically with ends, whilst Sheeler’s true interest resides with means. The ‘redesigned’ Park Row Building represents a warped rationalising power at work. As a monument to capitalism and the power of rationalisation, the ordered and controlling geometric forms of the skyscraper are subjected to the same rationality of abstraction, where the straight line is undermined by imprecision. The concept of technique and its rationalising ethos seems to counter Adorno’s critique of Enlightenment rationality. After all, it appears that Sheeler’s New York series is engaged in a calculated, instrumental programme of abstracting the essential essence of the landscape, whether urban or ‘natural’. This, however, is not the case, because Sheeler’s art is a rational questioning of rationality itself. Throughout Aesthetic Theory Adorno offers up the vision of an administered world that is at its heart irrational, hiding behind the façade of rationality. It is the responsibility of art to express this irrationality because ‘Art is rationality that criticises rationality without withdrawing from it’.74 By adopting the principles of the rationalised system, Sheeler’s dissenting line highlights the irrationality behind the façade of rationality. Sheeler’s various interpretations of the New York, Park Row Building photograph replay the central tenets of Adorno’s notion of construction. Adorno’s reading of construction leads him to identify an aporia in the modernist construction of the artwork. Construction is fallible because it has a will of its own: ‘This is the aporia of construction: its


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fallibility, on the one hand, is that it necessarily has a penchant to destroy what it integrates and to arrest the process in which it exclusively has its life’.75 Bleakly, Adorno concludes that construction runs on an ‘irreversible path’, and, consequently, ‘construction wants to make itself into something real sui generis, even though it borrows the very purity of its principles from external technical functional forms. Functionless, however, construction remains trapped in art.’76 Sheeler’s work is faced with the dilemma of balancing technologisation and construction without the latter overpowering the expressive part of artwork without which it would fail to be art. Despite the fact that Adorno reads construction as ‘functionless’ and ‘trapped’ in art, there is a clear correlate between construction in art and what Adorno calls ‘external technical functional forms’, most notably architecture. Functionalism acts as the example par excellence here. Adorno maintains that construction is ‘a form empty of human content’ and only ‘gains expression through coldness’.77 Under this rubric, the emotional coldness of Sheeler’s work apparently folds into itself as nothing but empty expression. It has meaning only as a model of construction, and, as such, fails as art. The stripping away of ornament and detail demands the efficient use of materials during the production of the work, stand as purely constructive elements that cheat art of expression. Art without expression or human content thus enables us to categorise Sheeler’s art as a total identification with the aggressor, non-critical of the rationality of domination. However, Adorno’s dialectic of mimesis and expression in the face of pure construction allows Sheeler’s work, through the conception of the something more of art, to escape such a total identification with the aggressor and find a space for critique. It is helpful here to examine Adorno’s analysis of construction and expression in the work of Picasso and of Schoenberg. ‘Art’, Adorno explains, ‘cannot be reduced to the unquestionable polarity of the mimetic and the constructive’.78 This is because art would be required to strike a balance between the two, a fault that would fail to recognise that ‘what was fruitful in modern art was what gravitated toward one of the extremes’.79 Picasso and Schoenberg exemplify artists engaging with these extremes. As Chapter One indicated, there is a radical aspect to Sheeler’s work, one that saves it from Adorno’s dismissiveness above. Moreover, Sheeler’s work is much more helpful in understanding the interrelation between art and functionalism in the American modernist context than that of Picasso or Schoenberg. As the previous sections on Veblen and Kasson demonstrate, there is a more complex and less obvious


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relationship to artistic tradition and American culture than one might expect. Admittedly, at times Sheeler’s work seems less of a response and more an exercise in importing wholesale the disciplines of the designer or engineer into artistic production. But, from Adorno’s perspective, such a conspicuous act is one that encapsulates the predicament of modern art, caught between rational construction and mimetic expression. Could this constant need to peel back the surfaces of the urban landscape perhaps be described as a compulsion on the part of Sheeler’s work to eradicate all expression through construction and technique? In the next section, I want to draw attention to the rather confusing combination of discourse surrounding the skyscraper that blends the functionalist with a pseudoreligious aspect, linking engineering excellence with a spiritual essence.

The Spirit of Functionalism There is a profoundly functional argument for the emergence of the tall building. The technical developments in steel production led to steelframe construction, crucial for the height and for the strength of this new form of building. With the contemporaneous refinement of the elevator, architects were able to design ever-taller and grander structures without the worry of endless flights of stairs. However, there is another more metaphysical or pseudo-religious conception of the genesis of the tall building. For Thomas van Leeuwen, at its inception the skyscraper was considered more than just a tall building. The sheer scale of vision involved, whether as a set of ideas or the actuality of the building itself, has engulfed the skyscraper in an air of the sacred in a profane world. In his study of the skyscraper, Leeuwen writes: Although it always seems to be purely functional, business – in particular big business and still more American big business – contains a highly paradoxical and metaphysical element, in which the practical and the frivolous, efficiency and waste, fight for priority and surprisingly often coexist harmoniously. In the American skyscraper, poetic imagination and brute materialism are perfectly welded, and it would be a mistake to think that its two aspects are in contradiction; they are not. Dreams, while rooted in business, are the cornerstones of the skyscraper.80

Although Leeuwen cannot deny an overbearing influence of business and the businessman on the formal or decorative development of the skyscraper (think of the Woolworth and Chrysler Buildings, for instance), the tall building is infused with otherworldliness. The recognition of


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an otherworldly aspect offers a promising avenue of inquiry. In order to follow these arguments, I want to explore the relationship between Sheeler’s chosen method of representation – the abstraction of detail to reveal hidden forms – and the parallel concept of abstraction of form in architectural functionalism. The dissenting lines in the New York series suggest that these works are critique rather than a validation of the discourses of the skyscraper and functionalism. For Sullivan, ‘Offices are necessary for the transaction of business’, whilst Wright notes that ‘The tall office building is the machine, pure and simple’.81 The comments of both architects highlight an important distinction between architecture and art, especially in light of Sheeler’s technological art. The functionalist building is equated with the conception of a functional machine, whose design articulates the most efficient means of meeting a specific set of ends. The technological aspect of Sheeler’s work is not specifically its subject but the appropriation of technological technique into artistic production. Arising from this appropriation is, as Adorno notes, a contradiction within the technological work of art; the productive process might incorporate the functionalist aesthetic of rationalisation but it cannot do so in the name of function because the artwork renders its technological subject functionless and is itself without function. Wright’s notion of the office building as a machine raises the issue of what buildings are for, how their design affects use, and their relationship with the world at large. Besides standing as a visible structure, as Leeuwen notes – a beacon of capitalism’s power – the building-as-machine reveals itself as a form of instrumental rationality. To borrow a phrase from Adorno and Horkheimer, the skyscraper, as a specific cultural historical product, is the ‘monument to capitalism’.82 The machinic metaphor in Wright’s observation captures the more dehumanising qualities of the office building. As a machine, the building reduces the human subject to a component, subject to, rather than controlling of, the machine qua technology. In many respects, the building-as-machine recalls Max Weber’s ‘iron cage’, operating as a microcosm of the capitalist system. The importance of the dissenting line and its relationship with the grid becomes apparent here. Rosalind Krauss refers to the grid as ‘the emblem of modernity’, the defining character in modern art.83 The grid is manifest in the regularity of the Park Row Building’s windows, analogous to the controlling obedience of the machine. The dissenting line, though, undermines this rigidity when the right angles of the grid collapse. The grid, however, is not the sole preserve of modern art, and


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if Manhattan is famous for anything other than the skyscraper, then it is the grid format of its streets and avenues. The unique history of the urban grid is worth briefly looking at because it helps associate the skyscraper and the medieval cathedral through the themes of precision and spirituality. In his exploration of the city, The Conscience of the Eye: The Design and Social Life of Cities, Richard Sennett writes that, after the collapse of the Roman Empire, new cities began to grow out of the ruins. However, these cities developed on top, as it were, of the Roman grid. Ignorant of the grid, the medieval town seemed to develop its own set of rules. As Sennett notes, these cities, unlike their Roman predecessors, were the creation of the ‘medieval builder’s masons and carpenters, [and] not philosophers’.84 Following Christian tradition, they partitioned carefully between secular and sacred space, so that ‘cities grew, jumbled together, the streets twisted and inefficient, while the churches were carefully sited, their construction precise, their design elaborately calculated’.85 At the centre of the town stood the church, a fortress against the flux and turmoil of the secular city. The sacred building became a place where the power of the Word of God offered ‘refuge and sanctuary from the violence that infected the city’. Housing the power of the Word of God was the cathedral, whose massiveness grew progressively throughout the twelfth century. As Sennett notes, this proliferation in size is often attributed to a need or a desire to remind the masses of the power of God. However, Sennett argues that ‘God’s power was in no need of advertisement’. The problem, therefore, was not one of spreading the word or of maintaining power; rather, it was a problem ‘of how to bring the congregation to an apprehension of His presence rather than an affirmation of His existence’. Sennett suggests that the voluminous interiors meant far more than the outward immensity of the structure’s exterior. As he concludes, ‘these cathedrals were large because of what happened in their interiors’.86 The sheer scale of these structures, as with the skyscraper, demanded a high degree of engineering prowess and the ‘built mass of medieval churches betrays a mathematical precision far more refined than that of much modern engineering’. The displacement of the grid in favour of the sacred centre had the effect of concentrating effort on one building in particular, a city’s church or cathedral, at the expense of secular architecture. What this meant was that ‘exquisitely crafted structures like . . . churches, [were] set seemingly at random in relation to other more indifferently built secular structures, [and so] engineering became a part


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of religious effort. Precision took on a spiritual meaning.’87 It is this idea that has the strongest impact on any consideration of Sheeler’s dissenting line in the New York series. If the sheer size of the religious structure’s exterior is not meant solely to impress or frighten the citizens of the city, then the precision-engineered high-vaultings of these religious buildings are not expressions of height for height sake. Nor is it simply a matter of displaying the engineering skills of the community. Height serves a specific purpose. The Christian builder, like the Christian artist, is engaged in an attempt to make faith explicit to the eye. As Sennett observes, ‘height, as it was originally conceived was a matter of looking up from within, in the act of prayer, and so having a visual experience of the ascension’.88 For Sennett, the decline of the grid in the medieval period hastens the development of an urban centre with its focus on religious architecture. The development of the medieval city appears very different to that of the American city. Whereas the European, medieval city has an almost organic growth, the appropriation and use of the grid in the construction of American cities represents a far more deliberate and rational employment. The use of the grid can be seen as an expression of Americanness. As Sennett notes, ‘Americans saw the natural world around them as limitless, they saw their own powers of conquest and habitation as subject to no natural or inherent limitation’.89 The American interpretation of the grid system legitimated this. The grid, laid down at the cost of anything and anyone standing in its path, eliminated both the need for a religious centre, whilst maintaining a need for the precision building. As Leeuwen notes, ‘Skyscrapers . . . were the fulfilment of the Babylonian promise, the realisation of both its technical enigma and its utopian-cosmopolitan objective’.90 The form of the religious building is defined by the function of religious worship, its vaultings constructed in such a way as to intensify the worshipper’s experience of the ascension. In all three of Sheeler’s images what becomes manifestly obvious is that, even when the buildings are stripped of their ornament, these structures are essentially to be experienced as external deities. What goes on behind the blank walls is a mystery to those of us outside trying to look in. If we recall Sheeler’s functionless windows, they delineate the exterior of the building as something to be looked at and not into or through. The building’s function or purpose becomes unknowable; its interior is impenetrable and our relation to it alienated. Contrary to the religious tall building, which acts to draw those outside in, Sheeler’s New York series steadfastly documents the divisive


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nature of their stature. Those outside the building remain so. The spiritual experience of the cathedral’s precision vaultings is replaced by an emptier experience, where human expression is no longer directed towards a purely spiritual end. The skyscraper represents the expression of the modern spirit, the spirit of capitalism, the accrual of wealth and the display of that wealth through ornament and the tall building. This interpretation of Sheeler’s New York series seriously questions the idea that these works are the ‘glorified vision of a brave new world’. Sheeler’s series of New York works are co-opted into the writing of the history of the skyscraper, especially in Schleier, often reducing the photograph, painting and drawing to the level of mere pictorial examples.91 The move to inculcate Sheeler’s ‘positive’ depictions of New York into an overall discourse of the skyscraper does provide a sociocultural background against which one might read immanently the tensions between form and content, realism and abstraction, and the artworks’ imprecise Precisionism. In conclusion, the imprecise Precisionism of Sheeler’s New York series questions the idea that these images are the work of an artist who is the ‘quintessential optimist of the urban scene’. The New York series form a critique that not only adopts the language of rationality as artistic material but is also a dialectical attempt to resolve two seemingly contradictory aesthetic influences – the multi-perspectivalism of Cubism and the monoscopic perspective of photography. It is the combination of artistic material, the specific form of the images’ construction – the process of re-presenting the photographic image in pencil and oil – through which Sheeler engages with the social and cultural practice of rationalisation. The collapse of the geometric line can, therefore, be seen as the dissonant effect of a doomed attempt to harmonise the irresolvable dialectic of multi-perspectival Cubism and monoscopic perspectival photography through a process of abstraction and rationalisation. The imprecise Precisionism of Sheeler’s New York series highlights imprecisely the irrationality through the dissonant forms of the works that hide behind the façade of rationality. As such, Sheeler’s New York series is, in the Adornian sense, a negative critique, a rational questioning of rationality itself, one that lives up to Adorno’s belief that ‘Art is rationality that criticises rationality without withdrawing from it’.92


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Chapter Three

The Disappearing Subject Self-Portrait

Introduction The most striking feature of Self-Portrait (1923) [Plate 4] is that, as a self-portrait, the subject of the work is more or less absent. The human figure is here seen only as a reflection but it is also a reflection without a head or face. Such a lack is crucial because, as Georg Simmel argues, the significance of face relies on the fact that it ‘offers itself as the first object of the gaze between one person and another’. The face becomes, therefore, ‘the symbol of everything that an individual has brought with him or her as the prerequisite of their life’, an organ of expression that ‘tells’ others about the self through the intra-personal act of looking; it is, therefore, a reciprocal form of knowledge.1 With specific reference to the history of art, Simmel determines the face as a central subject in art because it ‘strikes us as the symbol, not only of the spirit, but also of an unmistakable personality’.2 Tracing Simmel’s interpretation of the sociological and aesthetic importance of the face in Sheeler’s Self-Portrait is problematic because the work itself vehemently denies the exchange of knowledge that looking upon the face would give, in turn negating the aesthetic significance of the face in (self-)portraiture. But, then again, this negation is what makes Self-Portrait intriguing. Without the symbolism of the expressive face, a symbolism further reconfigured as an emphasis on apparition rather than the corporeal body, this self-portrait alludes to the possibility that there is no longer a tangible self to portray. By drawing himself ‘out’ of the portrait whilst maintaining the illusion of bodily presence, Sheeler’s work presents a self not in limbo but as liminality. However, as much as Sheeler’s biography provides useful clues to a more literal understanding of the work, the remainder of this chapter is concerned with exploring the work in other ways. This chapter begins with an analysis of Self-Portrait in order to outline the ways in which Sheeler deliberately creates tension


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through the interplay of title and image, not only in this work but others, such as View of New York (1931) [Plate 5].

A Brief History An often-overlooked fact is that Self-Portrait is not the original title of the artwork.3 It was first exhibited in Paris in 1923 under the title Nature Morte-Telephone. When the work returned from France in January 1924, it was exhibited as Audubon 451-, the number on the telephone.4 In 1931, the drawing was acquired by Mrs A. Rockefeller and subsequently exhibited under the title, Self-Portrait. According to Troyen and Hirshler, ‘The title [Self-Portrait] has led to much speculation about the meaning of the drawing’, and ‘the picture has been treated more like a cryptogram than a work of art’.5 Breaking the cryptographic code begins and ends with the disconcerting interplay between the work’s final title – Self-Portrait – and image. Crucially, the shifting titles of Self-Portrait do not form the basis for a critical reading of the artwork. With this in mind, the changing titles of Self-Portrait are not merely factual details making up a colourful art history but that they reveal a fundamental problem in modern art: that of naming absolutely the modern work of art.6 The ongoing interest in the connection between the title and the work of art was undoubtedly stimulated by the ironically titled Dadaist works of Duchamp and Picabia, both of whom exerted quite a considerable influence on the fledgling American avant-garde. Unlike contemporaries Morton Schamberg and Charles Demuth, on whom Dada was a greater influence, Sheeler’s engagement with Dadaist principles is harder to substantiate because, of the three American artists, Sheeler’s work displays only slight Dadaist influences. Little of the irony and none of the eroticism of the works of Picabia or Duchamp inhabit Sheeler’s work and it is perhaps more the artist’s close friend, Schamberg, who explores the machinic metaphors evident in Picabia and Duchamp. Demuth, too, in works such as My Egypt, relies heavily on the tension between title and image the Dadaists loved to exploit. But Sheeler was neither isolated from, nor immune to the aims, objectives and working logic of the Dadaist. Importantly, he was well aware of the connection between Dada aesthetic philosophy and their artistic technique.7 Sheeler was also a great admirer of Duchamp, as his photographs of the Large Glass show, and Duchamp, too, expressed his liking for Sheeler’s Self-Portrait. Whilst it seems reasonable to identify Dada as an influence in the production of Self-Portrait – whether because of the deliberate play on title and image or simply because Sheeler was one of many American artists


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loosely connected with Dada via the salons of the Arensbergs or Mabel Dodge – as a work subject to at least three title changes, interpretation seems conditioned only by its final title. The earlier titles and their effect on the meaning of the work remain largely ignored. Avoided too is the question, why was naming this work of art so difficult? Adorno is clear on this subject: finding titles for works of art is fraught with difficulty because of the ‘essential impossibility of naming, that is, titling . . . works of art’.8 With this in mind, Self-Portrait offers an opportunity to examine a canonical work in Sheeler’s oeuvre from new perspectives.9 But is it possible for Adorno’s description of the impossibility of titling modern works of art to break open Sheeler’s ‘cryptographic’ drawing to interpretation? In this insistence, Dada’s playfulness might illustrate the link between image and title but it also restricts the parameters under which the meaning of Self-Portrait has been interpreted. Therefore, it is vital to redefine these limiting parameters and to find a new way of reading the work. It is the consideration of the many titles of Self-Portrait and the difficulty identified by Adorno of titling works of art that provides the impetus for this project. Put simply, a configuration or constellation is formed by assembling all the work’s different names with the work placed at its centre. For Adorno, ‘constellations represent from without what the concept has cut away within: the “more” which the concept is equally desirous and incapable of being. By gathering around the subject of cognition, the concepts potentially determine the object’s interior. They attain, in thinking, what was necessarily excised from thinking.’10 Configurational form is central to Adorno’s aesthetics and is linked to mimesis and subjective aesthetic experience, both of which shall be discussed in more detail later. For the moment, though, a brief explanation of how configurational form operates might be helpful. In the 1962 essay ‘Titles’, Adorno addresses through his own experiences the problem facing all modern artists; the impossibility of naming the contemporary work of art. Adorno describes his own inability to find suitable titles for his work and how, generally, the task of titling fell to his publisher, Peter Suhrkamp. According to Adorno, Suhrkamp ‘had an inimitable gift for titles’; a gift that allowed him to discern what Adorno could not.11 As Adorno says, the problem is that ‘titles, like names, have to capture it, not say it’, and therefore naming the modern work of art absolutely has become ‘as hopeless as trying to remember a forgotten word when one thinks one knows that everything depends on remembering it’.12 The inability to remember this forgotten word – or to think of a title – is due to the artist’s proximity to their own work.


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Such closeness prevents the artist from capturing the work’s ‘essence’ in a title. For Adorno, it is ‘so much easier to find titles for the works of others than for one’s own’.13 Reading between the lines, it transpires that Suhrkamp’s ‘gift’ for titles has to do with a position of unfamiliarity or what might otherwise be described as a lack of emotional involvement with the work’s intentions. In this position of unfamiliarity, the viewer/ reader is compelled to compose a ‘constellation’ of elements ‘like a picture puzzle’ or cryptogram from the work. It is then through an imaginative reconstruction of these elements that the title of the work presents itself as the ‘response to the question the riddle poses’.14 In order to undo the ‘riddle’ of the artwork Adorno employs Walter Benjamin’s concept of the constellation ‘to suggest a nontotalised juxtaposition of changing elements, a dynamic interplay of attractions and aversions, without a generative first principle, common denominator, or inherent essence’.15 The constellation is a powerful tool in Adorno’s work, one he employs because of its capacity to allow different and conflicting discourses to co-exist, acknowledging ‘the still potent impact of past ideas’ and combining them to produce ‘new and unexpected constellations with others from different contexts’.16 The artwork is, therefore, able to convey and produce various reflection-provoking configurations. What is important about these reflections is the fact that they are not, as Shierry Weber Nicholsen notes, ‘grounded through explicit argument using discursive logic’.17 Instead, meaning arises out of a constellational ‘mass’. Therefore, the coherence of the central argument of ‘Titles’ (and Adorno’s work in general) is constructed around a loose set of reflections upon the titles of various works and various artists. In short, coherence and meaning do not necessarily emerge from an explicit, discursive presentation but out of a heterogeneous configuration of ideas and reflections. Importantly, constellational form allows meaning to arise from a nondiscursive, as well as discursive dimension. For Self-Portrait, the process of titling and the various titles themselves, with their connection to the work itself form the constellational mass from which meaning emerges, which helps open Sheeler’s ‘cryptographic’ drawing to interpretation.

From Nature Morte-Telephone to Self-Portrait As Constance Rourke observes of Sheeler’s drawing, ‘The picture seems exceedingly simple, but’, she continues, ‘stay with it a while and you will find that it is not’.18 In this next section, I intend to ‘stay with’ the work and to draw on the complex construction of this ‘exceedingly simple’ picture.


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From Nature Morte-Telephone through Audubon 451- to Self-Portrait, each attempt at naming the work of art has necessarily redefined the relationship between title and image. As Nature Morte-Telephone, central to meaning is the telephone as machine, obscuring the figure; as Audubon 451-, a specific kind of relationship between machine and human figure is intimated, one that is complex and challenging; finally, as Self-Portrait, the emphasis shifts once again, this time toward the human figure. With each title change, so the focus of aesthetic contemplation changes. However, what does not change is the ironic tone of each title in relation to the image. Consequently, it is this ironic element, combined with the unusual subject matter, that has enabled critics to draw definitive comparisons between Sheeler’s drawing and the contemporaneous work of the Dada movement.19 However, through tracing the similarities and differences between Sheeler’s work and Dada through a constellation of the artwork’s titles, it is clear that the artist’s work adopts a negative rather than ironical position in relation to technology and the machine. As Dickran Tashjian notes, Sheeler did not share the defining Dadaist sensibility of irony towards technology; rather, Dada was more a ‘catalyst’ for change in the artist’s approach to art.20 But I disagree with Tashjian. Dada’s deliberate and profound disturbing of convention is not so much a catalyst or a revelation, but more a confirmation for Sheeler; an affirmation of Sheeler’s aesthetic fusion of realism, cubism and photography that stretch back to the Doylestown photographs and drawings of barns. If Dada functions as a catalyst at all, then one can point to the changing titles of Self-Portrait as representing something of a break with Sheeler’s earlier works.21 Prior to Self-Portrait, Sheeler’s more abstract work uses descriptive titles – for example, Side of White Barn and Barn Abstraction – in order to redeem the more representational elements of the works from the forms of abstraction to which they are subjected. And, as Tashjian notes, the irony of Dada is absent from Sheeler’s portrayal of technology and exists in terms of an ironical relationship between title and image. For example, as Self-Portrait, the subject of the self-portrait, Sheeler, is doubly obscured, appearing only as a headless reflection hidden behind the telephone. In one respect, Sheeler’s titles echo the ironic tone of Dada, but they differ significantly through the significance given over in the titles to the missing or obscured elements from the work: their absence when the work’s title suggests their presence. The original title of the drawing, Nature Morte-Telephone, can be seen as part of the modernist challenge to the conventional subject matter of the still-life genre. Constance Rourke notes that at the time of the production


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of Nature Morte-Telephone, the telephone was considered at that time ‘an unsuitable subject for art’.22 In some senses it is exactly the presence of the telephone that allows the conjoining of Sheeler’s drawing and the anti-artistic notions of the Dada movement. Susan Fillin-Yeh claims the drawing is ‘clearly a Dadaist statement by an artist otherwise very unDadaistic’ and whilst Fillin-Yeh illuminates a radical aspect in Sheeler’s drawing, something missing in previous critical accounts, I think it unprofitable to over-identify Sheeler, the drawing and Dada.23 It would also be a mistake to define the artwork only in terms of its unconventional subject matter. The work of Francis Picabia is a good example of the more abstract theoretical notions of Dada. Picabia’s ‘mechanomorphs’ and portraits can be seen to represent a wider interpretative perspective than merely the playful allusions of their titles. For example, Picabia’s machinist representation of Stieglitz, Here, This is Stieglitz Here (Ici, C’est ici Stieglitz) (1915) [Figure 9], appears to be a straightforward allusion to Stieglitz and his camera that collapses the identity of the photographer and avant-

9. Francis Picabia, Here, This is Stieglitz Here [Ici, C’est ici Stieglitz] (1915) Pen and ink on paper 75.9 x 50.8 cm (29 7⁄8 x 20 in.) Alfred Stieglitz Collection


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gardist into one and the same entity. On the surface this seems somewhat trite, an easy connection, too obvious in both its methodology and its application. It is only when we look more closely at the drawing that anomalies appear in the easy veneer of Stieglitz-as-camera. On closer inspection, the camera looks flimsy, out-dated and worn, its internal structure exposed (suggesting an inability to work). The lens of the camera, pointing skywards, is framed by the word ‘IDEAL’, a comment upon Stieglitz’s photography. The idealising image is rendered redundant by the fact that the exposed structure of the camera would itself allow light to obliterate any photographic image. The lens’s obsession with the ideal portrays, in one sense a closed frame of reference, of not seeing the broader, more dynamic world of the early twentieth century. The notion of redundancy in Stieglitz’s work is extended to the level of critical commentary on the influence of Stieglitz in the art world of New York. As if adding insult to injury, Picabia’s image makes reference to the symbol of the dynamism of the modern age, the motor car, with hand-brake and gear-stick of the car – those instruments regulating this dynamism and forward movement – in place behind the camera. Crucially, though, Picabia’s transfiguration of camera and motor car as Stieglitz shows the hand-brake engaged and the gear-stick in neutral, further reinforcing the image of Stieglitz’s impotence; the objects are not in the field of view of the camera, and even though they are drawn behind it, they are close enough as to appear as the workings of the camera. In both instances Stieglitz is caricatured in derogatory terms. Central to Picabia’s critique of Stieglitz is a more general interest in the equivocation of the individual and the machine. In Picabia’s ‘mechanomorphic’ work, a reductive process is in operation by which the individual human being is described in terms of the machine and/or machine parts through extended metaphor. In order to contextualise Sheeler’s drawing in relation to Dada, it is worth considering how Morton Schamberg, the artist’s contemporary and close friend, adapts the principles evident in Francis Picabia’s work. Schamberg’s close alliance with the New York Dada movement was instrumental in the development of his aesthetic. In much the same way as Sheeler selectively synthesised aspects of European modernism, Schamberg does not merely replicate the essential qualities of Picabia’s Dadaist mechanomorphs, for example, but fuses aspects of Dada with his own aesthetic. What distinguishes Schamberg’s work from Picabia’s is the concentration on the machine part in isolation. Tashjian argues that Schamberg’s ‘machine-forms exist in a mysterious ambience of blank discontinuity’, most evident in Mechanical Abstraction (1916) [Figure 10]


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and God (c.1918).24 The removal of the machine or machine part from a recognisable context distances Schamberg’s work from the ironic and pseudo-eroticism of Picabia. The machine is decontextualised and, in some cases, is even an imaginary machine part, distinguished as an object for aesthetic contemplation in its own right. Whilst Dadaist similarities exist between the work of Schamberg, Picabia and Sheeler’s Nature Morte-Telephone, the latter is, in many respects, markedly different. Whilst the title stresses the importance of the telephone, this machine, unlike Schamberg’s Telephone (1916) [Figure 11] or Picabia’s mechanomorphs, is neither equivalent with the human subject, nor removed from its context. Sheeler’s Self-Portrait relies upon the specificity of its context, the modern interior, for its condition of critique. Sheeler’s work questions the place of the machine in the modern interior by making strange a familiar environment. As Karen Lucic notes, by personalising the environment, Sheeler was able to thematise ‘the impact of technology on human existence more directly’.25 Placing the telephone within a recognisable space renders the telephone as part of a larger constellation of objects and no longer as isolated, and, therefore, quite unlike Schamberg’s telephone set – apart from purely for aesthetic contemplation.

10. Morton Schamberg, Mechanical Abstraction (1916) Painting VIII (Mechanical Abstraction) 76.5 x 51.4 cm (30 1⁄8 x 20 1⁄4 in.) Philadelphia Museum of Art: The Louise and Walter Arensberg Collection


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85 11. Morton Schamberg, Telephone (1916) Oil on canvas 61 x 50.8 cm (24 x 20 in.) Columbus Museum of Art, Ohio Gift of Ferdinand Howald

Here the context of the interior emphasises the machine’s emergent cultural position as a symbol of progress, as well as of the growing network of communications proliferating across 1920s America. With the widespread belief that the ‘Factories, railroads and telegraph wires seemed the very engines of a democratic future’, how and why Sheeler’s work was associated with positive representations of the machine age becomes obvious.26 The telecommunication technologies, as well as the concomitant development of the railroads and the free market redefined the temporal–spatial landscape of America during this period.27 The telephone, the principal example of the machine in the modern interior, connecting the individual with the rest of the locality, city, state, country and the world: a world that offered emancipation through communication and technology. Contrary to the view of Sheeler as some kind of sage of a technological utopia, there is an equally strong case to be made against the investiture of Sheeler as a kind of high priest of the machine age. Invariably images of the machine possess the quality of power, a spark; they are transformative, and as Alan Trachtenberg notes, democratising. Arguably, the telephone, as in Sheeler’s other representations of technology and the machine age, lacks these qualities. The promise of communication, connection, and empowerment through technology all seem alien in this environment. As Nature Morte-Telephone, the lifelessness of the work is the negation


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of the machine as a life-affirming dynamo. The telephone possesses a solidity the reflected human figure lacks; the reflection takes on the appearance of an apparition, a ghost haunting an impersonal technology. In some respects the reflected figure represents the disembodied voice crackling at the end of the line, the ghost in the machine; a scratchy and incomplete substitute for actual face-to-face communication. Here, the reflected figure does not sit in exaltation of the machine but appears as a portentous motif: a reminder of the persistence of the human subject that appears to be under attack and alienated from the world by the machine. The image places the positive and upbeat assertions of the machine age under the cold, piercing artificial light of Edison’s electric light bulb. Under this spotlight, there emerges not only a critique of the machine but also of the impact of the machine on individual subjective experience of a culture in which the machine is coming to dominate; a culture, as Williams noted earlier, in which the machine could not be ignored. The significance of the reflected figure lies with its facelessness, and, hence, its inability to communicate, trapped by technology; the ghost of human subjectivity reduced to haunting an unassailable future. After the exhibition in Paris November 1923, Nature Morte-Telephone returned to New York in January 1924 to be exhibited at the Whitney Gallery under the title Audubon 451-. This title change increasingly manipulates the viewer’s experience of the work because, as another attempt at naming or capturing the essence of the work, the title suggests some form of personal connection between the machine and the reflection. The telephone number – Audubon 451- – is a territory of convergence, where subject and technology merge. Here ‘Audubon 451-’ implies the existence of a concrete connection between the figure in the glass and the telephone. The title functions in such a way as to develop the formal theme of communication that, as Nature Morte-Telephone, the work began to untangle. The importance of the telephone number accentuates other aspects of the drawing, such as the human relationship between mass communications and the subject, and its effect on cultural values and societal norms. As Audubon 451-, the impact of the growing network of communication technologies and their consequences for human personal relationships becomes stronger. The subject’s identity is reduced to a number, a fact reinforced by the disembodiment of the reflection and the compositional alignment of the telephone and the human body. Compositionally, the work is reminiscent of Picabia’s mechanomorphs in that the mouthpiece of the telephone substitutes for the figure’s missing head. This substitution suggests a dehumanising electrification


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and mechanisation of human speech, thought and action, an invocation of the human as machine. Moreover, as a reflection, the figure loses its physical tangibility as well as its agency: what might be considered a contemporaneous mirroring of the disembodied voice travelling along the telegraph wires of America. As the figure and the telephone merge in some kind of cyborg – a human machine – the headless figure is projected forward from behind the telephone almost, presenting itself as a subject for contemplation through the estranged co-mingling of subject and machine. The growing constellation of formal considerations within the work, as well as between the work and its title, invites the viewer to refocus upon the telephone. This focus draws upon factors such as the relationship between the telephone number, Audubon 451-, and individual identity; between the technology of the telephone and new forms of communication; between the mechanics of the telegraph and real human contact. Troyen and Hirshler observe: Mediating between the ephemeral figure and the solid telephone are the cords of the phone and the window shade, which snake animatedly through the left half of the picture. The serpentine patterns they trace are complicated by their shadows which . . . do not exactly reflect the twists and loops made by the cords themselves.28

The displaced shadows of the telephone cords are a subtle distortion, dissenting lines, which present the new method of communication as a distortion; an alienating, rather than liberating, experience. As Self-Portrait, Sheeler’s image is ever more evocative of the bleak notions of alienation and reification. Adulation of the machine is portrayed as a mask that discourages a true reflection (hence Sheeler’s reflected self, a reflection on himself by himself) on the effects of the machine. The drawing possesses a complexity beyond the simplistic attribution of Dada playfulness and irony to the representation of the telephone with which we began. The image, on reflection and in conjunction with the titles, has slowly led us to configure Sheeler’s work as a manifestation of a negative perspective on the machine age. Sheeler’s work presents us with an uncomfortable set of observations on technological progress. There are the obvious connotations of human identity reduced to a number and the isolation of the subject initiated by the new ‘democratising’ forms of communication, imprisoning the subject within the modern interior, a bright, clinical, efficient, machine-like space that appears to deny the subject comfort or identity.


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As is typical in Sheeler’s work, the artist displaces the conventional function of windows, choosing to cast the glass in Self-Portrait against type: it is not a window on the world but a reflective device. Reminiscent of the Doylestown House suite of photographs, the harsh electric lighting bleaches the non-reflective surfaces and blackens the window, reducing it to a mode of reflection and introspection. The window is no longer a window on the world, but a barrier to it; it fails to illuminate, cast light, or perform as a transparent object: it only reflects. As such, the light of the interior creates a surface through which the reflected figure (and the viewer) cannot see, but it suggests that, again like the earlier critique of the Doylestown photographs, anybody on the other side of the glass would be able to see through the glass perfectly well (from the exterior to the interior). Accordingly, Sheeler’s reflected figure would remain unaware of human presence on the other side of the window. In contradistinction to the Doylestown photographs, though, with their inferences of the lighted hut, the inclusion of the figure invokes notions of the objectification of the individual, the scrutinised subject of modernity. Trapped and reliant upon the machine for company and self-identity, Sheeler’s work draws the worrying conclusion that the structure and meaning of modern life seems ever more dependent upon the machine and technology. Sheeler’s shadowy figure is the last vestige of humanness, a disappearing presence that represents a self that might resist the proliferating mechanisation of culture and society. However, the reflected human figure, caught in the glass, also points to the modern subject’s growing reliance on a proliferating mechanisation and technology to the extent that, if one were to switch off the electric light in Self-Portrait, the subject would vanish.

The Disappearing Subject: Self-Expression and Self-Effacement Clearly the complexity of Self-Portrait extends well beyond the artist’s synthesis of Dada. As a constellation, the changing titles of Self-Portrait reveal a negative rather than ambivalent or positive attitude towards the machine and machine age. In what follows, I want to explore this negativity and complexity through Sheeler’s use of photography, or more accurately, the impact of photographic practice on Sheeler’s nonphotographic work. In particular, I want to explore the development of what can be described as Sheeler’s photographic vision in order to account for Self-Portrait’s disappearing subject.


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For Susan Fillin-Yeh, Sheeler possessed a ‘fascination with photographic vision’,29 and she notes that, despite being a pencil drawing, Self-Portrait, in composition, colour and form, resembles a photograph. Fillin-Yeh’s observations echo those of William Carlos Williams30 and Theodore Stebbins,31 who both identify a directness of vision in Sheeler’s work that they each attribute to the artist’s use of photography. For Sheeler, photography introduced a degree of precision into his work; a precision undermined through reinterpretations of the photographic image in paint and pencil, a process I referred to in the previous chapter as ‘imprecision’. The photographic resemblance of Self-Portrait becomes an interrogation of the precision of the machine through subjective expression, in this case through drawing. For Tashjian, Sheeler’s attempt to conceal the maker’s mark echoes a Dadaist anti-art impulse; however, one could conceive of this deliberate extermination of the artist’s mark not as antiart but as anti-modernist, an accusation levelled at Sheeler’s work by Hal Foster et al. in the art historical survey, Art Since 1900. If modernism has an identifiable mantra then it is that art must, above all else, reveal rather than conceal itself as art. Not to do so is worse than regression, it is barbaric. Ironically, though, and as Rourke has previously noted, Sheeler’s smooth, non-painterly surfaces not only imbue his work with a recognisable style, but these non-painterly surfaces, bound together by a decisive construction, only ever reveal themselves to be art and not artifice. Perhaps this is the enigmatic quality in Sheeler’s work. Furthermore, Sheeler’s methodical process of making up a picture allows the unfolding of his disappearance only to reappear through his style and by the fact that he leaves his identifying moniker in the corner of each work. What Tashjian and Foster et al. cannot properly account for is the insistent dialectical tension in Sheeler’s work between art and antiart, modernism and anti-modernism, the photograph and the easel. The considered reduction of the artist to copying machine further reinforces and destabilises any effort to pigeonhole. Sheeler at once manufactures the space for a photographic vision, only to subvert the precision and function of this photographic vision. The repositioning of the artist in relation to artistic practice is important for a number of reasons. Firstly, Sheeler chooses to subject the accuracy of the photographic image to subjective expression; secondly, Sheeler’s seemingly contradictory attempt to paint like a machine necessarily reveals its own artifice. Nevertheless, Self-Portrait is not a photograph. Nor is it, as is the case with the majority of Sheeler’s work’s, a drawing or painting of an image with a photographic origin.32 Understanding Self-Portrait is as


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much a consideration of the effect of photography on Sheeler as it is of Sheeler’s use of photography and the photograph. The tensions between a dominating photographic vision, the desire to paint like a machine and the role of subjective expression in Sheeler’s aesthetic, offer a new perspective of looking at, or experiencing, the world through machines. Unlike Picabia’s mechanomorphs, which collapse the distinction between the human and the machine in order to caricature and satirise, Sheeler’s work engages in a complex interrogation of the effect of the machine on subjectivity and agency. Works like Self Portrait might ‘investigate notions of personal identity in the machine age’, but more importantly, ‘they address its challenge to both the traditional aims of artistic production and to notions of the creative self’s autonomy’.33 For support, Lucic invokes Walter Benjamin’s ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’34 as confirmation that Sheeler’s photo-dependent works ‘thematise the revolutionary significance of mechanical reproduction in a way that runs parallel to Benjamin’s theories. In such works, the reliance on photography ultimately challenges the creator’s self-concept as an autonomous maker of unique, irreproducible artefacts.’35 Sheeler’s reduction of the self to a mere instrument of reproduction correlates with Adorno’s conception of sacrifice of the artistic self. Sheeler exemplifies the self-effacement of the artist through technique, a technique that deliberately erases brushstrokes and all physical evidence of human making. To make sense of Sheeler’s desire to remove his mark from the canvas, Adorno’s work on sacrifice is more than helpful. For Adorno, sacrifice of the artistic self is ‘both a sacrifice of one’s identity and a preservation of it in hiding’.36 The sacrifice of the artist to the work is, for Adorno, an acceptance of the artist to the role of a conduit in the artwork’s production. As Nicholsen explains, ‘Disguise and sacrifice are two sides of the same coin, which is death and preservation, oppression and artistic activity’.37 Nicholsen’s conclusions arrive at the end of a long discussion of Benjamin and Adorno’s interest in photography and aura, a discussion that is informed by the long-standing debate between the two men and Benjamin’s ‘Artwork’ essay.38 As Benjamin outlines in that essay, ‘aura is tied to . . . presence; there can be no replica of it’,39 and it is this presence – the uniqueness of the singular work – which the reproduced work of art destroys. Self-Portrait clouds the issue of aura somewhat because it is not a photograph and, as such, retains the aura of a unique, singular work of art. It is more beneficial, therefore, to consider the auratic nature of Self-Portrait less in terms of its uniqueness as a work and more in relation to the notion of the sacrifice of the artist’s self to the work. The effacement of the self


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from the artwork, which Adorno finds so edifying in Benjamin and Kafka, can again be seen in his insistence that the works of both share a ‘photographic perspective’ or ‘photographic vision’.40 This observation on photographic perspective or vision is a valuable bridge between Adorno’s aesthetic theory and Sheeler’s photographic vision. Moreover, this association is more than an allusion to the artist’s ability to perceive and describe the world ‘as it really is’. The self-effacement of Kafka and Benjamin, their sacrifice in respect of their own work (the acceptance that they are secondary to the work) is also true of Sheeler’s aesthetic. Sheeler prefers ‘the picture that arrives at its destination without evidence of a trying journey’ and this awareness on Sheeler’s part extends to his own role in this ‘journey’.41 On painting Spring Interior (1927), Sheeler explains: ‘I wanted to eliminate the evidence of painting as such and to present the design with the least evidence of the means of accomplishment’.42 Despite his best efforts to disappear, though, Rourke notes that it ‘is never difficult to single out a Sheeler at an exhibition, yet characteristically this artist says that he aspires to paint pictures which will not be recognised as his’.43 Sheeler’s expressed desire to disappear from his own work is, as it were, undone by his own aesthetic technique of reducing the mark of the artist to the barest minimum, a technique that becomes, ironically, one of the most identifiable features of his work. In many respects, Self-Portrait expresses exactly this paradox between selfexpression and self-effacement. The expunging of painterly evidence is haunted by the presence of the artist. Over the next few pages, the focus will be the dialectic between self-effacement and self-expression and the language of photographic vision in Sheeler’s Self-Portrait. Following Nicholsen, who believes it is possible to speculate that photography ‘has the capacity . . . to present a version of the world in negative’, I want to argue that Sheeler’s photographic vision is itself manifestly negative. Consequently, the production of this negative image may produce a negative form of aura. The manifest negativity of Self-Portrait is best explored when reconsidering the image’s reflected figure and by paying particular attention to the reflection’s facelessness. It is tempting to interpret Self-Portrait’s reflected figure as a deliberate act on Sheeler’s part to represent the withdrawal of the artist’s mark through his own fading self-image. One could also argue that Sheeler was caught between the overly technical and constructive elements in his aesthetic (the camera, the photograph, formal experimentation) and the expressive, subjective elements (Sheeler’s retention of a form of realism). Troyen and Hirshler attribute form and content in Self-Portrait to a period of transition in


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Sheeler’s life. By 1923, many of Sheeler’s associates on the New York scene had either left or were leaving the city: the Arensbergs had taken up permanent residence in California, Duchamp had returned to Paris, and the De Zayas Modern Gallery had been closed for over a year.44 These pressures and fears find expression in Self-Portrait, according to Troyen and Hirshler, a work that reveals ‘the vulnerability Sheeler no doubt felt at the time’.45 As convincing as this might be, a more theoretical consideration fleshes out the reading of Self-Portrait to account for the negative qualities of the image beyond the realm of Sheeler’s biography. It is worth pursuing Benjamin’s comments on a childhood photograph of Kafka in his essay, ‘Franz Kafka’, because they reveal an affiliation with Simmel’s work on the face discussed earlier. For Simmel, in the perceptible world ‘there is no other structure like the human face’, and its uniqueness lies in the face’s ability to merge ‘a great variety of shapes and surfaces into an absolute unity of meaning’.46 Benjamin’s concern with the fate of the face is an extension of Simmel’s point and finds its own focus in the consideration of the bourgeois interior and the photographer’s studio, which he describes as ‘somewhere between a torture chamber and a throne room’. This conclusion in part depends upon Benjamin’s interpretation of the expression on Kafka’s face in a photograph.47 For Benjamin, the photographed face in this period is overwhelmed by the interior, making it ‘the locus par excellence of the aura’.48 Benjamin construes the aura as an ‘inextricable connection between past and future, that is, between the present moment of the subject in the photograph and the present moment of the viewer looking at the photograph, and thus between life and death, [which] is experienced as something new and unique’.49 Therefore, it is within the reciprocal gaze of the subject and viewer that past and future collide, a disconcerting experience that engineers a shock or shudder; the roots of genuine aesthetic experience on the part of the viewer; an idea Adorno develops in his own aesthetic theory.

The Shock and the Shudder The conceptions of a negative photographic vision, of aura, and of the fate of the face, all resonate strongly with Self-Portrait and new tensions surface. Self-Portrait presents the subject literally absorbed by the interior, trapped in the glass of the artist’s photographic studio. This interior, however, shares nothing with the splendour and opulence one finds in the studio of the bourgeois photographer as Benjamin describes it. There are no thrones, tapestries or palm branches; the modern interior appears


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as its opposite. Sheeler’s Self-Portrait, following Benjamin’s argument, readily attests to the destruction of the aura on both counts: the subject without a face, fully absorbed by the interior. But what can account for the faceless subject and its absorption into the modern interior? If we recall the way in which Self-Portrait synthesises the Dadaist and the photographic, an impulse to confront tradition and formal expectation, the work expresses a quality of both strangeness and estrangement. Understanding the strange and estranging aspects of the work is best approached through Adorno’s notion of Shock. Shock or shudder is, for Adorno, an inherent part of mimesis and subjective aesthetic experience, two subjects to be discussed below, but before we move on to these topics, the link between shock and aura needs to be addressed. The importance of the notion of shock and shudder for Adorno’s aesthetic theory cannot be overstressed. The constellation of elements that the viewer composes and then reconstructs, as discussed earlier in light of the essay ‘Titles’, not only allows the subject to capture the essence of the work, but to see beyond the work their own subjectivity and the world of reified ideas. ‘Under patient contemplation,’ Adorno says, ‘artworks begin to move. To this extent they are truly afterimages of the primordial shudder in the age of reification: the terror of that age is recapitulated vis-à-vis reified objects.’50 The significance of the shudder is, however, not purely subjective. Adorno explains: The shock aroused by important works is not employed to trigger personal, otherwise repressed emotions. Rather, this shock is the moment in which the recipients forget themselves and disappear into the work; it is the moment of being shaken. The recipients lose their footing; the possibility of truth, embodied in the aesthetic image, becomes tangible.51

The capacity for images to shock, whether visual or literary, is an incendiary device for exploding static and reified perspectives. For Adorno, Kafka’s work has the shock of the snapshot about it; the photograph of a frozen moment that provides a visual shock.52 The diminished role of the face, its effect on aura, and the shock this produces in Self-Portrait, connect the work with Benjamin’s as well as with Adorno’s understanding of Kafka. For Adorno, the power of Kafka’s work lies in its ability to present the major theme of the age – the proliferation of monopoly capitalism and the totally administered society – not through direct engagement but through absence. Adorno explains: ‘Kafka, in whose work monopoly capitalism appears only distantly, codifies in the dregs of the administered world what becomes of people under the total spell more faithfully and powerfully than do most novels about corrupt industrial trusts’.53


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It is through Kafka’s ‘sober presentation’ that his ‘epic style’ presents itself as the ‘mimesis of reification’.54 The cumulative effect of Kafka’s style results in making absurdity ‘as self-evident as it has actually become in society’. The irony of the Self-Portrait’s title touches these absurd heights but, more than this, Sheeler’s image extends Adorno’s notion of shock through a Kafkaesque engagement with what is absent from the artwork.

The Mimesis of Reification Over the next few pages I want to consider the various constellational elements of Self-Portrait and their relation to shock through mimesis and subjective aesthetic experience. I will therefore discuss the Adornian concepts of mimesis and subjective aesthetic experience, concepts that, when applied to Self-Portrait, reveal how Sheeler’s work manages to a produce a negative critique – a mimesis of reification – through the incorporation and synthesis of Dada and photography. Adorno’s conception of subjective aesthetic experience is rooted in mimesis and, in his 1928 essay on Schubert, he describes how music is a vehicle that ‘makes us weep without knowing why; because we are not what the music promises we could be’.55 Adorno’s understanding of mimesis and subjective aesthetic experience arises from the existing tension between two things. Firstly, the inability to comprehend how and why works of art can move the human subject emotionally, and secondly, how it is that certain kinds of art are able to offer the subject a glimpse of a different kind of world from their own. Therefore, ‘subjective aesthetic experience, which seems to have understanding the individual work of art as its end, extends the subject beyond itself and beyond the individual work. The dialectic of subjective aesthetic experience opens out into intersubjectivity, history and utopia.’56 What allows this dialectic of subjective aesthetic experience to occur, according to Nicholsen, is the process of ‘exact imagination’. Nicholsen defines this as the ability to follow the internal relationships of the work accurately in order to read the objective truth content of the artwork. Reading the internal constellations of the work relies on an understanding of details as singularities, and the ability to read these singularities in relation to the whole (as we have with the titles of SelfPortrait). In short, Adorno’s aesthetic theory requires a combination of a close reading of the work of art (an interpretative practice that is closely allied to the work itself) with special reference to the subject’s lived experience. Interpretation is, therefore, an active and not a passive or arbitrary exercise.


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Modern artworks, by their very form, require a productive imagination. With such stringent interpretative demands placed on the subject, Adorno argues that there is necessarily a greater interaction between object (the work of art) and subject. A consequence of this intense interaction is the increased possibility of an objective moment, a moment of recognition and understanding that is related to intersubjectivity, history and utopia. What is at stake here, for Adorno, is the subject’s role in the production of objectivity. The problem for the modern subject, as far as objectivity is concerned in capitalist society, is mediation: there is no such thing as the immediacy of experience. And, whilst Adorno does not believe in objectivity totally free from subjective mediation, subjective mediation is, paradoxically, necessary for aesthetic experience. To circumvent this problem, Adorno contends that aesthetic experience is determined by a combination of what he refers to as ‘the primacy of the object’ and an authentic and spontaneous subjective response. The primacy of the object is Adorno’s answer to Kant’s scepticism that we can ever know an object in itself. The importance of the thingin-itself for Adorno is related to his idea of the non-identical, of the Other, that resists identity. The term ‘primacy of the object’ also invokes a materialist position, one which acts as a rejoinder to the priority of the subject prevalent in idealist forms of thought. Adorno’s reformulation presents subjectivity and objectivity as participants in an interdependent relationship, where objectivity is achievable through subjectivity. Here, Adorno relies upon his own concept of mimesis as evidence of the relationship between subjectivity and objectivity. Adorno’s interpretation of Benjaminian mimesis shares the view that it is no longer possible to refer to a mimetic connection between the subject and nature. Domination over nature, secured through the dialectic of the Enlightenment’s programme of rationality, has destroyed the link between inner and outer nature. To combat or resist the Enlightenment’s programme of rationality, Adorno proposes a new kind of mimesis that is not a practice of domination but of affiliation. As Michael Cahn notes, ‘Adorno’s approach consists in bypassing the conventional understanding of mimesis as representation or imitation’.57 Cahn explains further that, for Adorno, mimesis always goes with ‘onto’ (an, as in anschmiegen, anbilden). He does not pay obedience to the dubious demand of language that mimesis be always mimesis of, since mimesis of something is always imitation. This an (onto) also implies the behavioural dimension of his concept of mimesis in which a flexible and pliant subject entertains an adaptive and correlating behaviour to an object.58


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Adorno’s invocation of the production and interpretation of the artwork as the last vestige of mimesis means that, as we saw with his comments on the work of Kafka, ‘modern art is virtually an identification with the aggressor, a mimesis of reification’.59 The ‘identification with the aggressor’ on the part of art and the artist is necessary for mimesis because this identification with the enemy ‘immunises you’.60 Cahn also notes Adorno’s differentiation between ‘identification of’ and ‘identification with’; the latter ‘designates a non-repressive behaviour which does not disfigure its object’.61 For Adorno, the possibility of experience and its connection with mimetic behaviour becomes the central ploy in understanding the primacy of the object. Since the primacy of the object is dependent upon the possibility of subjective experience, ‘mimesis raises a resistance . . . to reification and secures the “primacy of the object” against the subject’s “claim to domination” ’.62 The arbitrary separation of the inner and outer nature of the subject instigated by rational thought in the name of domination, has raised the concept of the subject to an unassailable position. Mimesis resists this arbitrary distinction, because Adorno’s conception of mimesis is not an attempt to make a copy of nature but an attempt to become like nature. The work of art is the locus for this mimetic activity. What this means is that Adornian mimesis is an active as well as a receptive process. For Adorno, ‘Stumbling along behind its reification, the subject limits that reification by means of the mimetic vestige, the plenipotentiary of an undamaged life in the midst of mutilated life, which subverts the subject to ideology. The inextricability of reification and mimesis defines the aporia of artistic expression.’63 Self-Portrait is clearly entwined in this ‘aporia of artistic expression’ because it battles to express some form of negative hope in the midst of the subject’s reification. The reification of forms of communication in Self-Portrait, whether personal or artistic, combined with modernist construction and Sheeler’s self-effacement, all combine to produce shock. This pristine image that emits a beguiling charm of quiet is filled, on reflection, with the jarring sound of dissonance. In Self-Portrait, Sheeler’s subject sits motionless as though paralysed: the prominence of the telephone and the empty chair signifying the end of one and the beginning of another form of human contact. Sheeler’s reflection might seem passive in this process but the work itself, through its own mimetic identification with the enemy, its rationalised construction, is far from passive. Rather, Self-Portrait shocks the passiveness of the viewer’s passive acceptance of the mechanised and the rational; the work embraces


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the viewer and encourages the kind of identification with the object that Adorno’s theory of mimesis invites. The aporia of artistic expression is also an aporia of subjective interpretation because the ‘objectivity of the work of art is . . . mediated both by the subject who produces it and by the subject who experiences it’. The mimetic function becomes the only hope for genuine experience, one that divorces itself from the pseudo-experience that contemporary culture offers. Since mimesis and subjective experience are inextricably bound up with the processes of alienation and reification, subjective aesthetic experience becomes a task similar to reading. In many respects, the artwork for Adorno ‘itself is analogous to a musical score. The recipient – listener, viewer, reader – follows along or mimes the internal trajectories of the work at hand, tracing its internal articulations down to the finest nuance.’ Adorno says that The share of subjectivity in the artwork is itself a piece of objectivity. Certainly the mimetic element is indispensable to art, as regards its substance, universal, but it cannot be reached other than by way of the inextinguishably idiosyncratic particular subject. Although art in its innermost self is a comportment, it cannot be isolated from expression, and there is no expression without a subject.64

The subject, as artist or viewer, becomes the key for opening up the work of art. It is also here that the complete artistic withdrawal for Sheeler from the artwork, the aporia between construction and expression in his work, is seen as impossible. What marks this moment of opening, the instant when the work emotionally moves the individual and art offers the promise of what might be, as discussed, Adorno calls the ‘shudder’ or ‘shock’. As ‘the irruption of objectivity into subjective consciousness’, the shudder is an aesthetic experience resembling the orgasm of sexual experience.65 The shock or shudder is the culmination of the individual subject’s mimetic experience of the work of art. What this experience affords the subject is the opportunity to look beyond the ‘prison’ that the ‘I’ of the subject has become in contemporary culture. As Jarvis notes, the ‘decisive experience of monopoly capitalism is a loss of individual experience; the experience of one’s own life as utterly contingent, dispensable, and having significance not in itself, but only as a means to something else’.66


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Sheeler and the Loss of Experience Relating these difficult concepts to Sheeler’s Self-Portrait is best done through the idea of shock, which introduced and concluded the explication of mimesis and subjective aesthetic experience. Self-Portrait provokes an unease in the viewer merely through the conflict of title and image, but this conflation cannot really be described as, or account for, Adornian shock. More realistically, title and image disorientate the initial experience of the work, forcing the viewers to re-familiarise themselves in respect to the work. This process of re-familiarisation is a process of finding answers to such questions as: ‘where is the face of the artist in Self-Portrait?’ The viewer forms a constellation through the interrogation of what is not represented; what might be considered the work’s invisible elements. This constellational form functions as a catalyst for opening up the work of art to interpretation. The missing subject of the self-portrait is the invisible element of Self-Portrait and is as important as those objects visible within the frame because it performs the role of the ‘blank centre’ of the work’s constellation. Only through a consideration of what is not there can the visible elements be placed in a meaningful constellation whose coherence is reliant upon the invisible or hidden: the blank centre. Self-Portrait presents us with the fate of the human subject in the face of American modernity. Sheeler’s work apparently takes on the attitude of a dispassionate onlooker: a paralysed response to a paralysing situation. However, it would be a mistake to relegate Self-Portrait to the critical position of a resigned ambivalence. Self-Portrait provokes the recognition of one’s own sense of loss and the loss of others through a mimetic relationship between the viewer and the faceless figure in the portrait. It is at and within this reflective moment – the mimetic affiliation between the viewer and the work – that ‘shock’ manifests itself, a realisation of the viewer’s own sense of awe and paralysis in the face of modernity. SelfPortrait’s ‘photographic vision’ and aporetic aesthetic stand as a testament to the mimetic capturing of not only a moment – the still image – but the experience of that moment. Here, the artwork’s painting/drawing of the invisible reveals to us what is excised through the inimical relationship between humanity and capitalism.


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Chapter Four

Is it Still Life? Sheeler, Adorno and Dwelling

Introduction Over and again, Sheeler’s art explores the importance of ‘home’, and no work exemplifies this more than Home, Sweet Home (1931) [Plate 7]. Like the Doylestown photographs before it, Home, Sweet Home is a simple paean to the power of home and, in keeping with the earlier photographs, reveals the artist’s continuing concerns with formal experimentation. As I argued in Chapter One, the traces of human presence and habitation are recognisable in the rooms of the Doylestown house because, as we look from outside in, the imprint of human habitation is everywhere revealed to us: open doors, stair treads worn by countless feet, a mirror on a wall, the plant pot on a window sill, all illuminated by the light of the stove. Our perception of this space is mechanically and monoscopically governed by the camera, the compositional structure of each image transforms thresholds into barriers and the series of photographs meet in a constellation that slowly reveal this place as home. Home, Sweet Home is quite different, though. As such, this chapter traces how Sheeler’s experimentation with photography, Cubism and the genre of still life collide in this painting, and the ways in which this work addresses headon the problem of dwelling in early twentieth-century modernity.

Home, the Avant-Garde and Dwelling On the changing historical status of the concept of dwelling, Walter Benjamin notes that the ‘twentieth century, with its porosity and transparency, its tendency toward the well-lit and airy, has put an end to dwelling in the old sense’. But the old sense for Benjamin – the seeming eternal nature of dwelling – needs to be understood specifically in terms of the nineteenth century, which, he says, was ‘addicted to dwelling’.1 The age-old phenomenon that is the desire to dwell means, as Agnes


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Heller argues, that ‘“Home” seems to be one of the few constants of the human condition’.2 Subsequently, home is the point from which all journeys begin and end: ‘Home is the centre of the world’.3 Born in 1883, Benjamin might well diagnose in Sheeler’s work an addiction to dwelling underscored by the fact that Sheeler’s home becomes a constant source of inspiration in his work; Home is the place where all Sheeler’s work begins and ends, home is the centre of Sheeler’s world. Peculiarly, then, modern art, by which I mean the art associated with the modern artists of the early twentieth century, appears distinctly uninterested in the home. Artworks of this period are, in general, free of domestic imagery or objects related to the home. For Christopher Reed, this is because ‘the linkage of domesticity and modernism has been obscured by another conceptual invention of the nineteenth century: the idea of the “avant-garde”’.4 With a determined militarism deserving the name avant-garde, modern artists and theorists launched an assault on tradition in an attempt to exorcise and obliterate the anti-progressive and nostalgic elements of nineteenth-century thinking, consequently repositioning home as ‘the antipode to high art’.5 Rachel Bowlby’s insightful reading of the domestic, especially the connotations of ‘to domesticate’, highlights precisely why the house and home remain out of bounds for the avant-garde.6 Domesticity and domestication are by definition negatives: ‘to domesticate’ something is to tame it, to make it suitable for the home. Avant-gardism was never about anything other than destroying tradition and gentility; it certainly did not define itself negatively, and the idea of taming instincts an anathema. As such, it is hardly surprising that representations of the home are absent in their work. However, to conceive of some kind of moratorium on domestic imagery in the work of avant-garde artists is to ignore the examples of such works in existence. As Karen Lucic noted earlier, it was this very reason why the Doylestown photographs at first appear unusual in the oeuvre of an artist like Sheeler. Employing the home, no matter how abstractly, left Sheeler open to the type of criticism that might have adversely affected his career. As it stands, the success of the Doylestown photographs encouraged Sheeler to continue to look for inspiration for his work at home. In her extended discussion of Home, Sweet Home, Wanda Corn rightly draws attention to the fact that ‘Home played a large role in Sheeler’s art’ and thus insulates, up to a point, the artist’s avant-garde reputation from arguments like Reed’s. However, in the following, Corn casually disregards the problematic aspect of representing domesticity for the avant-garde artist when she says:


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While [Sheeler] represented most subjects coolly and analytically, his art about his home expressed his affection for objects that he had personally acquired and arranged. Indeed Sheeler had what commonly resides in a female sensibility: a doting attention to the little things in a household, to chairs, table, fabrics and bibelots on the mantel or tabletop. By subjecting these material goods to the rigor of cubist composition, he kept his emotions and his female side under tight control; his art, he always seems to say, is about pictorial problems, not himself, and not about domesticity. But the artist, by returning time and again to the personal and the domestic, reveals himself happiest when at home surrounded by beautiful things.7

I will address the pictorial problems Corn alludes to in greater detail later. For now, it is worth pausing and thinking through her other points. Corn argues that Sheeler’s work, despite its engagement with formal experimentation (or avant-gardist principles) is, in the end, merely a reflection on domestic satisfaction, a pictorial evocation of home, which renders the work’s title – Home, Sweet Home – a literal statement of fact. These pictures reveal only an artist happy at home, surrounded by his collection of antique and modern furnishings; they are not able to be subject to the cool, analytical approach of Sheeler’s work on non-domestic spaces. Following this, one might presume that Sheeler’s foregrounding of cool, analytical cubist compositional techniques in Home, Sweet Home are a way of masking or legitimating his pictures of home against accusations of nostalgia: the enemy of the modernist artist and modern art. Most disconcertingly, though, Corn’s critique serves to domesticate Sheeler. In fact, Sheeler’s work had long walked a fine line between the nostalgic and the modern, as the earlier discussion on Sheeler’s photographs of the Doylestown House showed. Sheeler found as much to admire in the vernacular architecture of Pennsylvania and the interior of the Doylestown House as he did in the skyscrapers of Manhattan or the factories of Henry Ford. But, to isolate the artist’s engagement with the domestic interior from these so-called grander subjects, as though Sheeler’s approach was somehow softened by the domestic as if it were a gauze filter, is to insert a strange and peculiar caveat into his practice. It is to say that Sheeler’s interior works with their apparent ‘pictorial problems’ are not problematical in themselves. Instead, the pictorial problems are a light-hearted game and these works genuinely reflect the happiness Sheeler felt about being at home. In short, the artist presents his uninterrupted domestic bliss for the viewer.8 Likewise, Susan Fillin-Yeh says Sheeler’s interior works draw attention to the objects that fill the interior spaces. Fillin-Yeh identifies within these works Sheeler’s collection of American craft.


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Sheeler’s paintings and photographs of early American subjects, his ‘American Interiors’, possess a charged imagery. They are the domesticated, preindustrial counterparts to the factory images of the 1930s, and they are filled with the resonant presence of handmade objects: country and Shaker pieces, Windsor chairs and early American furniture, fabric and pottery.9

The ‘charged’ aspect is the link between the pre-industrial and industrial, the handcrafted and the machine-made. Like Corn, Fillin-Yeh is able to infer a shift in aesthetic emphasis on Sheeler’s part when comparing representations of his home and the factory images of the Rouge. And where Corn refers to Sheeler’s ‘female sensibility’ as evidence, Fillin-Yeh makes much of the personal relationship extant between the artist and those objects that form part of his collection. If Corn domesticates the artist, here Fillin-Yeh domesticates the images themselves. However, Fillin-Yeh’s criticisms, in a manner reminiscent of Rourke, are clearly an attempt to resuscitate the usable past argument, of inventing tradition. Thus what is interesting about Sheeler’s interior works is not their aesthetic importance but their role in recording an American cultural heritage: these images are documents as much as artworks. The fact that not all the objects in Sheeler’s ‘American Interiors’ are American, is something of a footnote. But when one considers the inclusion of a Marcel Breuer chair, for example, then the ‘charge’ produced in these images is more akin to static or white noise than a wholesome depiction of a recently deceased American handicraft tradition. On saying this, FillinYeh identifies in Sheeler’s ambivalent attitude a well-documented aspect of his response to modernity. As Sheeler himself says of the artefacts he collected: ‘I don’t like these things because they are old, but in spite of it . . . I’d like them still better if they were made yesterday.’10 The aim here is to reconsider what Corn, Fillin-Yeh, and other critics overlook: the pictorial problems of which everyone seems aware but say little about. The significance of these requires a more sustained analysis, one that does not seek to domesticate the artist’s work, but takes seriously the interior works not as simplified odes to domesticity but of evidence of something far more troubling. In what remains, I will discuss the ways that the artist’s photographs, drawings and paintings of the interior and of home in the 1920s and 1930s relate to debates surrounding the possibility of dwelling in the early twentieth century. Building on the criticisms of the Doylestown photographs and barn abstractions, I will examine the significance of the pictorial problems in Sheeler’s later interior works as they appropriate and develop, in this instance, the genre of still life. These works, in their subject matter, composition, and formal experimentation,


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are not harmonious deliberations on the domestic, but pictures in which one can read expression of suffering and loss. Sheeler’s collection brings to mind Walter Benjamin’s insightful work on collecting – in Benjamin’s case, books – especially his comments in the short essay, ‘Unpacking my Library: A Talk About Book Collecting’. Here Benjamin notes The most profound enchantment for the collector is the locking of individual items within a magic circle in which they are fixed as the final thrill, the thrill of acquisition, passes over them. Everything remembered and thought, everything conscious, becomes the pedestal, the frame, the base, the lock of his property.11

Benjamin’s reflection on the ‘profound enchantment’ that collected objects radiate is the effect of a transaction: the acquisition of an object. The efficacy of acquisition not only imbues the acquired object with something magical, but also draws the acquirer into a ‘magic circle’. Binding the collector and the object in this ‘magic circle’ is the fact of ownership because ‘ownership is the most intimate relationship that one can have to objects’.12 As an intimacy that issues through ownership, an exclusive relationship between collector and the collector’s object of desire becomes tangible. Acquisition and ownership radically alter the nature or, as one should say, the subjective perception of the object of desire, from merely an object amongst others to an object able to produce a peculiar and specific form of consciousness. It is not difficult to place Sheeler between Benjamin’s lines of reflection, nor is it difficult to identify Benjamin’s familiar trope of the constellation. Benjamin unlocks the cabinet door on the strange world of the collector, revealing the peculiar relationship that exists, as if in a vacuum, between the collector and the collected object(s). In an effort to consider the complex relationship between Sheeler, his collection and the interior artworks, Jacques Derrida’s Archive Fever is particularly helpful. Derrida says it is not the archive itself that warrants our attention but the means by which the archive is ‘made’. In essence, it is important to consider the intermediary technologies that help create and maintain the archive. For Derrida, repetition is a crucial aspect in this process.13 The desire to collect, maintain and archive a collection is, for Derrida, a means of externalising memory, and at the root of the desire to collect and archive is fear: the fear of forgetting. The archive as an external and tangible form, to be visited and addressed in its physicality in time and space, allays this fear of forgetting. Derrida asks,


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Is the psychic apparatus better represented or is it affected differently by all the technical mechanisms for archivization and for production, for prostheses of so-called live memory, for simulacrums of living things which already are, and will increasingly be, more refined, complicated, powerful than the ‘mystic pad’ (microcomputing, electronicization, computerisaztion, etc.)?14

Derrida’s reading of the archive, unsurprisingly, is less worried about what ends up archived and more concerned with how the process of archiving itself operates, and especially whether the production of an archive actually changes the object archived.15 It is also bound up with contemporary concerns regarding digital culture, but this should not detract attention from the fact that similar concerns apply equally to Sheeler. If we recall Benjamin’s description of the collector and the collection, it is clear that the object is undoubtedly altered, perhaps more then once, as it is first desired, then acquired and then placed in that magic circle where it becomes an object in a larger constellation of objects. Derrida says this act of archiving not only incites forgetfulness, amnesia, the annihilation of memory, as mnēmē or anamnēsis, but also commands the radical effacement, in truth the eradication, of that which can never be reduced to mnēmē or to anamnēsis, that is, the archive, the consignation, the documentary or the monumental apparatus as hypomnēma, mnemotechnical supplement or representative, auxiliary or memorandum.16

The question is, as Derrida suggests, does Sheeler’s obsessive archiving annihilate exactly what he seeks to preserve? And, furthermore, what is it Sheeler seeks to preserve?

The Interior as Archive If Sheeler’s work altered radically with the introduction of the camera, then his relationship with Henry Mercer is just as important. Mercer was a wealthy Bucks County native with a keen interest in preserving the pre-industrial handicrafts of the region, particularly those made by unknown early settlers in Bucks County.17 Sheeler and Mercer became acquainted because of their affection for the Doylestown House. Lucic argues that Mercer’s collection of vernacular artefacts was the inspiration for Sheeler’s own collection of objects of early-Pennsylvanian origin. And it is these objects, and others, that Sheeler begins to incorporate in his work progressively after moving to Manhattan in 1919. One senses a convergence of influences gathering together in Sheeler’s still lifes from this period onwards, with origins extending back to


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c.1914. Lessons learned as a commercial photographer helped refine the Doylestown images, but the artist’s photographic recording of works of art for dealers (1914–16), Marius de Zayas’ collection of African sculpture (1918) and John Quinn’s African Dan masks (1919), reveals a dynamic approach to archiving these collections photographically.18 For example, Sheeler’s photographs African Musical Instrument (c.1916–17) [Figure 12], Fang Figure (c.1916–17) and Dan Mask (c.1918) are far from straightforward renderings of their subject. As much as these photographs record the existence of an object for the archive, they are also complex compositions in which controlled light produces shadows of varying intensities that energise these objects. In essence, these photographs are as experimental as Side of White Barn or any of the Doylestown photographs in their use of light to reveal texture and form. In what follows, I argue that Sheeler’s experimentation with photographic lighting and cubist composition are realised most dramatically in his still life paintings and drawings of the 1920s and 1930s; but, rather than the harmonious qualities that Corn and Fillin-Yeh identify in these works – especially Home, Sweet Home – Sheeler’s still life work reveals a more troubling account of the home.

12. Charles Sheeler, African Musical Instrument (negative date 1916–17) Photograph, gelatin silver print Sheet: 25.4 x 19.7 cm (10 x 7 3⁄4 in.) Mount: 45.7 x 35.6 cm (18 x 14 in.) © The Lane Collection Courtesy, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston


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Is it Still Life? The critical reception of Charles Sheeler’s still life work is at best disappointing. The absence of criticism is more remarkable when one considers that around seventy per cent of the artist’s recorded works between 1920 and 1926 are still lifes.19 Such a sustained burst of experimentation in the genre should raise many questions, not least why does still life dominate Sheeler’s artistic production of this period? James Maroney complains that most analyses of Sheeler’s work generally suffer because they remain too much within the strict confines of ‘machine-age’ interpretations.20 The same can be said of Sheeler’s still life works. I would go further and argue that a machine-age interpretative framework poorly serves works such as Tulips – Suspended Forms (1922) and Still Life and Shadows (1924) [Figure 13], to name but two, a problem that historically has prevented a more thorough and reflexive reading of Sheeler’s still lifes. What still life represents in Sheeler’s artistic production is a very specific confrontation between historical form and content with a consciously studied modernism. To subsume the outcomes of this clash under the neat tag of machine age or precisionism is overly reductive and counter-productive. Between 1920 and the early 1930s the progressive eradication and then reintroduction of environmental context in Sheeler’s still life work becomes increasingly evident. Sheeler’s still lifes present us with an unsettling response to the notion of home in the machine age through a complex interplay of realism and abstraction, photography and painting/drawing. The culmination of these clashes is best exemplified in Home, Sweet Home, a work that trades on the familiarity and comforts of home whilst simultaneously collapsing these tropes through formal dissonance. If, as Adorno says, ‘The splinter in your eye is the best magnifyingglass’, then the genre of still life is that splinter, and, like sand in sun cream, it becomes an irritant, one that magnifies the awkward presence and therefore significance of the genre in Sheeler’s aesthetic development.21 Because Sheeler’s still lifes resist straightforward absorption into a machine aesthetic, their awkward presence – which haunt the neat constructions between machine-age aesthetic, precisionism and Sheeler’s work – in turn suggests a necessary reconsideration of the position that still life holds in the development of Sheeler’s aesthetic. How to define the marked and obvious tension between abstraction and realism in Sheeler’s work has perpetually puzzled critics. Although Precisionism has long been the preferred art historical category to


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13. Charles Sheeler, Still Life and Shadows (1924) Conté crayon, watercolour and tempera on paper 78.7 x 53.3 cm (31 x 21 in.) Columbus Museum of Art, Ohio Gift of Ferdinand Howald


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14. Charles Sheeler, Cactus (1931) Oil on canvas 114.6 x 76.4 cm (45 1⁄8 x 30 1⁄16 in.) The Philadelphia Museum of Art/Art Resource/Scala, Florence The Louise and Walter Arensberg Collection © Photo Scala, Florence, 2004


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describe Sheeler’s work, Milton W. Brown’s notion of Cubist–Realism is the most ‘anatomically’ accurate.22 For Brown, two of the artist’s works from the 1910s, Barn Abstraction (1917) and Flower Forms (1919), provide early evidence of this tension.23 The oscillation in Sheeler’s work between two opposing poles – identified as the internal struggle between realism and abstraction – deserves special attention, especially in respect of his still life work. Throughout the 1920s, a distinguishable trajectory that begins with Flower Forms appears to end in the rejection of abstraction in favour of a more realistic set of representational techniques. So, from Tulips – Suspended Forms (1922) to Cactus (1931) [Figure 14] or from the stark interior of Self-Portrait to the fuller interiors of Americana (1931) and Home, Sweet Home, formal abstraction appears to give way to more realistic visual principles. I think it is crucial to discuss these works together as a constellation because the later interiors are indissolubly linked to the ongoing experimentation with still life and should be seen as a point of convergence of the various strands of influence implicit in Sheeler’s aesthetic. What this means is that works such as Americana and Home, Sweet Home represent neither a rejection nor a concentration on either abstraction or realism but are, instead, works that consist of a plurality or constellation of visual discourses held together in dialectical tension. Besides the more obvious visual regimes of European modernism (particularly Cubism) and photography, Sheeler’s work partakes in what Norman Bryson identifies as ‘the self-conscious adaptation of still life conventions developed by painters of still life’.24 Home, Sweet Home represents the working culmination of these influences, and although this work is not a still life, it is a product of Sheeler’s experimentation with, and development of, the forms of still life. The works preceding the beguilingly simple vision of home presented by Home, Sweet Home – most obviously works like Still Life and Shadows and Interior (1926) [Plate 6] – are in many ways transitional paintings. As experiments in form and content they help account for the extended focus beyond the tabletop of the traditional still life painting seen in Home, Sweet Home. It is this aspect of Sheeler’s work – the introduction of the domestic interior in Home, Sweet Home and the experimentation with still life form – that reveals most clearly the relationship to modernist philosophical concerns with dwelling.


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The Historical Material of Still Life/Looking over the Overlooked Historically, still life painting has long been considered the lowest of the low and discussion of the genre tends to lack the rigour and/ or enthusiasm that one associates with the critical analyses of history painting or other genres.25 However, Norman Bryson points out that those aspects of still life commonly employed to condemn still life – for example, the limited and mundane, if not lowbrow, subject matter, as well as formal repetitiveness – are actually very useful for considering the incorporation of, and engagement with, material culture. One of the ways in which Sheeler’s still life work has been bound to a machine-age aesthetic has been through the artist’s inclusion of American material culture. Often regarded as unproblematic, Sheeler’s interest in Shaker artefacts is most often cited as the intersection where a pre-modern liking for unornamented objects – exemplified in the arts and crafts of the Shakers – meets the rationalised and functionalist rejection of ornament at the start of the twentieth century. This argument, commonly referred to as the ‘usable past’, is part of a much broader attempt, evident in art and cultural criticism in the United States, to present a strong bond or, more forcefully, a historical teleological connection between America’s past and present artistic production. As we have seen, the furore caused by the Armory Show showed the deeply suspicious attitude held by American institutions and public alike with regard to modern art. Bonding together a Shaker insistence on function and pragmatic design with a similar compulsion to be found in the work of modern American artists like Sheeler served to show that American modern art had its roots in a recognisable American consciousness. This consciousness distinguished itself through its use value and clear-headed pragmatism; moreover, the simple objects of the Shakers as abstractions were a rejection of fussy design, which was seen as wasteful of time and energy. And, of course, these objects were beautiful because the economy of their production did not try to conceal but instead expressed their essence. In these simple objects – whether a ladder-back chair or cooking utensil – was America and an American way of thinking and being. The problem remains, though, as to how the material of still life might offer insight into the formal issues with which Sheeler’s work is concerned. Clearly, the notion of materiality and materialist analysis is concerned with the treating of social and historical elements as causal factors in the production of individual works, at specific times in history, by a particular artist.


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Bryson’s call for a materialist analysis of the still life genre as a generic series is itself specifically historical but is confronted with a major problem: still life does not appear specific to time and place, nor to sociohistorical conditions that dictate the form of still life. As such, the genre of still life nullifies the local circumstances of the artist and painting (or the local pressures that formed the artist’s milieu). Bryson’s worry is that considering the generic series of still life as discontinuous in space and time – to leap from the Netherlands to France and from one century to the next – it seems as though art is behaving in exactly the way enemies of materialist thought always maintained it did: as timeless, universal, transcending local conditions, inhabiting a higher Platonic realm somewhere above and beyond the struggles of history.26

Of course, the conclusion of such thinking would ‘regard each instance of picture-making atomistically’.27 The problem facing any materialist analysis is the need to confront and find the means to overcome its own theoretical shortcomings. For Bryson, this does not necessarily mean abandoning the notion of series, because such a generic series exists in history. The discontinuous nature of this series means that a traditional materialist analysis ‘must close its eyes, or issue an automatic accusation to anyone who thinks it is still a series’. The problem with most attempts at a materialist analysis of still life, Bryson suggests, is that they are not ‘materialist enough’.28 When we face up to Sheeler’s still lifes, then, a number of issues arise. In terms of American material culture, many of the artist’s works contain objects from history, like the Etruscan oinochoe in Tulips – Suspended Forms, or contemporaneous but non-American objects such as Marcel Breuer’s ‘Wassily’ chair in Portrait of Katherine (1932). The inclusion of these objects or artefacts, are, ‘like wars and revolutions’, the products of cultural and historical tensions.29 Accordingly, the historical representation of these historical objects reveals the existence of two planes of change in still life, each with its own dynamic. Bryson says that ‘The culture of the table displays a rapid, volatile receptivity to its surrounding culture in the mode of inflecting its fundamental forms. At the same time it also displays a high level of resistance to innovation in the forms themselves.’30 The apparent resistance that the genre displays towards innovation means that still life ‘makes use of forms that endure over very long spans of time, in a long-lived series that cut right across divisions of national culture and historical period’.31 Bryson draws on the novels of Jane Austen, which, he notes, all but fail to mention the Napoleonic wars, which is his way of supporting the claim that ‘involvement with the “higher” levels of culture is comparatively optional’.32


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One would imagine that a lack of formal innovation in still life has ramifications for Adorno’s view of form as material. As Adorno notes, form is artistic material, but if ‘form is the law of transfiguration of the existing’, then the resistance of still life’s forms to change is problematic. For Adorno, form is crucial because as something that ‘transfigures the existent’, it opposes society whilst at the same time communicating with it. According to Adorno, this is because the ‘unsolved antagonisms of reality return in artworks as immanent problems of form’.33 Form and content are engaged in a dialectical tension but the problem here is that, as Lambert Zuidervaart identifies, Adorno never clearly defines what ‘content’ means in Aesthetic Theory.34 Despite concern over Adorno’s lack of clarity concerning content, Aesthetic Theory does address this distinction. Translations make clear that Adorno uses two distinct interpretations of content: Inhalt, which is art content, and Gehalt, the truth content of the artwork. In the section entitled ‘Aesthetics of Form and Aesthetics of Content (II)’ Adorno discusses the content (Inhalt) of the painted/drawn work of art in light of the content (Gehalt) of Schoenberg’s music through a critique of Kant and Hegel’s notions of content (Inhalt).35 Adorno explains: Hegel missed what is specifically aesthetic, and Kant missed its depth and richness. The content [Inhalt] of a picture is not simply what it portrays but rather all the elements of colour, structures and relations it contains; the content of music is, for instance, as Schoenberg put it, the history of a theme. The object portrayed may also count as an element of content; in literature, the action or the narrated story may also count; content, however, is no less what all of this undergoes in the work, that whereby it is recognised and whereby it is transformed.36

What this means for Adorno is that ‘artistic form can emerge from content rather than being imposed upon it’.37 Under this rubric, form follows the elements and impulses in the artwork and the more mimetically it does so, the stronger or more truthful the artwork’s content (Gehalt) will be. If, however, form attempts to control and marshal these elements and impulses against their will, as it were, then the artwork as a social product offers a false resolution to the antagonisms of society. If this is the case, how are we to judge the genre of still life whose form, according to Bryson, is resistant to innovation? And does this mean, therefore, that the static nature of the still life form defers the dialectic of mimesis and rationality in favour of the dominant status quo? To answer these questions it is helpful to examine what in still life is susceptible to change, and what is not. If the form of still life remains


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historically constant, content is then most subject to change because the objects on and around the tabletop vary from period to period. Sheeler’s inclusion of the Etruscan vase or the modernist chairs of Breuer and Kaare Klint are examples of this. Furthermore, in Cactus (1931) and Tulips (1931), a modern photographic lamp appears in both images. The incorporation of all these specific objects clearly responds to the general shifts in the production and availability of such objects. Cactus and Tulips also reflect the changing status of art, consciously revealing itself as art through direct reference to its own forms of production. What does not change in any radical fashion, however, is the domestic nature of the objects in still life. Interior is one of the first truly specific depictions of Sheeler’s home in South Salem, a work that has marked connections with the later representations of the home in Americana and Home, Sweet Home. As trans-disciplinary and a technique in its own right, the genre of still life is subject to modification and change. As such, and following Adorno, it should be considered a type of artistic material. For Adorno, Material . . . is what artists work with: It is the sum of all that is available to them, including words, colours, sounds, associations of every sort and every technique ever developed. To this extent, forms too can become material; it is everything that artists encounter about which they must make a decision.38

And whilst still life might appear resistant to formal innovation, as a form of material, it is not impervious to it. In short, the form of still life is embedded in its content. Change, however subtle, comes about through the inflections of artists who self-consciously take on the conventions of still life and who are located in specific socio-historical contexts. In order to contextualise Sheeler’s adaptation of still life forms and techniques, and to help highlight his own formal innovation in still life, I think it worthwhile working chronologically through Sheeler’s work from the initial influence of Cézanne up to the works of the early 1930s. With Sheeler light becomes a palpable medium through which form is apprehended to the full, through variations in its quality, through contrasting shadow, through modulations of tone within shadow . . . . A full perception of the use of shadow in his art may lead to an understanding of its most fundamental qualities, bringing the spectator back finally to the constant use of light itself as a dimensional force.39

One of Sheeler’s greatest achievements is, perhaps, his use of light to generate shadows and silhouettes that then themselves take on the


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appearance of forms. The use of artificial light – a direct deployment of photographic technique – in Still Life and Shadows expressly deals in those dimensional forces of light as a manipulation of form and content. In Still Life and Shadows, the work presents a three-legged table, a band of carpet along the bottom that acts as a border, a play of shadows beneath the tabletop that adds the fourth leg, and a manipulation of shadows on the tabletop itself. The objects arranged on top of the table cast shadows onto the wall behind, whilst the figure, centre, casts an impossible shadow in front of itself. The Oriental carpet appears as though we were looking down upon it squarely from above, forcing a collapse in threedimensional space, a space further confused by the criss-crossing of shadows that appear underneath the table. It is physically impossible for these shadows and silhouettes to exist at the same time and this points to Sheeler’s manipulation of form and content. The embeddedness of form in content manifests itself through the implicit use of artificial light that results in both the rational construction of form, as well as an expressive (mimetic) articulation of the subjects themselves. As Bryson notes, ‘one of the properties of silhouettes is to trigger the instant recognition of form while supplying no data concerning relief; it is a powerful device’:40 a device Sheeler uses to convincing effect in Still Life and Shadows. Recalling Adorno, light can be added to the long list of what constitutes artistic material for the modern artist; as a form of artistic material, light is fundamental to the construction of the artwork. Furthermore, as light works as a dimensional force, it does so in relation to those everyday objects on which still life depends. Progressively, Sheeler’s still life works adopt a critical change in the use of isolated forms through light and lighting. The isolation of forms, strictly suspended in space, as we see in Still Life and Shadows and Tulips and Etruscan Vase (1922) [Figure 15], gives way to a sense that all objects when staged in a scene of domesticity, such as Home, Sweet Home, exist in a state of both isolation and connectedness. As will become clearer later in the context of the construction of Home, Sweet Home, the dislocation of these objects in space is achieved by light, where the light source is not natural but controlled by the artist through carefully positioned photographic lighting. In later works, such as Cactus, Sheeler goes beyond the mere inference of unnatural light, as in Still Life and Shadows, by making explicit the use of artificial light through the inclusion of the light source itself – the photographic lamp. Whether implicit or explicit, light in Still Life and Shadows or Tulips (in fact all of Sheeler’s work) is part of the furniture of the scene. Light is as crucial as the actual furniture framed by the image itself.


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15. Charles Sheeler, Tulips and Etruscan Vase (1922) Pencil on paper 54 x 40.5 cm (21 1⁄4 x 16 in.) The Museum of Modern Art, New York/Scala, Florence Given anonymously

Significant though light is, so too is the isolation of forms from their context; something Sheeler explores most obviously in the works produced during his Doylestown period. This series of works dealt in a ‘sense of reduction and isolation, of the object removed from its context in order to reveal its pure abstract structure’.41 Like Barn Abstraction, Tulips and Etruscan Vase is little more than a line drawing whose forms are emphasised against the blankness of the background. As a spare horizontal line in pencil, a line suspended in space, not reaching the edges of the paper, the tabletop is nothing more than a suggested form. It is little more than a line supported by faint shading, an advancing v-shaped shadow edging up behind the bases of the two standing containers: one, a vase with tulips, and the other an Etruscan oinochoe. Any evidence of time or place has dissolved into whiteness. Any hint of colour has given itself up to the grey scale. The life of this table, and the world in which it once was part, has disappeared. The vase, the pitcher and flowers (though not always tulips) appear again in Suspended Forms (Still Life) (1922), and Tulips – Suspended Forms. However, some basic colour – blacks, reds, blue-greens – are reintroduced in Tulips – Suspended Forms and Suspended Forms (Still Life). The colour fills out the forms themselves rather than their background, which remains invisible. In many respects, these three works sustain a concentration on


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forms by means of their contextual isolation, a focus that Sheeler began with Barn Abstraction. But what do these forms express in their isolation? And, how, over time, do isolated forms in Sheeler’s work maintain this separateness whilst partaking in the representation of a fuller, more realistically constructed interior, such as Home, Sweet Home? Thematically, isolation is nothing new in Sheeler’s work around this period and in fact develops, through various forms – objects out of context, the eradication of human presence – into a lifelong theme. In 1920, Henry McBride warned that what prevented Sheeler from achieving (deserved) fame was ‘a certain coolness in [his] work’.42 McBride’s comments explicitly refer to the emptiness and isolation expressed both literally and figuratively, in the Bucks County barn works exhibited that year. If Sheeler literally isolates the barn from the landscape and the vase of flowers from the interior (from even the tabletop on which it was positioned), he goes one step further with the human form and eradicates it from most works, while only hinting at it in others. When the human form does appear in Sheeler’s work it serves a particular function. For example, the headless reflection in Self Portrait cedes centrality to the isolated form of the telephone and the lone figure on the railroad tracks in American Landscape (1930) emphasises the scale of the surrounding industrial environment.

Home, Sweet Home: A Mere Transcription of Reality? 43 The darkened recesses of doorways and opacity of windows in Sheeler’s work is often counter-pointed by the rhythmic insistence of colour in patterned rugs and other decorative features. The domestic scenes Sheeler produced in the late 1920s and early 1930s, more than the earlier still life works, reintroduce and rely upon the context of Sheeler’s home for its material objects. What is remarkable about these works is their combination of realism and the continuing preoccupation with the theme of isolation. Sheeler constructs seemingly harmonious domestic scenes that continue an engagement with the theme of isolation, through presentation, where objects live or co-exist amongst other objects in isolation. The reintroduction of external reality – representation, as it were – whether fictional or factual, has been one area where critical discourse truly exploits Sheeler’s affection for Shaker artefacts. As the obvious content of the artworks, these objects have been used to codify Sheeler’s work as engaged only with an American artistic tradition. Throughout the 1920s, the stark backgrounds of Sheeler’s still life images blossom, as interior detail becomes more prevalent. No longer


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are forms such as tulips in vases or an Etruscan oinochoe suspended in a blanket of white space, supported by barely visible tables. Whatever the medium – conté crayon, pencil or oil – external reality begins slowly to impinge on the white space of the canvas or the paper, the emptiness expropriated by the recognisable features of fire places, rugs, windows and furniture. I will argue that these significant interpolations of external reality, of realism, and the representation of the interior of the home, have a philosophical essence – modernism’s concern with dwelling. Such a view is in keeping with Bryson’s notion of the generic series in still life and extends interpretation of Sheeler’s work beyond concerns with American tradition and/or the usable past. As the earlier section of this chapter made clear, I believe Sheeler’s interior works – Interior, Home, Sweet Home, Americana and Spring Interior (1927) – are best understood in light of the genre of still life. Aligning these works with the more conventional still lifes, such as Peaches in White Bowl or Still Life and Shadows, raises the question of where Sheeler’s work is located in relation to Bryson/Bann’s notion of presentation or representation. Sheeler’s work constructs a particular kind of vision and visuality, one that emerges through the dialectic of mimesis and rationality. Over the next few pages, I will outline how Sheeler’s work constructs a new kind of vision, where the artist retains the isolation of forms that defines his earlier, more abstract works, whilst introducing a context represented in a more realistic manner. Interior and Home, Sweet Home are important for mapping out these distinctive qualities in Sheeler’s ostensibly realistic vision of the interior spaces of his home. It is with these works that I want to begin an analysis of the dialectic of rationality and mimesis that underpins Sheeler’s revision of the still life genre. One of the first works to depict Sheeler’s collection of early American furnishings was Interior.44 What marks this painting out for attention is the work’s visually disconcerting formal features. On the one hand, as Troyen and Hirshler note, the objects within the frame are common enough in Sheeler’s work: a four-door cupboard, a turned-post bed from the nineteenth century and rugs.45 On the other, there is an obvious incongruity in the construction of the work’s form and content. The relationships between the domestic objects in scene are disrupted through the lack of any perspectival coherence. The legs of the stand in the centre of the canvas are extended, fragile almost, stretched to breaking point. The back left leg seems to take a position before the front left, and the rug under the stand – like the rug in Still Life and Shadows – stares at us as though straight on. The rug does not lie flat on the floor and its corners do not recede towards the corners of


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the room. The top of the long table to the right seems disjointed from the legs that support it, which, in turn, seem incomplete, the final supporting arc disappearing under the stand but not reappearing on the other side. Quite rightly, Troyen and Hirshler conclude that Sheeler is ‘wrestling . . . with Cubism, but in a manner neither derivative or slavishly adulatory’.46 If this is an encounter with Cubism, then it is also an encounter with the forms of still life. And as such, it is an encounter that results in Sheeler’s own particular inflection into the generic series of still life. Additionally, Troyen and Hirshler detect that Interior is ‘slightly awkward’ in its execution and ‘the interrelationships of objects artificial’.47 The isolation of forms and their subsequent redeployment in the context of the scene is overtly peculiar. Unlike Home, Sweet Home, Interior is not much of a visual puzzle because the dissonant elements of the work are too obvious. There is an overt and undisguised awkwardness about the work because the visual plane is so clearly awry. As a result, all attempts to hide behind a loose realism collapse. Light fills the whole scene seemingly from all angles, the brightness of the floor and walls is uniform, there are no deep shadows lurking beneath the table or anywhere else for that matter. The combinations of line and colour in the rugs, the edge of the table, the diagonal of the bed and the frontal view of the rug at the bottom of the image, all direct the viewer’s eye to the centre of the image: a glowing purple-white pitcher. The outline of the pitcher is highlighted in pencil to emphasise its contours and it seems to hang in space whilst simultaneously sitting on the stand. The work is desirous of some form of realism that goes beyond the realistic depiction of objects. Sheeler here employs an exaggerated realism and, as Adorno remarks, ‘exaggerated realism is unrealistic’.48 The overt dissonance of forms in this work betrays the reintroduction of the more realistic context of the interior and any sustained engagement with the painting leaves the viewer feeling slightly dizzy, even nauseous. The balance between the realistic and the abstract is weighted towards the latter, and when compared to the later Home, Sweet Home, which manages to balance these elements with more success, Interior appears transitional in nature. It has the qualities of a work in progress, where the seeds of an idea are slowly taking root. Interior can, therefore, be seen as part of a series of works that eventually result in the more realisticlooking Home, Sweet Home, a painting that overcomes the artificiality of appearance, whilst nonetheless maintaining a strong undercurrent of formal dissonance. In keeping dissonance at bay, hiding the incongruities of formal abstraction behind an illusion of harmony, I will argue these later works testify to the radicalness of Sheeler’s aesthetic.


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Conversely, Home, Sweet Home does not give up its veil of contiguous reality so easily. The colour tones of Home, Sweet Home are greyer, and the light source is strong and directional. The shadows that fall echo hard against the stairs, which themselves reverberate through the zigzag pattern of the rug. It is a light that cleverly casts shadows dark against light, as on the mantel, and light against dark, as on the stove. As with Interior, only one object receives the full attention of the artist and that is the rush-seated ladder-back armchair. The stove, the bench seat and the Shaker table, like the rugs and stairs, appear only as partial entities. The rugs, especially, generate complex geometric forms, in places interlocking and forming bonds with the furniture above and the floor below. Fernand Léger, writing in 1924, observed that ‘Modern man lives more and more in a preponderantly geometric order ’ and Home, Sweet Home seems content to hold true to Léger’s ethos.49 The geometry of the work’s form and content, from the patterns in the rugs to the straight lines of the floorboards and stairs, the table and bench, appears true. The geometric order – which cubism wilfully adopts only to then subvert – is not, however, without its dangers for art.50 As Adorno notes: ‘Compositions fail as background music or as the mere presentation of material, just as those paintings fail in which the geometrical patterns to which they are reducible remain factually what they are’. And when art fails, the ‘striven-for shudder comes to nothing. It does not occur.’51 A closer inspection of those self-same geometric lines delineating the scene in Home, Sweet Home reveals a resistance to the geometric order and the domination of the straight line. These lines are, in themselves, anything but truly straight: they dissent. Sheeler’s realism takes a turn away from the exaggerated and towards the subtle. The disjointed connection between the lines in the rugs and the floorboards is not so obvious. Neither are the changes Sheeler makes to the furniture. The three-dimensional perspective of the chair, in particular, is completely awry. The chair’s left arm is impossibly long in relation to its opposite and although the seat meets the ladder-back of the chair as it should, the top appears square on. There are other anomalies, too. The fireplace behind the stove is inexplicably small and the floor is tilted upwards, shortening the room and flattening space. During the five years between these works, the obvious play with geometric form in Interior has been modified to reveal an altogether more illusory harmony in Home, Sweet Home, a harmony that is governed by the dissonance of its forms. Sheeler’s works conform to both representation and presentation. Representation because, with Bryson’s inference of Platonic mimesis (as imitation or copy), the work provides the realistic (i.e. harmonious)


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illustration of the interior. And presentation (more closely allied with Adornian mimesis) because there are overtones of art’s ability to present or capture something more of the external world than its mere appearance through dissonance. Acting as an arbiter in this dialectic between harmony and dissonance is an artistic vision specific to Sheeler’s work, a vision that failed, on the whole, to balance the conflicting elements of Interior but succeeds in Home, Sweet Home. For Adorno, ‘Dissonance is the truth about harmony’, but without the illusion of harmony, as we saw with Interior, any dissonant collection of forms becomes nothing other than a geometric pattern, preventing the relationship between social antagonism and their expression through experimental form from speaking. Art should not present a false reconciliation of social antagonism through the harmonious construction of artworks. Sheeler’s Home, Sweet Home offers a fragmented vision, a vision that underlies and belies the appearance of a harmonious image of domesticity. In many ways, Home, Sweet Home echoes Adorno’s belief that ‘the aesthetic sensorium [of] dissonance bears all too closely on its contrary, reconciliation’.52 The reconciliation of Home, Sweet Home, though, is one that cannot hold. For Adorno, what ‘appears in art is no longer the ideal, no longer harmony; the locus of its power of resolution is now exclusively in the contradictory and dissonant’.53 Sheeler’s vision of domesticity, with its representation of a harmonious home, filled with both modern and pre-modern objects, plays with this ideal through the contradictory and dissonant. This constructed vision can be seen in the fact that both Interior and Home, Sweet Home share a concentration on one object – the pitcher (or pitcher and stand) and the chair – leaving all other objects to exist in their fragmented and partial forms. Likewise, Cactus and Tulips reflect this practice of isolating one form – the cactus or the tulips – whilst presenting all surrounding objects as either fragments – lamps, stands, blinds – or representing them as in some sense non-functional: for example, the unplugged photographer’s lamp in Cactus. The lamp, which should drown the cactus in light, is impotent because the electrical cable and plug hang redundantly about its stand. But, despite the lamp’s lack of light, the overhead light is manipulated to construct a number of disconcerting shadows. Again, like the chair in Home, Sweet Home, there is an impossibility about the form of the cactus. Its spines are gone, its smooth green flesh exposed to the harsh light, revealing a multiplicity of tones and textures on the surface of the plant. There is a doubling of vulnerability at work. A cactus without spines is exposed enough without standing the plant


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apart on a display stand and subjecting the naked flesh of plant to the bright lights. The tulips in the work of the same name are given the same treatment. The scene is practically identical to Cactus, a lamp stands idly next to the vase of three tulips that are ‘casually arranged in a broad chevron’.54 Although Cactus and Tulips are not located in the home they are in keeping with Sheeler’s domestic scenes in that their central object is placed in a recognisable scene, in this case, the artist’s studio. However, such consistent concentration on single forms throughout the 1920s and into the 1930s – as either complete isolation from context or isolation within a context – reveals this central figure not as the object of Sheeler’s work but its subject. Sheeler’s work is an expression of the homelessness of the modern subject, something that I will expand on below, a subject that cannot feel at home even when the subject or its substitute – the chair, the flowers, the cactus – is in residence. I base this observation on an important aspect of construction in Sheeler’s work; namely, that the carefully constructed, harmonious interior of Home, Sweet Home cannot shake off the dissonance of its forms. If we see the chair in terms of the human subject, the creature comforts that Bryson highlighted in his analysis of still life surround the chair. The stove provides heat and hot food, the table is for eating on and for socialising around, the stairs suggest bedrooms and sleep. Provision is made for all the subject’s basic needs. However, the chair is twisted and deformed. It strikes an uncomfortable pose in relation to the other objects that should provide comfort, security, and a sense of home. With its back turned to the stairs, twisted away from the stove and the table, the subject is merely installed into the surroundings; there appears to be no communication or harmony between them. At this point, it is worth considering the diametrically opposed interpretation of these elements offered up in Wanda Corn’s analysis of Home, Sweet Home.55 For Corn, Sheeler’s work is ultimately concerned with an American usable past. Corn reads the domestic still life, Home, Sweet Home, as ‘a family portrait of things related aesthetically, not historically’.56 Of course, this chapter has concerned itself with the interpretation of aesthetic relationships as historical, and problematic though this assertion might be, more troubling is the way in which such a view shapes the final reading of the work. In seeing the work as a ‘family portrait’, Corn draws a dubious analogy between the objects in the work and their respective positions in an imagined family. For Corn, the centrality and size of the chair denotes a patriarchal figure. The elongated left arm of the chair is extended in the direction of the stove and implies intimacy with the


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furnace, suggesting to Corn that the stove represents a female figure: the mother/wife of the family, the provider of warmth and comfort. And, finally, the little black box at the foot of the stairs is identified as the family dog. Corn’s most acute observations are undermined somewhat by the desire to read the image as an aesthetic marriage of differing forms that find harmony amongst themselves. For example, Corn discusses at length the geometric play in the work and the fact that, interestingly, the straight lines are drawn freehand. She also notes the startling inconsistency in perspective but fails to recognise ‘harmony’ between forms as forced, in tension and ultimately unstable. In an effort to reduce the work’s formal and compositional strategies to an aesthetic matchmaking exercise between pre-modern and modern artefacts, she overlooks the more fascinating aspects of Sheeler’s work. It is the power to estrange both the work and the viewer’s experience of the work that is crucial and which, sadly, is passed over without serious comment. The illusion of harmony between the dissonant elements in Sheeler’s still life work is representation/presentation of dramatic estranging effects through the complex pull of geometric forms that undo their own stability and harmonious construction. For Adorno, the artwork must retain its strangeness initiated through form because ‘Strangeness is the only antidote to estrangement’.57 In her critique, Corn neglects this difficult but ultimately modernist fact, preferring to read an ambivalent strain in Sheeler’s attitude to the machine age. The visual dissonance that Sheeler’s work exhibits is intimately linked to two things: his photographic vision and the concern for the isolation of forms. Reference to Caravaggio is useful here. As Bryson notes, in Caravaggio the ‘third dimension is taken out, and the image seems strangely monocular: it is a painting which supplies to both eyes open the world when seen with one eye closed’.58 Sheeler’s own monocular artistic practice, or his ‘photographic vision’, has strong connections to the still life work of Caravaggio. In Home, Sweet Home, however, there is the multiplication of the monoscopic element. Each object in the room seems to have been isolated and then painted with one eye firmly closed. The final image on the canvas is the reconstitution of these images. The initial image is broken down into its particularities and then reformed through a residual image in which these fragments return to produce a new whole. In short, the image is an Adornian constellation of elements whose truth lies somewhere in the tension between them. Sheeler draws attention to this, in fact, when he describes how his work came together:


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[I] realised that, when we look at any object around us and walking around among other things subsequently, we have to bring it up into a conscious plane because – at least I didn’t realise it or think of it in that light for some time – but when we look at the next thing in sequence to the first object that we have gazed at, there’s still an overtone carried over of what the retina has just previously recorded . . . There may be two such images playing against each other or possibly three, no definite number arbitrarily decided, but certainly two.59

Home, Sweet Home exemplifies this process and, therefore, estranges not only the chair from its own home but also the viewer’s experience of the work.

Home, Sweet Home and Dwelling An air of nostalgia for the home pervades Home, Sweet Home despite the fact that the painting portrays Sheeler’s South Salem home. Any security or comfort the home is supposed to provide – its harmonious quality – is undermined by the dissonant elements of the work’s form. The work’s dissonant forms express the sense of loss and estrangement from the modern world. The reappearance of a recognisable context in Sheeler’s still life works, the domestic interior, and its representation can be addressed through the Adornian notion of the dialectic of mimesis and rationality. By doing so, the work’s construction and meaning invoke a central concern of modernist philosophy: the impossibility of authentic dwelling under the condition of modernity. This aspect of Adorno’s thought enables us to widen the analysis of Sheeler’s aesthetic. The philosophy of modernity appropriates the concept of home, or more accurately, dwelling (with which Martin Heidegger’s work is synonymous),60 as a nostalgic reflection upon the experience of homelessness engendered under the conditions of modernity. The significance of nostalgia for philosophy and dwelling can be understood when one considers the etymology of the word itself. As a combination of the Greek nostos, meaning a desire to return home, and algia, the feeling of pain or of loss, nostalgia encapsulates the homelessness of modernity. As Hilde Heynen notes, ‘the technological development of production and the bureaucratic organisation of social life, which are two of the most important characteristics of the process of modernisation, depend on principles such as rationality, anonymity, and an increasing abstraction in social relations’.61 The defining characteristics of the age produced the uncomfortable prospect of not feeling at home at home. The self-same conditions that


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prompted Heidegger’s reflections on dwelling also aroused Adorno’s interest. For Adorno, the experience of dwelling under the conditions of modernity had ‘in the proper sense’ become impossible.62 The real effect of the impossibility of dwelling upon the individual subject can be summarised as the loss of feeling at home in one’s home. Feeling at home is important because ‘dwelling is in the first instance associated with tradition, security, and harmony, with a life situation that guarantees connectedness and meaningfulness’.63 Without these arbiters between the subject and the world, where can the subject find meaning and connectedness with the external world, except through a nostalgic reflection for the home? Adorno’s own ‘reflections on damaged life’, the subtitle of Minima Moralia, spell out the problematic relationship existing between modernity and dwelling, which has its basis in the realm of experience, or rather the inability to gain access to genuine experience. Contemporary society, built on the principle of instrumental rationality, where all things ‘can be identified, possessed, and sold’, has sucked the marrow from authentic human experience.64 Nothing can escape the exchange principle driving commerce, not even art. For Adorno Not least to blame for the withering of experience is the fact that things, under the law of pure functionality, assume a form that limits contact with them to mere operation, and tolerates no surplus, either in freedom of conduct or in autonomy of things, which would survive as the core of experience, because it is not consumed by the moment of action.65

But what was it that once accommodated the subject to the world, according to Adorno? Adorno nostalgically laments that modern functionality in the home has replaced ‘casement windows to open, but only sliding frames to shove, no gentle latches but turnable handles’.66 The reciprocal relationship between pure function and enlightened instrumental rationality corrodes everyday experience for Adorno and drives apart the relationship between the subject and reality. Consequently, the subject is unable to find the reassurance one gains through authentic dwelling. Adorno is well aware that his views are susceptible to accusations of conservatism. As he admits, ‘the fear of technology is largely stuffy and old-fashioned, even reactionary’, but such a fear ‘does have its validity, for it reflects the anxiety felt in the face of violence which an irrational society can impose on its member, indeed on everything which is forced to exist within its confines’.67 Adorno’s strategy is to negate thinking that perceives an unproblematic link between technology and progress, drawing attention to the subject’s radically


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altered interaction and experience of the external world. According to Adorno, under the conditions of instrumentality, the subject develops ‘a loveless disregard for things’, that manifests itself as a ‘matter-of-factness between people . . . an ideology for treating people as things’.68 As Adorno suggests, art that merely copies the geometric organisation of modern life necessarily fails as modern art. This is because the artwork would be complicit in maintaining society’s status quo by glossing over its defining antagonisms. Art that fails to account for the dissonance behind the harmonious veil of ideology becomes ideology itself, and promotes exactly the ‘loveless disregard for things’ that Adorno claims lies at the heart of instrumental rationality. Adorno’s central concern is to reveal the mediated connection between technical progress in art and technical progress in the relations of production. Hence, Adorno can read the antagonisms of society emerging through problems of form. In terms of the dialectic between rationality and mimesis, the ‘rationality of art consists in its ability to adapt to technological development. Or, to put it another way, art is able to produce expression (mimesis) by technical means.’69 The adaptation of modern techniques in modern art, the role of photography and fragmented vision in Sheeler’s work, as well as historical artistic material – the techniques of still life, the material objects of the home, for example – are the grounds on which Sheeler produces expression (mimesis). For Adorno, ‘art whatever its material has always desired dissonance, a desire suppressed by the affirmative power of society with which aesthetic semblance [illusion] has been bound up. Dissonance is effectively expression’.70 The dissonant elements of Sheeler’s form in Home, Sweet Home, for example, offer an illusion of harmony that Wanda Corn mistakes for the expressive element in Sheeler’s art. Following Corn, Sheeler’s work would be, in Adornian terminology, bound up in the process of producing an illusion, a non-critical image, of the affirmative power of society that demands the glossing over of contradiction and estrangement. Sheeler’s work would fail as art to do justice to the antagonism at the heart of modernity. Corn’s analysis loses sight of what I have tried to illuminate: namely that, through the mode of dissonant expression, Sheeler’s work can be read as a negative indictment of the experience of modernity on the individual subject. The extended arm of the chair in Home, Sweet Home is not some attempt to pull its Other closer, as Corn might have us believe. In keeping with Corn’s own metaphor, the extended arm of the chair is more of an expression of hiding the face, of covering the eyes with a raised arm to block out a world beyond comprehension.


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Sheeler’s domestic scenes represent the home with all its recognisable features and, as such, are marked with a sobriety of vision that Bryson refers to and associates with art that represents an external world. We feel at home in this world; it appears in keeping with the Albertian notion of art as a window on a world. However, Sheeler’s works are littered with the manipulations of space and form and, on reflection, are resolutely not a window on any real world: the image conforms to Bryson/Bann’s notion of representation. The windows in Sheeler’s works, as well as thresholds such as doors, compound this distinction between interior and exterior, between the subject and the world of objects. Such a split between inside and outside is indicative of modernity’s impact on the subject. The modern subject, faced with uncertainty, seeks the refuge of home. However, the home is no longer a dwelling in the true sense and cannot offer the experience the human subject seeks. Sheeler’s Home, Sweet Home captures this loss, caught as it is between presentation and representation, between a rejection of the overactivated painterly surface and the continuation of formal innovation through spatial abstraction. It is also caught between the impulses of realism and abstraction, the harmony of the domestic interior and the dissonance of its aesthetic construction, and, finally, between mimesis and rationality. The image may have its origins in an external world, but the artwork’s construction of fragments displaces the recognisable features of the interior, of the home, and estranges them from their surroundings. The world on offer appears to be controlled and rational – Adorno’s administered world – but the mimetic expressive element in art places this rational world under its critical gaze. Consequently, the viewer is compelled to reconcile the dissonant elements of the work. However, this reconciliation fails to materialise. What is striking about the dissonance of Sheeler’s work is that it is constructed in contradiction to the ideology of modernist representation: the rejection of the overactivated painterly surface. From his earliest works onwards, Sheeler’s modernist technique is marked by the impulse to remove surface detail and physical material from the canvas, contra modernism. Consequently, Sheeler’s aesthetic has been seen as a form of artistic functionalism and this has, in turn, helped form the basis for the predominant mode of interpretation of Sheeler’s aesthetic. However, Sheeler’s aesthetic resists such comparisons for two reasons. Firstly, Sheeler breaks up this sense of place through the dissenting line and shifts


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the emphasis again towards art making itself the focus of the artwork, despite stripping the painterly surface and returning the viewer’s eye to a sense of place that Bann might appreciate. Secondly, despite the negative overtones the concept has for Adorno, the functionalist removal of extraneous detail (ornament) from the canvas opens out into a moment of the artist’s self-sacrifice to the work. In the end, Sheeler’s engagement with the interior and the home provides the forms and content that allow him to foreground the threat of modernity to dwelling, of finding a place to feel at home. I would argue, therefore, that Home, Sweet Home does not represent a nostalgic longing for specific objects in the home. Instead, it depicts – somewhere between representation and presentation – nostalgia for the authentic experience of home or dwelling, one irrevocably damaged under the conditions of modernity.


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Chapter Five

Between Commission and Autonomy Sheeler’s River Rouge

Introduction If one series of works help codify Sheeler as iconographer of the machine age it is the 1927 photographs of the River Rouge, commissioned by the Ford Motor Company in 1926, and the later paintings inspired by the same subject matter, particularly American Landscape (1930) [Plate 8] and Classic Landscape (1931) [Plate 9]. These paintings and the photographs that precede them are significant because, as Terry Smith rightly says, they ‘have become a paradigm of the meeting of art and industry, archetypal images within American art and even icons of American history’.1 Wolfgang Born goes as far as to argue that Sheeler’s photographs of the Rouge ‘raised industrial photography to the level of uncompromising artistic purity’.2 Consequently, Sheeler’s precisionist reinterpretations of these artistically pure photographs with their emphasis on further abstracting structural detail and simplifying architectural form, present the industrial landscape as beautiful. Of course, this is problematic for several reasons. Firstly, one is reminded of Bertolt Brecht’s critique of photography, quoted by Walter Benjamin: ‘A photograph of the Krupps Works or the AEG tells us next to nothing about these institutions’.3 Photographs aestheticise; they do not reveal anything about the inherent nature or experience of the factory system. To aestheticise the architecture of capitalism is to willingly take part in the covering over or concealing of the truth about capitalism. To present the Rouge as beautiful is to present a lie as truth. Sheeler’s approach in American Landscape and Classic Landscape has thus been labelled ‘capitalist illusionism’: ‘In his compositions the fragmentation and reification of work and worker alike – which Marxist critic György Lukács defined in 1923 as the prime effects of assembly line production –


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are magically smoothed over’.4 Sheeler’s ‘smoothing over’ works on at least two distinct levels; on one hand, there exists an anti-modernist rejection of the overly activated painterly surface, and, on the other, presenting an image of industrial capitalism as idyllic. The former is no surprise and is a key aspect evident in the development of Sheeler’s aesthetic. The Rouge paintings continue his determined elimination of his mark, an act that hides the physical and technical effort expended in the actual production of the artwork. As a result, the paintings of the Rouge in particular do not draw attention to their constructedness: that is, their status as objects made by an artist. In fact, a work like American Landscape ‘spritualizes, momunetalizes and naturalizes a historical moment as a “machine age”: New York as glorious cathedral, grain elevators as Egyptian pyramids, a factory as a classical landscape’.5 Countering these complaints is made more difficult when Sheeler, in both his work and autobiographical statements, seems only to confirm that he found nothing in the processes of assembly-line production other than inspiration for his aesthetic vision: a vision that, it might be argued, appears predominantly idealising rather than critical in its focus. The fact that Sheeler was at work on Classic Landscape and the other Rouge works throughout the early 1930s, when the Depression was at its most severe and as strikes at Ford’s plant ended in violence and death, is particularly saddening. Furthermore, a longer view embeds Sheeler ever deeper within the ideological framework of the emergent culture industry in early twentieth-century America. Whether working as a commercial photographer in the 1910s, or with Steichen at Condé Nast in the 1920s, as well as accepting commissions from the Ford Motor Company, the White Star Line and, later, Fortune magazine, to name a few, Sheeler’s parallel career is crucial when criticising his non-commissioned work. Despite his protestations that he found the commercial dimension to his work a distraction, Sheeler describes his time at Condé Nast as the equivalent to ‘a daily trip to jail’, it is readily apparent that besides sustaining the artist during lean times, commercial work and commissions are often the creative force that propels aesthetic experimentation and change in his non-commercial/ non-commissioned work.6 Perhaps the romantic critical demand that an artist starve rather than take on commercial work is just that: romantic, out of date, unreasonable and, in the end, impossible for all but a few artists at the start of the twentieth century. But this is not to excuse or gloss over the closeness of Sheeler’s involvement with the culture industry. It remains problematic, especially for the conception of his work as critique.


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In this chapter, I intend to reclaim the critical potential of Sheeler’s River Rouge photographs and paintings by reading, to an extent, against the grain of Adorno’s aesthetic theory. I will argue against the perception of the commissioned River Rouge works as at best ambivalent about industrial capitalism or, at worst too much under the influence of capitalist ideology. In fact, the works themselves do say something meaningful about Ford, Fordism and the wider issues relating to mass production and industrial progress. Commissioned photographs, such as CrissCrossed Conveyors – Ford Plant (1927) [Figure 16] and Ingot Molds, Open Hearth Building – Ford Plant (1927) [Figure 17], in fact, through the means

16. Charles Sheeler, Criss-Crossed Conveyors – Ford Plant (negative date 1927) Photograph, gelatin silver print Sheet: 25.4 x 20.3 cm (10 x 8 in.) Mount: 47 x 36.8 cm (18 1⁄2 x 14 1⁄2 in.) © The Lane Collection Courtesy, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston


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17. Charles Sheeler, Ingot Molds, Open Hearth Building – Ford Plant (negative date 1927) Photograph, gelatin silver print Sheet: 25.4 x 20.3 cm (10 x 8 in.) Mount: 44.5 x 35.6 cm (17 1⁄2 x 14 in.) © The Lane Collection Courtesy, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston


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of their production, contain within them a dissenting line; the capacity to critique their subject. Furthermore, the paintings of the 1930s further critique the same processes, but in a more complex manner, a complexity that developed after a commission for the White Star Line was rejected in around 1928. Out of this rejection came Upper Deck (1928) [Figure 19]: a watershed work for Sheeler. Following Upper Deck, the images of the River Rouge, American Landscape and Classic Landscape, continue the tradition of the dissenting line in Sheeler’s works, questioning the processes of rationalisation in pursuit of the realisation of technological utopia. This chapter highlights an overlooked negativity in Sheeler’s response to his industrial subject. To draw out the negative or critical aspects of the Rouge works, I turn to Adorno’s aesthetic theory, and the notion of the truth content of art, as well as his claims for the utopian possibility of the autonomous artwork. For Adorno, autonomous art does not present a ready-made picture of utopia; it only hints at utopia through the elements of a constellation because ‘by the autonomy of their form, artworks forbid the incorporation of the absolute as if they were symbols. Aesthetic images stand under the prohibition on graven images’.7 Adorno is anxious that art avoids offering a conclusive image of what utopia might look like, because ‘abstract utopia is all too compatible with the most insidious tendencies of society’.8 In short, society must not strive for a prescribed utopia. As iconographic of the machine age, Sheeler’s River Rouge works are viewed as abstract prescriptions of a technological utopia, of exactly the sort Adorno criticises. Reading Adorno’s aesthetic theory against the grain is necessary because of his strict emphasis on the autonomous artwork and the lack of aesthetic merit of images produced in the service of the culture industry. Adorno’s aesthetic theory has been rightly criticised for its biases, elitism being one, but also because his emphatic privileging of autonomy is undialectical. But many critics miss a more dialectical Adorno in his essay ‘Cultural Criticism and Society’; here Adorno appears more open to the idea that heteronomous art might itself offer grounds for critique: the hardline Adorno of Aesthetic Theory to an extent undone by Adorno himself. Consequently, rather than disabling their critical potential, the closeness of Sheeler’s works to the culture industry actually helps realise a form of cultural critique.


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Sheeler and the River Rouge Commission In 1927, Sheeler was commissioned by the Ford Motor Company, through the N.W. Ayer advertising agency, to produce ‘a series of documentary photographs that would appear in various publications and would serve as a creative interpretation of American industry’.9 To fulfil the Ford commission Sheeler spent six weeks at the factory complex and produced a series of photographs of the River Rouge plant. During his time at the River Rouge, Sheeler made over 130 photographs of which he submitted to Ford only thirty-two finished prints. These images explore various aspects of the exterior and the interior of Ford’s industrial colossus. Theodore Stebbins distinguishes Charles Sheeler’s photographs (and the later paintings) of the Ford Motor Company’s River Rouge Plant against the perceived reality of an industrial leviathan with all its noise and dirt. According to Stebbins, the River Rouge for Sheeler is ‘idea, abstraction, serenity, the exquisite balance of palpable structure, of lights and darks, the exploration of every tonal nuance’.10 Just as the defining features of Manhattan – noise; activity; bright lights – find no place in Sheeler’s New York series of works, so the images of the River Rouge are without the defining frenetic energy and enveloping filth and smog of the factory. Instead, the machines and the architecture housing them are eerily silent and still. Consisting of ninety-three structures, over ninety miles of railroad tracks, twenty-seven miles of conveyors, 53,000 machine tools, and 75,000 employees, the sheer scale of the River Rouge plant was overwhelming. Considering the style of Sheeler’s work, it is not surprising to find that the final prints submitted to Ford do not reflect the massive size of the River Rouge. The photographs do not celebrate the plant’s workers, or narrate the act of creation from coal to car, nor do the images eulogise Ford, and nowhere, ever, do we see a complete car.11 In the main, we never see the whole of anything in the photographs, only fragments that imply the binding whole through constellational form. One assumes Sheeler never attempts to offer an overview of the Rouge because of the tremendous size of the industrial complex. However, as the analyses of Sheeler’s work from the Doylestown photographs onwards suggest, the artist’s predilection for isolated forms must inform this decision. As Mary Jacob notes, Sheeler ‘immediately became absorbed in [the Rouge’s] astounding display of technology’.12 Jacob assures us that Sheeler’s interest was best expressed in the exterior of River Rouge, but this refers more to the paintings and not the photographs of the plant. Jacob reasons that too many workers and complicated machines ‘diverted


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from the image, simple, geometric forms which were his real interests’.13 However, if Jacob is correct, photographs like Forging Die Blocks (1927) and Blast Furnace Interior (1927) should appear anomalous in the series of images. The truth is that they are not unusual or out of place. In fact, as Stebbins notes, nearly half of the River Rouge photographs are of the inside the factory.14 In this sense, Sheeler’s approach to the Rouge reflects that evident across his entire practice, from his photographic constellations of the Doylestown House to photographs comprising the New York series. Where the Rouge differs is in the combination of interior/exterior shots as opposed to a concentration on one or the other. When Sheeler enters the factory, he continues to trade in those tonal nuances and interest in line and form that define the exterior images of the Rouge. The images of the Rouge’s expansive interiors are as dominated by the interplay of line as the exterior photographs. For example, Ingot Molds, Open Hearth Building – Ford Plant offers a multiplicity of angular lines, criss-crossing at the top of the frame, interconnecting in a lattice strikingly back-lit on three sides by natural exterior light. The lower half of the print maintains a strong sense of perspectival line but is less complex; the lines are simple and more direct, focusing the eye along the left wall and then to the parallel row of receding moulds that lose focus as they approach the large square lighted exit. Somewhere in between the lattice roof and the top of the moulds hangs a trailing arm of a huge machine suspended from the ceiling, seemingly static but in action, the work overseen by three individuals standing elevated to the left. Although the figures add a sense of scale to the machines and the interior space, there is another element that serves to present scale but might also be seen as an ironic touch. In the bottom-right corner, leaning against a steel wall stands a shovel [Figure 18]. The true size of the moulds, the machine filling them, and the space in which these objects are operating becomes apparent, but so does the distance between modern and pre-modern human labour. The shovel stands as an archaic yet functional object in the scene. Waiting for a spill from an overflowing mould, the shovel stands as a resolute reminder of the past, of the simple tools that even these modern production processes cannot do without. It undermines the idea of the precise processes of the machine, suggesting inaccuracy, inefficiency and waste. The figures overseeing the work of the colossal machine appear helpless once the process is underway, almost awe-struck. There is a stark reversal in power relations. The machine regulates the speed and size of the task and the workers become servants to it. The image portrays the obvious power of the machine and the scale of the production process. Sheeler’s


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18. Charles Sheeler, Ingot Molds, Open Hearth Building – Ford Plant DETAIL Photograph, gelatin silver print © The Lane Collection Courtesy, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

work appears ambivalent in its attitude towards the machine. But the interaction between line and form questions the more straightforward conclusions critics have drawn, especially with regard to his modernist ambivalence. There is more to this photograph, and the other works of the River Rouge commission, than a simple dualism between the replication of the imagery of Fordism and any discomfort at its capacity to dehumanise the workforce. Sheeler’s fragmentary photographs are drawn to one particular part of the Rouge, the heart of the industrial complex: steel production. The foundry at the Rouge was at the time the largest in the world. It was a huge structure, measuring over 595 feet wide and 1,188 feet long, and it is easy to appreciate the artist’s interest in ‘the drama and display of power’.15 The foundry represents the processes of the power of transformation, the exercise of total control and the deliberate manipulation and shaping of rudimentary forms. However, this awesome power remains invisible.


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Where are the flames, the heat haze, the molten metals, and sparks flying? Even in an image like Blast Furnace Interior there is not much blast from the furnace other than a bright eerie glow. The extravagant and dangerous process of producing molten metal is represented as quite a subdued event. Sheeler’s depiction of this transformative power seems to mirror his own artistic practice: the manipulation of forms with the least physical evidence shown on the surface of the canvas. The Rouge photographs also rely on Sheeler’s technique of isolating forms from their context, or at least reducing any obvious relationship to their environment. There appears no fundamental change in approach to the Rouge as a subject, despite the fact that this is a commissioned body of work for use by the culture industry.

The Culture Industry and Sheeler For Adorno and Horkheimer, ‘The culture industry tends to make itself the embodiment of authoritative pronouncements, and thus the irrefutable prophet of the prevailing order’.16 Consequently, Sheeler’s commissioned images, as advertisements for the massive River Rouge complex, knowingly partake in maintaining the authoritative voice of ‘the prevailing order’. Although Sheeler chose commercial photography because it ‘appeared to be far removed from art’, the impact of photo graphy, as this book has traced, is crucial in the process of construction of his art from the 1910s onwards. However, up until the Ford commission, none of the artist’s commercial work was quite so closely aligned with the products and aims of the system of the culture industry.17 A question mark, therefore, necessarily hangs over them. This is the starting point for Terry Smith’s critique of Sheeler’s close relationship with the Ford Motor Company. For Smith, the Ford commission can be seen as part of a broader process of making modernity normal through the aestheticisation of the inhumane processes of Fordist rationalisation. In the pay of Ford, Sheeler manufactured an image of Ford for Ford, just as employees manufactured automobiles, in an arrangement that undermines Sheeler’s credibility as a serious artist.18 By paying close attention to the conflict of interests extant between artist and patron, Smith suggests that Sheeler surrendered artistic autonomy to the Ford Motor Company. Clearly, this is a relevant criticism but Sheeler is not exceptional in this regard. Georgia O’Keeffe, for example, accepted a commission from the Ayer agency – Sheeler’s agents – to paint a pineapple for the Dole fruit company.19 And it was


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fellow photographer Edward Steichen who invited Sheeler to join him at the magazine publisher Condé Nast. The relationship between art and patronage, and art and commerce, was nothing new, of course, but the complexion of this relationship changed dramatically with the inception of the culture industry. With the commodification of all aspects of human life, the culture industry’s inculcation of art into the technological commercial sphere could only be seen as negative. The aims of the artist are radically different to those of the advertising executive. Adorno argues that ‘the conflict between commission and autonomy results in a reluctant and scanty production. For today, far more than in the age of absolutism, the patron, and the artist – whose relationship was always precarious – are alienated.’20 Sheeler’s work vacillates uncomfortably between commission and autonomy, and, therefore, between the polar opposites of inauthentic and authentic art. The problem here is, as Adorno and Horkheimer argue, that the ‘autonomy of works of art . . . is tendentially eliminated by the culture industry’.21 Following this, Sheeler’s commissions, as works in service of the culture industry and despite the continuity in approach evident in his non-commissioned work, necessarily lack all semblance of aesthetic merit. Adorno and Horkheimer add: [The culture industry] lives parasitically from the extra-artistic technique of the material production of goods, without regard for the obligation to the internal artistic value whose implied functionality (Sachlichkeit), but also without concern for the laws of form demanded by aesthetic autonomy. The result for the physiognomy of the culture industry is essentially a mixture of streamlining, photographic hardness and precision on the one hand, and individualistic residues, sentimentality, and an already developed rationally disposed and adapted romanticism on the other.22

On one hand, the ‘photographic hardness and precision’ associated with one half of the physiognomy of the culture industry readily applies to Sheeler’s work; but, on the other, his work can hardly be described as either ‘sentimental’ or as an ‘adapted romanticism’. Accordingly, Sheeler’s River Rouge works resist easy assimilation with the aims of the culture industry and should not be seen as uncritical endorsements of Ford and Fordism. The central tenets of Adorno and Horkheimer’s critique of the culture industry in Dialectic of Enlightenment are perhaps the most summarised in all their collective works but it is well worth rehearsing them here in light of Sheeler’s involvement with Ford. The culture industry defines itself in technological terms, as fulfilling a need that consumers themselves demand. The unity of the system is maintained through technology and


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technological power controlled by those with the chief economic hold over society. As such, monopoly capitalism has made the technology of the culture industry no more than the achievement of standardisation and mass production, sacrificing whatever involved a distinction between the logic of the work and that of the social system. This is the result not of a law of movement in technology as such but of its function in today’s economy.23

Technology is a rationale of domination where the standardisation of consumer products and associated demand and supply has become the sole function of an economy that utilises technology to further its grip on power. Instrumental rationality, the epitome of Enlightenment thinking, has ensured the eradication of difference in favour of ‘universal exchangeability’.24 Adorno and Horkheimer’s understanding of technology draws strongly on Karl Marx’s ‘forces of production’, where technology refers, in the broadest sense, ‘to machines, techniques, organisations, social infrastructure, labour, raw materials, and other means to produce a change in material reality’.25 In this way, technology is described in Dialectic of Enlightenment as the essence of a form of knowledge that ‘does not work by concepts and images . . . but refers to method, the exploitation of others’ work and capital’.26 Exploitation and power have been exercised under the auspices of various stages of capitalism through the deployment of various forms of technology, or, following Adorno, forms of knowledge. Mass production is therefore paradigmatic of the process of abstraction in the industrial world, ‘a world which has turned abstract’.27 The logic of instrumental rationality enables the development of the assembly line and, through the combination of instrumental rationality and the technology of the culture industry, has systematically reified human consciousness. Adorno sees the result of these processes as the inevitable and necessary standardisation of the products of industry – the Model T stands as a prime example of this kind of standardized product – and of the standardisation of everyday life. The role of the culture industry is to propagate and sustain the standardised life. The standardisation of product and the human experience associated with society and culture under monopoly capitalism are all found in the ultimate symbol of this era: the Ford Motor Company’s River Rouge Plant. Adorno and Horkheimer conclude that all mass culture is identical because anything that might disrupt the flow of standardisation cannot be tolerated by the totality. Even ‘marked differentiations such as those


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of A and B films, or of stories in magazines in different price ranges, depend not so much on subject matter as on classifying, organising and labelling consumers’.28 Or, the ever-same repackaged as the new. The so-called ‘elixir of life’ for the culture industry is advertising and this links Sheeler’s work to Adorno and Horkheimer’s predominantly gloomy aspect on the possibility for radical culture.29 Advertising in the culture industry is a programme meticulously planned by those in control of the advertising agencies, who never ‘produce or sanction anything that in any way differs from their own rules, their own ideas about consumers, or above all themselves’.30 These perceptions on the culture industry offer an interesting perspective on Sheeler’s involvement with advertising, especially when considering why the extremely conservative Ford Motor Company should choose an avant-garde artist to produce the definitive image of the company. Sheeler was also free to tour the River Rouge at his leisure, without restriction, and to photograph exactly what he pleased. These elements seem seriously at odds with the musings of Adorno and Horkheimer on the operations of the culture industry.31 Sheeler’s photographs of the factory complex seem to exist somewhere between the culture industry and art, between commission and autonomy. Undoubtedly, the commissioned images were, in the hands of the advertising agency, pieced together in the form of a visual eulogy to Fordism, a celebration of what was at the time the largest industrial complex in the world. As Troyen notes, the ‘new Ford plant was seen as a visionary city; its observers sang its praises using spiritual metaphors and with religious zeal’.32 If Sheeler’s works were instrumental in the creation of the idea of the Rouge as technological utopia, is it possible to conceive the possibility that these images preserve any semblance of a critique of standardisation and rationalisation? Adorno’s negative critique proposes that the artist produce work that engages in determinate negation – the revealing of the untruth of art’s object – in this case, the Rouge. Many critics judge Sheeler’s Rouge images as a positive statement on Ford’s technological utopia, the Rouge because ‘there is neither grime nor confusion in Sheeler’s technological utopia’.33 These images present a pristine vision of the manufacturing process, which makes it difficult to see how one could claim that Sheeler is engaged in any kind of negative critique of the Rouge. Sheeler’s factoryscapes are grime free, but rather than consider this an end of the analysis, I believe the sterility and cleanliness are a point of entry into the works.


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Sheeler’s Technocratic Landscape The industrial subject, the factory or the machine, forms the backbone of Sheeler’s Ford commission and his later works based upon these photographs. The later images – American Landscape and Classic Landscape, for example – belong to the tradition of landscape painting, but from a particularly modern perspective. Wolfgang Born, in Landscape Painting: An Interpretation, defined what he calls the technocratic landscape in American art, a tradition that emerged in the mid-nineteenth century and is identifiable by its predilection for industrial subjects. In many respects, the painters of the technocratic landscape could be viewed as following, either directly or indirectly, Ralph Waldo Emerson’s proposal that the role of the artist was to ‘employ the symbols in use in his day and nation to convey his enlarged sense to his fellow men’.34 The symbols of the technocratic landscape are the railroad, the factory and the machine – the subject matter of Precisionism – revolutionary new socio-cultural objects responsible for shaping not only a new kind of landscape, but also a radically new form of reality. For Born, the industrialised landscape lends itself perfectly to another product of the industrial age: photography. The impact of photography and the photographic image on the form of representation in landscape painting arose because ‘photography showed that [it was] capable of producing true visual documents of the industrialised world’; a mechanised representation of a fast mechanising world.35 It is not too surprising to find that Born identifies Precisionist art, especially Charles Sheeler’s River Rouge works, as examples par excellence of the technocratic landscape in American art. For Born: ‘The photographic eye focused the hard, non-picturesque structures of engineering architecture with the same objectivity as the trees and the water next to it. Only there were less trees and more and more industrial architecture.’36 The industrial complex makes itself the focus of the landscape, imposing itself on natural forms of the environment. From the photographs of slag buggies, Slag Buggy (1927), and conveyors, Criss-Crossed Conveyors, to the paintings of silos and railroad tracks – especially Classic Landscape – the landscape is completely manipulated and controlled. The ‘natural’ traditional landscape with trees, rolling grass-covered hills, rivers and streams has been obliterated. Moreover, this technocratic landscape is practically uninhabited by human beings. Despite all these factors, Born concludes:


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There is no complaint about industrial ugliness to be traced in Sheeler’s world, but neither does he try to glorify and to romanticize chaos of steel and brick, smoke and refuse. He rather analyzes the technocratic landscape, this synthetic world in which concrete blocks are the mountains and smokestacks the trees, and he strips it to its essential elements.37

Like Constance Rourke, Born also refers to Sheeler’s attitude towards industry as ambivalent. Sheeler neither criticises nor romanticises the Ford Motor Company’s industrial complex. Instead, he analyses the new landscape with a ‘hardened’ investigative eye, as though waiting for the truth to emerge from behind an illusion. For all Born’s sensitivity to Sheeler’s aesthetic, the important distinction between the commissioned photographs and the non-commissioned artworks of the Rouge is scarcely acknowledged and remains unanalysed. The photographs are presumed to possess the same artistic merit as the paintings, and both are seen as objective interpretations of the American scene. For Smith, however, Sheeler’s commissioned works are not merely icons of Ford and the Rouge but actively partake in an iconology of the Ford Motor Company and the associated notions of Fordism, the assembly line, mass production and the democratisation of the automobile. The step up from ‘iconography – the repetition of images – to an iconology – the active production of meaning and knowledge through [the images] social reception’ is important because it elucidates the power that Sheeler’s commissioned works exerted within a social and cultural context.38 Smith criticises Sheeler’s photographs and the later paintings of the River Rouge because they are ‘too much part of the visual language of the bosses’.39 These images helped construct ‘a tasteful, discriminating gaze that aestheticizes the Ford Company system, epitomized by River Rouge, [facilitating] its ascension into art’.40 In essence, Sheeler is accused of aestheticising the true horror of the abstract industrial system of Fordism. Lucic adds that ‘on the more obvious level, [Sheeler’s] work seems to side with the supporters of the managerial elite. The artist’s first engagement with industrial subjects in fact resulted from a public relations scheme intended to glorify Ford’s aggressive expansionism’.41 The technocratic landscape of modern art, in Sheeler’s art, in much the same way as the skyscraper, accordingly idolises monopoly capitalism’s domination of nature. But, as Lucic notes, this is perhaps too obvious a conclusion to draw. Sheeler’s photographic aestheticising of the Rouge and their appearance in literature advertising Ford’s automobile is the embodiment of Adorno’s complaint regarding the culture industry and its use of


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photography. Here, the ‘new ideology has as its objects the world as such’ where the culture industry employs photography and the photograph as the straightforward representation of reality, a visual truth, aids a kind of self-fulfilling prophecy.42 For Adorno, advertising ‘makes use of the worship of facts by no more than elevating a disagreeable existence into the world of facts in representing it meticulously. This transference makes existence itself the substitute for meaning and right. Whatever the camera reproduces is beautiful.’43 Here Adorno is responding to the comments of Walter Benjamin on Neue Sachlichkeit and photography, which I discuss below.

Sheeler and Neue Sachlichkeit One of the most striking accounts to be found on art’s ability to account for the effects of modernity is Walter Benjamin’s reading of Paul Klee’s Angelus Novus (1920) in his ‘Theses on the Philosophy of History’. Klee’s angel is caught in a storm blowing from Paradise, his ‘face is turned toward the past’ but the wind in his wings ‘irresistibly propels him to the future to which his back is turned, while the pile before him grows skyward’.44 Benjamin concludes from this arresting image that the storm in which the angel is caught ‘is what we call progress’. The wreckage of modernity piling up at the feet of Klee’s angel is not to be found in Sheeler’s photographs; in fact, few of Sheeler’s images of modernity appear to have anything in common with the work of Klee. Debris and confusion are far from evident in Sheeler’s River Rouge works, even in the photographs of working machinery there is a distinct absence of gritty realism. One can imagine that Benjamin (and by association, Adorno) might be troubled by the lack of Klee-like rubble in Sheeler’s photographs. Unlike the painted River Rouge works of the 1930s, which might stand more favourably next to Angelus Novus, these photographs were commissioned by the Ford Motor Company in order to perform a technological function: to create an acceptable image of the Rouge. Sheeler’s photographs are caught in the storm between commission and autonomy. Benjamin shares Adorno and Horkheimer’s distrust of the photographic image in advertising and he is particularly critical of the German Neue Sachlichkeit movement. This group of artists is important for the analysis of Sheeler’s ‘objective’ photography, his ‘hardened eye’, because of visual similarities between their work and their relationship to the culture industry. Although the ‘term was originally used for paintings which dealt matter-of-factly with the world in a generally realist style’,


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Neue Sachlichkeit (or ‘New Objectivity’ or ‘New-Matter-of-Factness’) came to be predominantly linked to a particular style of photography.45 The defining feature of this photographic style was that it ‘celebrated the subject rather than the formal experimentation made possible by the machine’.46 Although Neue Sachlichkeit had strong links with the Bauhaus, two artists working outside the Bauhaus, Albert Renger-Patzsch and Karl Blossfeldt, developed the recognisable Neue Sachlichkeit photographic style.47 Sichel observes that both Sheeler and Albert Renger-Patzsch were part of a strong tradition of photographers working between artistic and commercial ventures.48 The observations of Sichel and Stomberg on why the style of Neue Sachlichkeit photography appealed to the culture industry bear a close relation to those of Adorno and Horkheimer. For Sichel, ‘the photographic image itself has a role as an analogon of industry’, and, what is more, ‘by the 1920s, [the photographic image] had become the most popular and powerful medium for creating icons of machine-made products’.49 As Stomberg concludes, ‘the realism of Neue Sachlichkeit provided advertising’s most articulate visual language’.50 In particular, the photographic style of Renger-Patzsch proved successful in the field of advertising, something that fed a retroactive relationship between art and commerce: the photographic representations of products fuelled the ‘explosive growth of consumer products in the 1920s’.51 This, in turn, led to the demand for more products and more images of these products. Stomberg adds: ‘Sheeler’s style of realism – informed by the tenets of abstract Modernism – paralleled the Neue Sachlichkeit of Renger-Patzsch’.52 So much so, in fact, that Sheeler was invited to show some of his Rouge photographs at the Deutsche Werkbund Exhibition (Film und Foto) of 1929. However, ‘despite the visual similarities’ – for example, compare Renger-Patzsch’s Kraner (1929) with Sheeler’s Criss-Crossed Conveyors – Precisionism and Neue Sachlichkeit developed independently of each other. As artistic movements emerging on opposite sides of the Atlantic, largely unaware of each other’s existence, their similitude can be accounted for only through reference to socio-economic factors, especially rapid urbanisation and industrialisation. Despite their geographical separation, many aspects of Sheeler’s River Rouge photographs do seem to share a confluence of interest and style with Renger-Patzsch’s work. However, it would be a mistake to suggest an unproblematic relationship Benjamin is highly critical of the Neue Sachlichkeit photographer Renger-Patzsch throughout ‘The Author as Producer’, directing a specific attack on his anthology, A Beautiful World. For Benjamin,


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Renger-Patzsch is ‘unable to say anything of a power station or a cable factory other than this: what a beautiful world!’53 Benjamin’s main point of objection is that the anthology represents the peak of Neue Sachlichkeit photography. This achievement is far from positive in that Neue Sachlichkeit photography only ‘succeeded in making even abject poverty, by recording it in a fashionably perfected manner, into an object of enjoyment’.54 The photographic technique of Renger-Patzsch aestheticises poverty in much the same way as Smith claims that Sheeler aestheticises the Fordist regime. What links these critiques is the accusation that the ‘objective’ photographic styles of Renger-Patzsch and Sheeler lack artistic experimentation. Consequently, their images do not seek to problematise our vision and understanding of the world, but normalises it. As art, they fail because they do not seek to engage with and change the world. Adorno, like Benjamin, is critical of Neue Sachlichkeit’s drive towards pure objectivity because when logically followed through to its end, Neue Sachlichkeit reduces the artwork to the purely literal. Hence, ‘the artwork becomes a mere fact and is annulled as art’.55 Through its factuality – the most appealing aspect of photograph for the culture industry – the image loses the power to critique the society from which it sprang. In both instances, art ceases to act as art; its power to critique is nullified. For Benjamin, the images fall into the trap of entertainment and fail to provoke the revolutionary spark needed to shake the status quo. For Adorno, the charge against the artists of the Neue Sachlichkeit movement is more complex. Neue Sachlichkeit is well aware of its complicity, according to Adorno, and it is through such a complicitous relationship that the movement retains a marginal ability to critique the whole. However, it is exactly the conditions that promote the possibility for critique that ultimately deny such a possibility. Because Neue Sachlichkeit shares the antinomies of the Enlightenment that, if left unchecked, will eventually push the movement, like the Enlightenment itself, into a regressive barbarism. In the end, what divides Adorno and Benjamin on the Neue Sachlichkeit movement are their differing attitudes towards revolution and political commitment in art. For Benjamin, when the author as producer discovers there exists a form of solidarity with the proletariat, the artist consequently discovers a ‘simultaneity with certain other producers who seemed scarcely to concern him’.56 The realisation that one is enmeshed in the productive forces of society and not alone in a defined field of expertise allows the artist to realise the political nature of their art. Adorno’s rejection of the


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idea of a revolutionary proletariat forbids him from promoting such a (Benjaminian) line of argument. As Adorno says, ‘One may play at anything, but not at being a member of the proletariat’.57 However, as Sichel comments, it is not quite so easy to polarise Sheeler’s artworks/photographs as Benjamin does with the works of Renger-Patzsch and Germaine Krull in ‘The Author as Producer.’ In fact, Sheeler is flatly criticised for appearing to be anything but in solidarity with the workers. Accordingly, Sheeler’s ‘objective’ photographs of the Rouge seem to exist in some kind of limbo as neither art nor advertising, whilst simultaneously retaining a claim to both. As we have seen for Smith, the aestheticisation of Ford and the ascension of Fordism into art asks serious questions of Sheeler as an artist and his art when these images were produced in the service of monopoly capitalism. Smith’s point is straightforward and convincing. However, following Adorno’s analysis in his essay ‘Progress’ and on the Neue Sachlichkeit movement in Aesthetic Theory, these works find space in which to convey an aesthetic experience that may reveal the truth about Ford and monopoly capitalism, whether Sheeler is ‘conscious’ of this or not. In short, despite their dubious origins in the culture industry and advertising, these images explore the problematic notions of progress through technology and rationalisation. Rather than ‘making’ the machine ‘beautiful’ and fostering a vision of a world of malevolent technology, Sheeler’s images are riddled with discrepancies that undermine these notions and which reveal a dissenting line of argument. Questions remain, of course. For example, are Sheeler’s photographs of the River Rouge determinate negations of the River Rouge itself? Or does the negation of the River Rouge and all it embodies only occur when Sheeler returns to the photographic material in 1930 when painting American Landscape. These questions will be addressed in detail later. Benjamin goes on to claim that what ‘we require of the photographer is the ability to give his pictures that caption which wrenches it from modish commerce and gives it its revolutionary use-value’.58 In a way, the River Rouge photographs attest to Benjamin’s own misgivings towards Neue Sachlichkeit, and, if we are to include Sheeler, of ‘objective’ photography in general. The titles of Sheeler’s photographs are literal. They name the object in the scene, for example – Forging Die Blocks, Stamping Press, or Power House No. 1 – and they also tag on the ubiquitous ‘ – Ford Plant’. However, unlike Renger-Patzsch as criticised by Benjamin, the literal nature of Sheeler’s titles is underscored by an ambiguity between the construction of the image and its title.


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Critique from the Inside: Sheeler’s Rouge Photographs Nothing demonstrates this literality more than Criss-Crossed Conveyors – Ford Plant. The eponymous conveyors are literally criss-crossed, but this description belies a more complicated set of relations between the conveyors in the frame. The conveyors on closer inspection exist in some kind of woven pattern. The conveyor rising from bottom left to top right first emerges from behind a scaffolded structure and then over it, growing towards its own support front right. Complicating this relationship further is the conveyor emerging from behind the scaffold to the left, which actually supports the other conveyor that falls from top left to middle right. The intersection of line between the diagonals of the conveyors, the pylon-like structures that support them, is set against the rising lines of the chimneystacks. These, too, are counter-posed in their cylindrical forms with the box construction of the structures covering up the actual conveyor belts themselves. What is more, Sheeler’s choice of aperture flattens the visual plane of this complex web of interlocking steel constructions; the depth of field is collapsed dramatically. The result is anything but straightforward. The image has a stately quality, the structures demand attention and careful contemplation, and it is through this act of contemplation that the more complex arrangements of the image come to the fore. Besides the intricate weaving of the weblike steel constructions in the lower half of the image, the flattened depth of field and changes in tone both serve to collapse and separate structures in the frame. The collapse negates spatial difference and the separation in tone between objects defines their structures as entities in their own right whilst co-existing in the whole. Sheeler exploits this technique more fully with the interiors of the 1930s, where fragmentation of simple still life perspective generates a challenge to a static view of the modern home and its pre-modern furnishings. In Criss-Crossed Conveyors Sheeler openly explores this notion of fragmenting the whole whilst retaining our view of it in some way. Of all the images that Sheeler produced for the Ford commission, I can think of none more negative, in the Adornian sense, than Criss-Crossed Conveyors. When one looks at Criss-Crossed Conveyors, the site of transition and of power, Power House No. 1, is obscured by an extremely negative structure, the web of iron and conveyors in the foreground, forming the symbolic shape of a cross. Moving on from the negativity of Criss-Crossed Conveyors, I would like to reintroduce an earlier theme recalling observations from the previous chapter on the importance of fragmentation in Sheeler’s still life works.


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The role of fragmentation and the rearrangement of fragments in a tenuous harmony defined the construction and expression in the still life works. There is a slight difference here, though, in that the photographs obviously maintain a more realist visual regime that does not take fragmentation as its sole focus of form but rather seeks to disrupt an obvious and ‘natural’ reality. Criss-Crossed Conveyors is typical of many of Sheeler’s exterior shots of the River Rouge in this way. The totality of the production process is implicit rather than explicit. A sense of the totality only emerges on contemplation of the interweaving of the image’s structures. Sheeler never attempts to encapsulate the whole, as it were, in any one image because he collapses the whole into the single image just as he collapses depth in the images. Each structure, machine or building is conceived of as both part of the massive complex involved in the construction of the Model A, and as isolated from it. As with the New York series, the artist alludes to the city – in a negative manner – through the very fact that it is not represented in its entirety. Adorno’s comment that ‘whatever the camera produces is beautiful’ is intimately related to the culture industry’s love of facts and the ability of the camera to record them. It also draws on the culture industry’s appropriation of art for its own ends, to aestheticise the systems of domination and therefore normalise them. The products of the culture industry are in no sense true art, despite being able to ‘pride itself on having energetically executed the previously clumsy transposition of art into the sphere of consumption’.59 Although art has been appropriated by the culture industry, the works it produces do not deserve the name. The culture industry is concerned exclusively with effects, it crushes their subordination and makes them subserve the formula, which replaces the work. The same fate is inflicted on whole and parts alike. The whole inevitable bears no relation to the details – just like the career of the successful man into which everything is made to fit as an illustration or a proof, whereas it is nothing more than the sum of all those idiotic events. The so-called dominant idea is like a file which ensures order but not coherence. The whole and the parts are alike; there is no antithesis and no connection. Their prearranged harmony is a mockery of what had to be striven after in the great bourgeois works of art.60

The consequences for Sheeler’s work are troubling if Adorno and Horkheimer are correct. The lack of any relation between the works’ form and content, the style imposed in the name of the aims of advertising, fails to produce a genuine work of art. The important distinguishing factor here is style and the idea of artistic style proves helpful for both


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re-evaluating Adorno and Horkheimer’s ideas in light of Sheeler’s work, and vice versa.

‘This is What I Have Been Getting Ready for’: Sheeler and Upper Deck After the inspirational excitement of the River Rouge, Sheeler, complete with the accompanying adulatory reception of the photographs, soon found himself in the artistic doldrums. At once, ‘Sheeler’s River Rouge photographs were immediately successful’ and the photographs ‘were treated both as advertising images and as works of art’. However, the success of Sheeler’s photographic images as both art and advertising simultaneously ‘dealt a traumatic blow to his painting’.61 Sheeler returned from Detroit to find not only his desire, but, more problematically, his ability to paint, diminishing by the day. For Sheeler, 1928 looked as though he had reached an insurmountable impasse: photography seemed to have extinguished the artist’s capacity to make pictures using paint. What saved Sheeler’s career as a painter was yet another commission. In a sense, one would have assumed that Sheeler might have been shy of taking on another stretch of work for the advertising industry, after all, the Ford assignment had consigned painting to another, unreachable space. What is more, and in complete contradistinction to the Ford commission, after completing his work for the White Star Line, the shipping company judged his work to be an unremitting failure and the photographs for the company’s liner SS Majestic were rejected. One imagines that the whole experience must have taken on an air of doom; a toll sounding the end of Sheeler’s career: an artist without a gallery, his support network now spread across America, his ability to paint blocked, and only advertising work to pay the bills. However, the negativity of this situation seems to have provoked a turnaround, and by the end of 1929 Sheeler ‘emerged with a new technique, new imagery and a new working method’.62 The idea of totally new technique, imagery and working method seems an extreme reaction to failure. Therefore, I want to question, with reference to Upper Deck, the painting around which these assumptions are based, whether this work is so different from Sheeler’s earlier work. There is little doubt that after Upper Deck Sheeler began consistently to produce the works that most significantly define his métier: American Landscape, Classic Landscape, View of New York, Home, Sweet Home and Americana. There is an intonation of finality in Troyen’s summary, of a cataclysmic and cathartic break with the past. Does Sheeler’s work truly reject the


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19. Charles Sheeler, Upper Deck (1929) Oil on canvas Sight: 73 x 55.3 cm (28 3⁄4 x 21 3⁄4 in.) Harvard University Art Museums, Fogg Art Museum, Louise E. Bettens Fund, 1933.97 Photo: Allan Macintyre © President and Fellows of Harvard College


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grounds and principles that had seen his work oscillate in various ways between Cézanne-esque landscapes through to total abstraction in the late 1910s, between the realism of an objective photography and the fragmentation explored through cubist-realism/Precisionist interiors and exteriors on canvas and paper? I would argue against any conception of Upper Deck in terms of a break in Sheeler’s aesthetic development (despite what Sheeler himself says). It does, however, mark a shift in consistency in Sheeler’s work, a shift that marks the artist’s middle and so-called most significant period. The experience of the success of the River Rouge works followed by rejection by the White Star Line – resulting in the production of Upper Deck – marks, I think, the apotheosis of Sheeler’s style. In short, Upper Deck is a moment of confluence where all the elements that had up to that point formed the productive basis of Sheeler’s works come together. So, photography and painting/drawing, abstraction and realism, the loss of the subject, the concentration on the ‘man-made’ world, and the ambiguity towards modernity and its effects find expression through an act of continuation, not the abandonment of these central tenets. James Maroney insists that Sheeler’s commission for German shipping company, the White Star Line, was probably more improbable a proposition than the commission from the Ford Motor Company. The owners of SS Majestic – which in 1928 was the largest, most luxurious passenger liner in the world – were far from impressed with Sheeler’s photographic prints. According to Maroney, Sheeler approached the subject, SS Majestic, in much the same way as the Rouge and yet employer and employee found themselves miles apart.63 The artist failed in any way to reproduce the splendour and the luxury of the liner and, clearly, the photograph of Upper Deck , (also entitled Upper Deck (c.1928)) does no such thing.64 It is not, as Maroney points out, ‘a picture of the ship or of its machinery per se’.65 The disparity between the image of the ship that the White Star Line obviously wanted portrayed and what Sheeler provided is more than obvious. Here was the most luxurious and modern vessel of its era, so enormous, in fact, and complete in its facilities that, just as the River Rouge was a self-contained industrial city, so the Majestic was ‘a floating town for 5200 persons’.66 There is a distinct aesthetic continuation in this work. Sheeler ignores the obvious: the sheer scale of the vessel, its luxury, its ability to travel at high speed, or the experience of ‘living’ on this most moderne of floating palaces. All the most salient advertising points of the ship are overlooked in favour of the genuinely overlooked. In the end, Sheeler focuses not on the quality of the cabins or the decks, the level


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of sophisticated pleasure that the liner offered the discerning Atlantic traveller, but ‘the power mechanism of the ship, its motors, ventilator stacks, and exhaust manifolds’.67 The ventilator stacks and exhaust manifold in Upper Deck could, perhaps, be described as the breathing apparatus of the ship, channelling clean air and expelling fumes.68 As with Sheeler’s River Rouge series, there is a fascination with a moment of transformation through technology; hence, the forge and Power Plant No. 1 at the River Rouge and, here, the external evidence of ship engines. Continuation rather than rejection of Sheeler’s past aesthetic is again evident. Moreover, when we compare Sheeler’s painting with the photograph that serves as its blueprint, continuation over radical change is at the fore. New York and Skyscrapers are the clearest precursors to one of the most obvious techniques Sheeler deploys in re-presenting the photographic image. What distinguishes the two images of New York’s Park Row Building from their photographic source, as discussed earlier, is the erasure of ornament. The details of windows and blinds, brick and other resident structures are in the main stripped of their defining marks and rendered through a formal abstraction that manipulates focus between realistic content and rhythmic formal construction. Sheeler’s oil, Upper Deck, engages in a similar attempt at seamless construction. The punctuating rivets of the photograph that follow line and curve, pinning the various structures together, are spirited away, leaving sheer straight lines and smooth circular planes. The strident distinctions in colour between the two Upper Deck images – the cool blue-greys of the painting and the more delineated contrasts between black and white in the photograph – can also be seen operating in Sheeler’s New York series of works. There is a progression, though, beyond the skyscraper depictions offered by Upper Deck, best examined through another constant theme: light. The notion of light as artistic material in Sheeler’s work was explored previously because, as Constance Rourke explains, light is as crucial an element in Sheeler’s work as are the objects under the artist’s gaze. In terms of depicting the machine, Fernand Léger most clearly explored the connection between light and representation in his essay ‘The Machine Aesthetic: The Manufactured Object, the Artisan, and the Artist’ (1924). For Léger: ‘Every machine object possesses two qualities: one, often painted and light-absorbent, that remains static (an architectural value) and another (most often bare metal) that reflects light and fills the role of unlimited fantasy (pictorial value). So it is light that determines the degree of variety in the machine object.’69 Léger’s observations on the machine hold true for both photograph and oil of Upper Deck. Shifting


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the emphasis of light in the oil painting from the stark photographic contrasts and into a range of sterile, laboratory-like colour produces a paradoxical effect. The grey-blues and purples that perform the roles of shadows never completely obscure where they fall; this is quite unlike the photograph, where, if not totally, the darker shadows to some extent hide areas of the deck. Moreover, the rivet-lined edges stand in relief and give texture to the smooth metal surfaces. Sheeler’s lightening of the scene sets up a definitive tension between preventing us from seeing, whilst peculiarly allowing us to see more. As Léger says, the architectural aspect remains static, and Sheeler’s engines are definitely that: light fixes them in time and space; there are no escaping gases, no plumes of smoke and hence no sign of movement, of progress, of this great machine powering the ship anywhere. And this leads us to Léger’s notion of reflective light, light that feeds a pictorial fantasy. Although not bare metal, the pristine surfaces mirror the colours in the sky, but the important aspect of the work lies in what Sheeler doesn’t allow us to see. The fantasy aspect of this image, following Léger, exists in this tension between the seen and the unseen. Granted, the clarity of the structures on the upper deck, with their architectural beauty, as it were, is unquestioned but where on the ship are these sterile machines? Where is the sea? Are these the only exhausts/funnels? Where are the passengers? On deck we have the breathing apparatus of mammoth 375tonne engines, capable of generating 64,000 horsepower, able to propel the ship at twenty-three knots. However, the technological wonder behind this power is hidden from view both under the skin of the ship and extended through Sheeler’s cropping and lighting of these external features. Breaking free from the composition of colour in the image and the smoothness of the forms themselves – a process that emerges from these elements – the interior blackness of the funnels at once adopts a function more familiar in windows in Sheeler’s work. As with the exterior windows in New York or Skyscrapers, or the interior windows of Ingot Molds, Open Hearth Building or the much earlier Doylestown House – Downstairs Window (1917), these ‘windows’ open into the heart of the machine – the ship’s engines – but offer no information as to the interior itself. The imperviousness of the funnels’ blackness and the reflectivity of the architectural surfaces, just like the opacity of Sheeler’s windows, sets up a series of dialectical relations evident in nearly all of Sheeler’s work: the tension between inside and outside, between movement and stillness, between realism and abstraction, between mimesis and


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expression. If the windows of the New York series ask us to question what goes on inside the office building, or what lies beyond the building in which the ingot moulds are sited, so Upper Deck reveals its relationships through formal experimentation combined with a strong emphasis on realism. Sheeler said of Upper Deck : ‘This is what I have been getting ready for. I had come to feel that a picture could have incorporated in it the structural design implied in abstraction and be presented in a wholly realistic manner.’70 Upper Deck possesses a ‘buoyancy [that] transcends severity,’ and the image manages to be ‘at the same time so simple and so complex’, an observation similar to Rourke’s comments on SelfPortrait (1923).71 In the last section of this chapter, I will argue that the River Rouge of the 1930s paintings, through the fusion of simplicity and complexity – an equation for ambiguity – continue the aesthetic development on which Sheeler embarked upon circa 1910. This continued development does not lead, despite criticisms of complicity with an industrial giant like Ford, to an unreserved affirmation of the machine age and the exploitative mechanisms of monopoly capitalism that lay behind it.

Repainting the River Rouge Sheeler’s reinterpretation of the River Rouge photographs in the 1930s presents a new set of critical issues, the first of which being the suitability of industrialism as a topic for modern art. ‘Modern works’, according to Adorno, ‘must show themselves to be the equal of high industrialism, not simply take it as a topic’.72 Adorno makes a crucial distinction concerning the role of technology and the industrial in modern art, a distinction that Sheeler’s aesthetic must be able to address fully if it is to save some semblance of autonomous critique from the commissioned images. For Adorno, ‘Art is modern when, by its mode of experience and as the expression of the crisis of experience, it absorbs what industrialisation has developed under the given relations of production’.73 From the outset, I think Sheeler’s paintings of the River Rouge, as a continuation of the techniques he had been developing over the previous twenty or so years, comprehensively respond to Adorno’s observation. It is through the various techniques of artistic production outlined in previous chapters, by which we can judge that Sheeler’s art, rather than merely taking high industrialism as a topic, is its equivalent. The Rouge represents the expression of the crisis of experience brought into being through the dialectic between mimesis and rationality, a dialectic


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that preserves the dissonance of the artworks’ forms through their arrangement in a precarious harmony. Another issue for the critical understanding of the Rouge paintings is the role of the artist and the construction of the technological work of art. For Adorno, the bias in the modern technological work of art necessarily drives ‘out the contingency of the individual who produces the artwork’, the self-effacement of the artist discussed earlier.74 In his view, ‘The same process that traditionalists scorn as the loss of soul is what makes the artwork in its greatest achievements eloquent rather than merely testimony of something psychological or human, as the contemporary prattle goes’.75 Following Adorno, the success of images such as those of the Rouge does not depend on individual genius but on the technological competency of the modern artist, which raises the content of the works above the purely subjective. It is important to distinguish how Adorno can question the photography in relation to the images of the culture industry and yet find the impingement of the technological in art at the expense of the individual as a positive aesthetic quality. Adorno’s reading of Schoenberg’s work is the key here, where the technological artwork actively disrupts the myth of autonomous subjectivity necessary for both the progress of art as art, and art as a means of critique. In light of these concerns, Sheeler’s paintings of the River Rouge are important because of their active immersion in the industrial, both in subject matter – the Rouge – and in technique – the painting of photographs and the abstraction of detail through repetition, reminiscent of the New York series. Despite freeing the commissioned photographs earlier in the chapter from the Adornian view of them as aesthetically derelict images in the service of the culture industry, questions remain. Much of the critical literature on the Rouge paintings views these works as positive representations of the technological utopia. This, of course, is anathema to Adorno. Therefore, Sheeler’s River Rouge series of paintings must be viewed anew in order to distil their critical perspective. What enables the technological work of art to move beyond the simple replication of the techniques of production is mimesis, which is not an attempt to make a copy of nature but to become like nature itself; a relationship based upon affiliation rather than domination. Nowhere is domination more apparent than in nature and the technocratic landscape. As a specific kind of landscape, the Rouge paintings present a compelling critique of the domination of nature under the auspices of monopoly capitalism and modernity. Thus, they refute any claims that they represent the technological utopia. Whilst art cannot provide a


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blueprint for what utopia would be like, art examines what our life is like under the conditions of modernity. The purpose of art, therefore is ‘to interpret this damaged life with sufficient attention and imagination to allow intimations of a possible, undamaged life to show through’.76

Sheeler’s Negative Utopia Adorno’s work on the industrial in art centres on artworks that avoid the direct depiction of the machine. Hence, Adorno observes: In many authentic modern works industrial thematic material is strictly avoided out of mistrust of machine art as a pseudomorphism. But in that this material is negated by heightened construction and the reduction of the material tolerated, the industrial returns with a vengeance, as in the work of Paul Klee.77

Obviously, it is not what Klee paints or draws but the techniques and methods that the artist utilises to produce the work that count. Interestingly, whilst Sheeler’s commissioned work of the Rouge does not always avoid showing the machine, as Adorno notes of Klee, the function of these machines is negated through their static or imprecise representation. The vengeful return of the industrial in Klee, which Adorno finds through its absence is, in Sheeler’s case, reversed; the machine’s presence is all important. However, Sheeler’s River Rouge paintings do not engage with machines at all, they concentrate upon the exterior of the industrial complex. The representation of the individual machine in isolation is superseded by the notion of the industrial machine as a totality. Sheeler engages less with the River Rouge of the Ford Motor Company (and their deployment of his commissioned imagery) and more with the River Rouge as the exercise in domination over the landscape and nature. This critique is exercised through the technical construction of the works, the subconscious exercise of mechanisation through the social production of art, which articulates the shift in emphasis in content through experimentation in form. The titles of two of the River Rouge paintings, American Landscape and Classic Landscape, highlight the relationship between form and content, and between realism and abstraction in the works. As landscapes, Sheeler’s River Rouge paintings represent a landscape of a very specific and unusual kind, which Born calls the technocratic landscape. The deliberate invocation in the works’ titles of ‘landscape’ situates them in a historical tradition of painting in art and, therefore, to a rigid set of traditional notions of form and subject matter that these paintings


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challenge, in common with Sheeler’s contribution to the still life genre. In relation to the specifically American tradition of landscape painting, where are the rolling hills or the deserted plains? Where are the cattle, the farms and the farm-hands? Where is the America of the American landscape tradition? On American Landscape, Troyen notes, ‘the painting represents the discovery of a peculiarly American vista’.78 Sheeler’s return to nature, the landscape, in modern art is problematic. Adorno’s notion that modern art is distinguished by its consistent abstraction finds no footing in Sheeler’s technical alliance of abstraction and painterly realism. Sheeler’s work is pitched somewhat against the Adornian grain. The balance Sheeler’s work developed between realism and abstraction was hard fought and, although the works retain a strong abstract element, they can in no way be associated with pure abstraction. Adorno’s analysis of modern art is biased towards abstraction and as such appears to preclude any direct reference to nature in the artwork. However, this is not the case: In order to express its contents art, and in the spiritual sphere not only art, must inevitably absorb the increasing domination of nature. However, it thereby also works surreptitiously against what it wants to say and distances itself from what it non-verbally, non-conceptually opposes to the increasing domination of nature.79

In many ways, American Landscape more than satisfies Adorno’s demand that modern art must address industrialism as more than a simple topic because the artwork fulfils all the criteria. Critics like Constance Rourke and Wanda Corn have consistently argued that Sheeler’s work is a sustained attempt at bringing a modernist set of sensibilities to bear on more traditional notions of American identity and American artistic traditions. However, Sheeler’s Rouge works cannot be simply equated with either replying to a call for a return to nature, or to traditional values in American art. Sheeler’s works are ultra modern in the Adornian sense: they engage with the socio-cultural abstraction of an industrialising America using those same techniques, transformed into a form of artistic production. Sheeler presents a wide-angled perspective on the River Rouge in American Landscape, a perspective that takes in the silos of the concrete plant (also prevalent in Classic Landscape) and the slag screen house.80 Two images from the Ford commission serve as the blueprints for American Landscape, Salvage Ship – Ford Plant (1927) and Canal with Salvage Ship – Ford Plant (1927) [Figure 20]. American Landscape, however, is not


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20. Charles Sheeler, Canal with Salvage Ship – Ford Plant (negative date 1927) Photograph, gelatin silver print Sheet: 25.4 x 20.3 cm (10 x 8 in.) Mount: 47 x 36.8 cm (18 ½ x 14 ½ in.) © The Lane Collection Courtesy, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

just a straightforward reinterpretation of these photographic images and is quite unlike Upper Deck or Skyscrapers – both paintings that, whilst manipulating aspects of the scene, nevertheless retain a direct relationship with the photographic composition. In this case, Sheeler chooses to do something slightly different. It appears that Sheeler has ‘sailed’ the hull of the ship up the canal somewhat to bring the buildings of Rouge under scrutiny. Whilst present in the photograph, these buildings are more distant and less defined. Once the perspective has been reset and positioned closer to the subject, the drama of linearity of the painted image is heightened. The power of this linearity is due in part to the effect of the shift in perspective between photograph and painting, one that results in a flattened sense of depth in the painted image. Whereas Salvage Ship retains the receding depth of field, a prevalent feature of Classic Landscape, American Landscape lacks the depth of the photograph. The linearity of line in Salvage Ship leads the eye in a way that evokes a sense of movement towards the end of the canal. In opposition to this, American Landscape appears to possess a static quality that resists this kind of movement, brought about through the retention of linearity combined with the collapse of the depth of field. However, a breeze blowing across the scene undermines the static quality of the image. Smoke from the stack suggests its direction, as does


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the posture of the figure on the tracks, bent as though walking against its force, and a white billowing tarpaulin hanging from the railroad crane above the rail trucks. American Landscape confronts the ideological domination of nature, which by extension becomes the domination of human nature, head on. Through the realist aspects of the imagery, the more traditional representation of the landscape – here a factory in the landscape – and formally through the construction of the work, the artwork expresses most clearly the deployment of technology as an end in itself. In American Landscape, the battle between humanity and nature appears over, nature is forgotten, and not a trace of it remains. Only the sky, the water in the canal and the breeze offer any signs of an elemental nature. But then again, the water is contained in a canal, which is in turn has controlled artificial tides using the locks of the waterway, and the sky is an open space into which smoke from the power house’s stacks forms clouds. Only the breeze suggests a force of nature but one inadequate to challenge the permanence of the River Rouge in the landscape. As Troyen notes, strong diagonal lines work to divide this picture carefully into organic and man-made structures.81 The dividing lines of the image act as identifying bands, setting out firm boundaries between the various elements in the scene, bringing together the man-made and the natural/organic in a dialectical relationship. These dividing lines set out a clearly defined dialectic at a standstill between technology and nature. Working from the bottom to the top of American Landscape, these boundaries can be separated out thus: • there is a fragment of the hull of the salvage ship, a man-made structure; • on the next level, water, a natural element; • above this, the canal-side and railroad, complete with rolling stock and heavy machinery, all man-made; • on the next level, mounds of grey-white and sandy-brown ores which take the form of miniature mountain ranges, suggesting a natural landscape and organic matter; • next are structures of the Rouge, all man-made; • and, finally, the last level, the sky. If, as Adorno states, ‘each artwork is a system of irreconcilables’, then why do these various stratifications in American Landscape appear to sit so comfortably together?82 The argument outlined in the previous chapter on the notion of harmony and dissonance in artworks is helpful here. As a collection of


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irreconcilable elements, the ‘man-made’ and the natural are forced into union both in reality – the technocratic landscape – and on the canvas. Sheeler’s artworks disguise dissonance through the production of (a tenuous) artistic harmony, and in American Landscape harmony is again an illusion that emerges from a background of dissonant material. American Landscape reflects the invasion of the natural landscape and its transformation through the technological domination of nature by the man-made. American Landscape is an example par excellence that ‘artworks organise what is not organised’.83 This work identifies the irrational at work within the rational technocratic landscape. The landscape as ‘nature’ and the Rouge as ‘culture’ come together in a seemingly harmonious dialectic, where the organic sits comfortably next to the man-made and the sky patiently waits to accept the innocent plumes of smoke that drift from the chimneystacks of the factory below. The rationale of domination is a force within the landscape, shaping and taming nature for its own ends under the instrumental guise of progress. American Landscape captures the essence of this relationship, revealing the perceived harmony between factory and landscape as a myth. The artwork reveals the contradictory harmony of this relationship and speaks for the organisation of society whilst violating the principles of organisation, revealing them to be an illusion. The artwork collides with the conditions of its own production. For Adorno, art is ‘the rescue of nature’.84 The technocratic landscape in Sheeler’s work is shown as a false reconciliation between nature and culture. The depiction of this spurious reconciliation enables artworks to hint at utopia, though negatively. As Jarvis notes: For Adorno it can be said that all authentic art is a mimesis of utopia – yet this mimesis can be carried out only negatively. Art cannot provide an explicit image of utopia. The possible ‘nature’ which does not yet exist can only imitated by the determinate negation of the falsely naturalised which does exist.85

The question is, can American Landscape or, for that matter, Classic Landscape or any of the other River Rouge images, be considered as non-explicit images of utopia? Following a brief exegesis of Adorno’s conception of utopia and truth content in artworks, I want to suggest that Sheeler’s works are more complex than maybe many commentators have acknowledged. Probably the clearest exposition of what utopia means for Adorno can be found in ‘Something’s Missing: A Discussion between Ernst Bloch and Theodor W. Adorno on the Contradictions of Utopian Longing’.86


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Adorno’s reticence to prescribe utopia is evident throughout the discussion. Adorno says, ‘whatever utopia is, whatever can be imagined as utopia, this is the transformation of the totality’. Adorno qualifies this by adding that what people have lost subjectively in regard to consciousness is very simply the capability to imagine the totality as something which could be completely different. That people have sworn to this world as it is and have blocked consciousness vis-à-vis possibility, all this has a very deep cause, indeed, a cause that I would think is very much connected exactly to the proximity of utopia, with which you [Bloch] are concerned.87

At the heart of Adorno’s thesis on utopia is the belief that ‘all humans deep down, whether they admit it or not, know that it would be possible or, that is, could be different’.88 However, this knowledge of the possibility of a different kind of world has depreciated over time. Bloch refers to the ‘very old slogan “that’s merely utopian thinking” reduced as depreciation to “castle in the clouds,” to “wishful thinking” without any possibility for completion, to imagining and dreaming things in a banal sense’.89 Consequently, to think utopian thoughts, or to even contend that the world in which we live might be different, is judged to be irrational or without basis in fact. The fundamental conflict is between the dominatory discourse of, in this case, monopoly capitalism, with its own hopes and dreams, and those of the likes of Bloch and Adorno, who seek to construct a mode of utopian thinking that breaks free from the domination of nature. Pivotal for the (negative) thinking of utopia is, of course, art and the artwork, but there is nothing straightforward about the relationship between art, the artwork and utopia. ‘At the centre of contemporary antinomies’, Adorno claims, ‘is that art must be and wants to be utopia, and the more utopia is blocked by the real functional order, the more this is true’.90 But in between wanting and needing to be utopia, art is unable – because of Adorno’s notion of determinate negation – to prescribe exactly what utopia might be. Adorno adds: ‘art is no more able than theory to concretise utopia’.91 In short, artworks that pronounce themselves as utopian or as offering a definitive vision of utopia, at the very same moment betray utopia by offering up the semblance (or illusion) of how the world might appear. For Adorno, this is anathema because the aesthetic image is included under the ban on the graven image.92 Providing an image of utopia is a consolatory gesture that fails to break free of ideology and which, in the end, reveals itself as nothing other than a placatory gesture directed towards the human sense that the world could be different.


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If the artwork is prohibited from portraying utopia directly, how, then, is the artwork able to communicate its utopian message? Adorno believes that ‘the greatness of works of art . . . consists solely in the fact that they give voice to what ideology hides. Their very success moves beyond false consciousness, whether intentionally or not.’93 Great artworks cannot help but reveal ideology and they do so without deliberate political motivation or partisanship. This revelatory moment Adorno associates with what he calls the redemption of illusion (or semblance) and it is a moment that communicates the work of art’s truth content. Truth content and the redemption of illusion are crucial in Adorno’s aesthetics, so it is worth extrapolating exactly how Adorno defines these aesthetic principles: The truth content of artworks is not what they mean but rather what decides whether the work in itself is true or false, and only this truth of the work initself is commensurable to philosophical interpretation and coincides – with regard to the idea, in any case – with the idea of philosophical truth.94

Artworks, like philosophy, are no more able to capture and reveal the totality of the real; instead, they are charged, like thinking itself, with the task of determinate negation. Arguing against ‘the illusion that earlier philosophical enterprises began with: that the power of thought is sufficient to grasp the totality of real’, Adorno proposes that ‘only polemically does reason present itself to the knower as total reality, while only in traces and ruins is it prepared to hope that it will ever come across correct and just reality’.95 Only through the determinate negation of details (traces and ruins) can thinking and/or the artwork reveal the truth content of reality. Jarvis summarises Adorno’s position thus: The truth-content in works of art, that is, points towards the possibility of a nature which ‘is not yet’; but it can only do this by determinate negation of what actually is. Although the truth-content of all authentic works of art points towards utopia, for Adorno, it can only do so by a configuration of materials which are historical, not timeless, a configuration which each work of art performs in a singular way.96

Art can only approach utopia through the negation of the present social reality – the existing – by appealing to the non-existing, the knowledge of the possibility that the world as we presently know it might be different. In order to keep sight of how these assertions relate to the work of Sheeler’s River Rouge works, I think it is important for clarity and continuity to reintroduce American Landscape and Classic Landscape [Plates 8 and 9] at this point. If American Landscape and Classic Landscape are utopian works of art, in what sense are they utopian? To be more specific, do American Landscape


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and Classic Landscape transcend the more traditional representations of utopian art, artworks that vividly portray a future world? Standing as another obstacle to the Adornian understanding of Sheeler’s works is the insistence on the redemptive or messianic moment in art and the artwork. Adorno maintains that ‘Aesthetic images stand under the prohibition on graven images’, thus preventing any artwork from straightforwardly depicting a vision of how utopia might appear.97 This assertion also has its roots in Adorno’s critique of those philosophies that insist that ‘the power of thought is sufficient to grasp the totality of real’.98 And yet, artworks must necessarily make some claim to wholeness, to the absolute.99 It is in this claim to wholeness, for Adorno, from which emerges the illusory quality of the artwork. As Jarvis notes, ‘Adorno admits that the work of art’s implicit claim to be more than a mere thing is an illusion . . . The work of art claims to be not a mere thing but something in-itself, an essence.’100 The historical and materialist basis of Adorno’s aesthetic thought is reliant upon the redemption rather than the liquidation of illusion, and it is only through the redemption of illusion ‘that it becomes possible to imagine freedom from illusion – to think as a materialist at all’.101 What binds art’s illusory character and art’s truth content is this redemptive tension, because ‘Art’s truth-content is accessible only by interpreting art’s illusory character, not by abruptly deleting or ‘demystifying’ that illusory character’.102 To demystify the illusion of art would be to foreclose the possibility of art and hence the possibility of utopia because ‘Art is a tour de force, a paradoxical artefact that brings into appearance what is not the result of making’:103 the something ‘more’ of art. In short, art produces a sense of, or the possibility for, the non-existing through the representation of the existing brought about through the social and technical production of the work of art. So, Sheeler’s depictions of the River Rouge not only confront the existing social and historical reality of monopoly capitalism, but do so through techniques art adopts from that which it seeks to critique, in this case, the instrumentality of Fordist production. To understand the mute language of art, however, is important if we are to get beyond questions of ‘what is it all about?’ and reach the more crucial line of questioning, ‘is it true?’.104 If, as Adorno believes, the truth content of the artwork is not external to history and is crystallised in the works themselves, the task of interpretation falls once again somewhere between form and content in the artwork.105 Whilst the material basis for interpretation exists in the content of the works, to search for the truth content here alone not only betrays the ban on the graven image, it also liquidates art’s illusory character, and thus precludes the possibility of


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the utopian moment. If we are to understand the mute language of art, we must, according to Adorno, look to form: ‘Everything in artworks that resembles language originates in form and is thus transformed into the antithesis of form, the mimetic impulse’.106 Sheeler’s River Rouge works take industrialism as more than a mere topic. Sheeler’s artworks have absorbed the processes of industrialism as artistic material, where the logic of the assembly line, of the system of exchange and instrumental rationality, are echoed in and through Sheeler’s formal experimentation. In taking the unique character of an object and transforming it into a representational and interchangeable subject, Sheeler’s work is in itself a model for understanding the concept of Enlightenment rationality: the domination of nature through the negation of difference or Otherness. That is, the River Rouge artworks adopt the logic of Fordism, the ideal of mass production and the utopian factoryscape, but never validate either. Instead, as socially produced artworks, historically engaged and charged, they form the basis of the determinate negation of Fordist totality: the River Rouge works, through their fait accompli, their double character of being both for and against society, articulate through aesthetic experience a dissenting line. Reading Sheeler’s work in terms of a dissenting line – questioning the underlying principles of society – goes against the grain of criticism that considers Sheeler as an artist glorifying American industrial modernity and developing an American identity contra Europe. Approaches fixated on the idea of the artist as genius, as the locus of all understanding of art, fail to comprehend the artwork in any concrete sense. Throughout this chapter it has been made clear that Sheeler’s commissioned works tread a fine line between being considered mere advertising fodder or art; in short, between commission and autonomy. However, both sets of images that Sheeler produced for Ford of the River Rouge and the later paintings derived from them engage in a complex way with the principles of modernity. For Adorno, ‘Artworks derive from the world of things in their performed material as in their techniques; there is nothing in them that did not also belong to this world and nothing that could be wrenched away from this world at less than the price of its death’.107 Adorno’s statements are able to construct a sound defence and thorough account of Sheeler’s ‘identification with the aggressor’. Such an identification with industrial modernity enables its critique, and in turn reveals the damaged life of the modern subject through the depiction of an imagined technological utopia.


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Chapter Six


When a painter faces his canvas he has, with every new work, problems to solve which are as old as the art of painting itself. If he has a style for which he is known, even famous, the problem is only intensified. Is he going to make a change in his style or go on developing it as before?1 William Carlos Williams The moment in the work of art by which it transcends reality certainly cannot, indeed, be severed from style; that moment, however, does not consist in achieved harmony, in the questionable unity of form and content, inner and outer, individual and society; but in those traits in which the discrepancy emerges, in the necessary failure of the passionate striving for identity.2 Adorno and Horkheimer

Introduction The clarity and coherence associated with Sheeler’s work of the late 1920s and early 1930s gradually splinters and disintegrates throughout the late work of the 1940s and 1950s. Few works of this late period match the harmony of form and content apparent in works of his so-called high period, paintings such as American Landscape or Home, Sweet Home. As I argued previously, most readings of Sheeler’s work, like that of Home, Sweet Home, make the mistake of taking the appearance or semblance of formal verisimilitude for an actual, concretised harmony of form and content. Criticism, from whatever quarter, would have us believe that the barely visible pull of formal dissonance is merely a game or puzzle in Sheeler’s work. It is neither. Criticism of Sheeler’s work settles too easily for these tenuous harmonies between form and content because they allow a seamless bridging between praise and criticism. For example, this allows, on the one hand, Milton W. Brown to argue that Sheeler’s greatest works are those that manifest the elusive ‘equilibrium between photography and painting’,3


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whilst, on the other hand, it gifts Hal Foster et al. the opportunity to argue that what is most regressive about Sheeler’s modernism is exactly this ability ‘to eliminate the interception of the medium’ between spectator and artwork.4 Both arguments supplement themselves via the role of illusion in the production of Sheeler’s work. Illusion operates as a guarantee of quality for Brown; for Foster et al. the illusory quality of the work, especially Sheeler’s work for Henry Ford, distinguishes itself as an insidious and instrumental naturalising of capitalist ideology. However, as I have argued, what distinguishes Sheeler’s work is the fact that the synthesis of photography and painting is always problematic. One cannot, and should not, for example, see either the River Rouge photographs or later interpretations as accountable solely to their status as products of the American culture and advertising industry. In terms of the late period, the interpretative narratives have always been narrow but, as I shall discuss, with successive non-reflexive reaffirmations of Sheeler’s continuing importance – the most recent being Charles Brock’s Charles Sheeler: Across Media – the artist’s late work appears to us as if seen through the wrong end of a telescope: distant and hard to pin down. Troyen and Hirshler argue that the problem lies not with criticism but with the quality of Sheeler’s late work itself, which ‘suffers from his repeated working of the same designs in different media’.5 In this sense, repetition across media distinguishes itself as a regressive rather than creative process; it constructs an image of the artist and his work as lacking inspiration, purpose or value. In essence, Sheeler has ceased to develop. However, I would argue that the problem lies less with Sheeler and more with criticism of Sheeler’s late work, which has not developed all that much since the artist’s death. In fact, criticism itself suffers from a repetition of the same old narratives drawn up throughout and after Sheeler’s career; most seem unable to advance a critique of the artist’s late work/late style much beyond a confounded reservation or as sentimental apology. In this final chapter, therefore, I re-examine Sheeler’s late period with reference to Adorno’s insightful writings on style in the late work of Beethoven, writings that address precisely the inconsistencies in the artist’s late work. Troyen and Hirshler propose 1931 as the year in which Sheeler’s vision reaches its highest creative point, calling it an ‘exceptional year for Sheeler’s development as a painter’.6 William Agee agrees, concluding that ‘there is no escaping the decline of Sheeler’s painting after 1931’.7 Both sets of critics attribute this to Sheeler’s dealer at this time, Edith Halpert, who convinced the artist to abandon photography because it


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damaged his reputation as a serious painter.8 But Agee, who considers Sheeler one of the least important of the American modernists, goes further in his criticism, claiming that Sheeler’s ‘post-1945 paintings are in the main tight and mechanical, turning late Cubism into something forced and unfeeling’.9 Written almost forty years before Agee, Brown’s ‘Cubist-Realism: An American Style’, published in Marsyas, similarly complains that the River Rouge paintings may have ‘popularised the industrial scene as a legitimate subject for American painting, [but] marked a turning point in his style’. Sheeler turns from an experimental mode to producing only work with ‘a condition of servility to the fact’.10 The summation of this kind of criticism has been the creation of a critical baseline against which one can judge Sheeler’s work. As such, it is possible to define Sheeler’s early work as a search or a quest, the pursuit of an individual vision or style; his late work/late style, however, becomes the opposite, regressive, introspective and meaninglessly repetitive: Sheeler’s late work/late style is a failure. Sheeler’s late work is visibly less original because not only do many of the paintings and drawings of this period replay old themes and ideas, but also because the ‘servility to the fact’ that Brown finds so objectionable is ever more apparent in the Power series – such as Rolling Power (1939) [Figure 21] – commissioned by Fortune magazine, or works such as The Nation’s Capital (1943). Here, Brown’s criticism of Sheeler’s ‘servility to the fact’ is amply qualified. Writing in 1963, Lillian Dochterman confirms that after 1943, Sheeler’s work is marked by a return to a ‘simplified realism’, a stylistic return reminiscent of the cubist-realism he pursued in the early 1920s.11 With works like Windows (1952), an old theme reappears in a new guise, overlapping planes of architectural façades with their emblematic height and rhythmic arrangements of windows. The connection between this work and Sheeler’s New York series is not difficult to see, reinforced by Convergence (1952). As a collage of contrasting architectural forms, Convergence is a work reminiscent of placing photographic negatives on top of one another, one of which is clearly the Park Row Building of the New York series. In all these instances, Sheeler sifts through his archive of imagery and recycles form and content through new and old modes of formal expression that combine in awkward compositions across media, including glass and plexi-glass. Any perceived awkwardness might be explained because our understanding of Sheeler, and, one might argue, all artists, depends upon an identifiable (and verifiable) unifying vision, one that conceptually bridges all aspects of his work: For Sheeler, this is Precisionism. As we have seen, critical analyses of Sheeler have constantly and consistently


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21. Charles Sheeler, Rolling Power – Power-series (1939) Oil on canvas 38.1 x 76.2 cm (15 x 30 in.) Smith College Museum of Art, Northampton, Massachusetts

compelled writers to use words such as ‘precise’, ‘cool’, ‘analytic’, ‘geometric’ or ‘emotionless’ to describe his works: a frosty vocabulary for wintry work. Terms like cubist-realism or precisionism might be helpful, but overall the price paid is the production of an unrealistic and genuinely unrealisable conception of a unifying vision in Sheeler’s work of the 1920s and 1930s. If we are to account for and then engage critically with Sheeler’s late work and late style, then a change in approach is called for.

Re-Imagining Late Style A re-examination of Sheeler’s late style requires us to reframe the limiting precepts of precisionist criticism. This calls for a re-imagining of the significance of late style in an artist’s late work; to do this I want to draw on Adorno’s writings on Beethoven’s late style. In Philosophy of Modern Music he argues: The maturity of the late works of important artists is not like the ripeness of fruit. As a rule, these works are not well rounded, but wrinkled, even fissured. They are apt to lack sweetness, fending off with prickly tartness those interested merely in sampling them. They lack all that harmony


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which the classicist aesthetic is accustomed to demand from the work of art, showing more traces of history than of growth.12

To frame Sheeler’s late work and late style in terms of decline and unoriginal thought at once evokes the hackneyed image of the once creative artist drawing from a dry well, floundering for inspiration. The ambition of youth obscured, if not forgotten, is relinquished by the older artist in the realisation that their life and career are approaching a terminal end: death. No surer sign exists that this is the case than the reappearance in an artist’s late work of familiar themes, images, forms, subjects and techniques. As already mentioned, Sheeler’s late work reiterates and reverberates with exactly these signs; his late period certainly shows ‘more traces of history than of growth’. Sheeler’s late work also oscillates more widely between abstraction and realism than at any other point in his career; in short, it lacks the mark of consistency and hence quality. Adorno argues that criticism of Beethoven’s late work concentrates too much on emphasising personality, in particular; an insistent identification of a breakdown in the artist’s late work as an outward projection of inner turmoil, which is nothing but weak biography. For Adorno, ‘late works are relegated to the outer reaches of art, in the vicinity of document’. The proper approach to an understanding of late work would be a technical study of the works themselves, one which ‘would concentrate first on a peculiarity which is studiously ignored by the current view: the role of conventions’.13 Conventions are central to our understanding of the creative artist because they define the work of the significant artist by their break with convention, which in turn helps institute another. But more than this, Adorno’s commentary also reveals the conventions in criticism of late work itself. The relationship between conventional criticism of late work and artistic convention can be framed more generally in terms of judgement about the quality of the work, often driven by the notion of consistency. The problem with late work is that at best it appears consistently inconsistent. Here the issue of inconsistency arises only because of the insistence on consistency, where the latter is essentially considered a critical prerequisite. In many respects, any artist who produces consecutive works of significance is, in the end, handing the critic a stick with which to beat them. Consistency represents the sublime moment in artistic production, the inspired endgame to which artistic growth necessarily gravitates, shaking off tutelage and finding enlightenment, a celestial convergence of magical and practical forces whose sum power is greater than its constituent parts. The artist, possessed by the spirit of


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this convergence, is seemingly able to command these creative energies and direct them at will. Remember, for Sheeler this all happened around 1931. Against this formidable formulation – which is a straightforward but impossible demand – inconsistency appears a weak and fractured body, broken and scarred, the artwork’s struggle for consistency too deeply etched in its forms to conceal. The gap between consistency and its opposite appear without consolation; accordingly, consistency and inconsistency are not dialectical. On late style, especially on inconsistency, if Adorno can offer the analysis of Sheeler’s late work anything, it is the insistence that it is a mistake to consider late work as mere subjective reflection on the imminence of an artist’s death. Against the model of the decline of the artist, and Adorno refers explicitly to the widely held conception of Beethoven’s output in his final years, he draws out the conventions of decline. The dying artist no longer looks forward but only backwards and inwards; overwhelmed by mortality, the artist maps a return to the past, a nostalgic journey, a return ‘home’, to the place from which authenticity lies. But consistency cannot be found in what once was the consistent element of the artist’s work, instead the artist seems bound only to regurgitate a series of critically ratified high points from the back catalogue. Sadly, late work bears only the slightest traces of the past and present historical moments, a path one can readily follow through the jagged terrain of Sheeler’s late work. Taking up Adorno in ‘Thoughts on Late Style’, Edward Said admits that it is easy to think of late works ‘which crown a lifetime of aesthetic endeavour’, and names Rembrandt, Matisse, Bach and Wagner as examples. ‘But’, Said continues, ‘what of artistic lateness not as harmony and resolution, but as intransigence, difficulty, and unresolved contradiction?’14 Take Ibsen, ‘whose last plays suggest an angry and disturbed artist for whom the media of drama provides an occasion to stir up more anxiety, tamper irrevocably with possibility of closure, and leave the audience more perplexed and unsettled than before’.15 This type of act on the part of the artist Said refers to as ‘unproductive productiveness’ or ‘a going against’.16 With this in mind, Sheeler’s late style deserves renewed attention, in particular, those works reassembled and reconstructed from imagery, forms and themes wrenched from earlier works. The question is this: is Sheeler’s late style truly a ‘going against’, as Said phrases it, or the flickering final moments of a redundant creative force? Distinguishing Sheeler’s late work in terms of the inconsistent or inconsistency, or, more harshly, as failure, has resulted in a weakened


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body of criticism, one reflecting the presumed weakness of the late work. I would argue that Sheeler’s late work receives considerably less attention because of a perceived brittleness in these works. What I mean by this is simply that, if handled without care, Sheeler’s late work will break into thousands of tiny pieces. Historically, criticism prefers to regard Sheeler’s late works as mere reflections of the subjective impulse, perhaps out of some kind of perverse respect. Consequently, late work is rarely analysed with any vigour and, as such, the language of precision, immaculateness or coolness ascribed to Sheeler becomes doubly important. Out of a misguided notion of ‘respect’ for the artist, late work suffers the indignity of merely existing as a sad end to a once productive career. It serves a function, but it is perfunctory, performative; it marks the slow descent towards a terminal end-point. There is something pathological in the avoidance of criticising Sheeler’s late work, one informed by a tacit acceptance that it is a poor relation to the work of his earlier career. One gets the impression that to subject Sheeler’s late work to criticism will only serve to cast a shadow over, rather than illuminate, the artist’s aesthetic or his career as a whole. The question remains, though: what, if anything, is wrong with Sheeler’s late work?

The Beginning of the End The catalyst for Sheeler’s most consistent period was a failure, to be precise two failures. Firstly, the success (one could and should ask: success according to whom and on what grounds?) of the commissioned series of photographs produced for the Ford Motor Company led to a period where Sheeler was unable to paint. Post-Ford, the artist’s ebullience – so apparent in his letter to Williams on seeing the Rouge as subject matter – stagnated, leaving him directionless. Sheeler’s second saviour came by way of another commission with the White Star Line in 1928. Sheeler photographed the SS Majestic in much the same way as he had the Rouge but this time his photographic interpretation was rejected unceremoniously. In the end, the company chose not to publish Sheeler’s series of carefully cropped photographs of the White Star Line’s newest liner.17 One has to wonder if the White Star Line actually looked at the artist’s photographs for Ford, because formally there are few, if any, differences. Without romanticising the situation, Sheeler’s rehabilitation began when he deliberately forced himself to paint a picture and the picture he painted was Upper Deck. As discussed in the previous chapter, Upper Deck is significant because it, arguably for both the artist himself and critics, marks a moment of


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22. Charles Sheeler, The Artist Looks at Nature (1943) Oil on canvas 53.3 x 45.7 cm (21 x 18 in.) Gift of Society for Contemporary American Art, 1944.32 Reproduction, The Art Institute of Chicago


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regeneration in Sheeler’s aesthetic. The calmness and precision of the high period works, which begin with Upper Deck, emphasise the diametrically opposed style of many of Sheeler’s late works: agitated, busy, confused. In Sheeler’s late period, works like The Artist Looks at Nature (1943) [Figure 22] or Lunenburg (1954) seem only to have an eye fixed on the past. Having previously shown how at no point in Sheeler’s high period does harmony truly prevail over form and content in the works, suggestions of collapse or regression are therefore insufficient and inaccurate ways to conceptualise the development of Sheeler’s late work and late style. One key problem with Sheeler’s late work is his continuing and purposeful – and therefore unsurprising – isolationism, a position the artist adopted from the very beginning of his career. Although not exactly an anonymous figure, underscoring Sheeler’s career is an impossible pursuit: the attempt to disappear. This manifests itself most obviously in his efforts to erase his mark from the canvas, but also in the discreet distance he kept between himself and other art movements. By adhering, perhaps clinging, to an aesthetic of asceticism, powered by a determination to pursue a dialectical expressive anonymity, Sheeler was as far removed artistically and intellectually as is imaginable from the emerging avantgarde art of the 1940s. In the 1920s, almost by default, Sheeler had found himself amongst those individuals shaping early American modern art: Duchamp and Dada spring to mind.18 One imagines Sheeler felt thankful that he was too old and too distant – artistically and geographically – from the burgeoning New York School that coincided with his late work. In fact, this distance is so great as to, on first glance, render Sheeler’s late work historically irrelevant. To see Sheeler’s awareness of himself as an outsider one only has to turn to New England Irrelevances (1953) [Plate 11] as evidence that this avant-garde artist of the recent past, no longer living in New York but in New England, saw the irony in his position. As an effort to pre-empt the description of the artist as out of time and past his best, nothing seems more relevant than the decrepit mills and decaying canals in this image. These structures – once augurs of utopian promise, offering America a prosperous future built around the principles of technological advancement and mass production – are shown here as out of date, condemned and representative of failure. But New England Irrelevances represents much more than the failure of Sheeler’s generation to secure the promised prosperity many found implicit in Sheeler’s Rouge works. The dizzying composition of New England Irrelevances is made up from images from earlier works, Ballardvale (1946) [Plate 10], The Mill


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– Ballardvale (1946), Amoeskeag Canal (1948) and Manchester (1949), and it is to this period I now turn.

From Ballardvale Onwards On the invitation of Bartlett Hayes, director of the Addison Gallery of American Art, Sheeler spent the month of October 1946 in Andover, Massachusetts. According to Frederick S. Wright, the result of Sheeler’s time in Andover saw what he calls a ‘big turnover’ in the artist’s style. Sheeler’s invitation was not to teach at the Phillips Academy but to ‘enter the environment, work in the lee of the museum and leave something of his behind’.19 In actuality, Sheeler photographed in and around the Phillips Academy – as was his usual practice – with the aim of producing a work that the Addison Gallery would acquire at some point after the visit. As Charles Brock notes, there was no expectation on Sheeler to produce a finished work by the end of his time in Andover. Sheeler began working with the photographic material that would form the basis of the work he would submit to the Addison Gallery trustees after he returned to his studio in Irvington-on-Hudson, New York.20 In the end, the trustees of the gallery purchased the painting Ballardvale (1946). Ballardvale, for Wright, is a work not too dissimilar to Upper Deck in its impact on the artist. Troyen and Hirshler, too, frame Sheeler’s residency in Andover, and later, in 1948, at the Currier Gallery, Manchester, New Hampshire, as providing ‘much needed relief from the listless subjects and tedious commercial assignments’ that the artist had been working on at that point.21 One has only to think of ‘Power: A Portfolio by Charles Sheeler’, commissioned by Fortune magazine in 1938, appearing in December 1940. Besides offering ‘relief’, they also invigorated the artist in offering a new subject. This subject came about as a result of Sheeler’s exploration of the Andover region and his discovery of the Ballardvale neighbourhood, with its abandoned nineteenth-century textile mills.22 Through these mills, the artist rediscovered, in part, inspiration to enliven the output of his late period. The significance of Ballardvale is that this particular image or aspects of it – the chimneystack, the arrangement of intersecting walls – begin to appear in subsequent works in various media. Much like the Park Row Building, which one finds appearing regularly in Sheeler’s late work, the architectural structure of Ballardvale haunts this late period. For Wright, The change is profound – unpredictable because creative; yet based on his earliest experiments, and therefore in character. Sheeler had returned to a


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freedom of means he had not allowed himself since the days of Church Street El. The late paintings are a fulfillment of first promise, and a lifework given to an insistence on fact comes around again to form the most basic fact of all. It is this new yet old grip on form which makes Sheeler’s more recent paintings a culmination. A cyclic movement, a coming full circle (so characteristic of man’s experience) can be a spiral in the work of the artist who returns to youth with altitude gained.23

Wright sees in Ballardvale a return home. But there is a tragedy in this return because Sheeler seems only to have gone full-circle and returned knowing little more than when he first ventured out. Wright might define these works as a culmination but his point seems to suggest

23. Charles Sheeler, Ballardvale Mill, Close Up with Raking Shadows (negative date 1946) Photograph, gelatin silver print Sheet: 25.4 x 20.3 cm (10 x 8 in.) © The Lane Collection Courtesy, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston


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otherwise; this is a practice unchanged by history. Rather than break with convention, Ballardvale seems only to repeat the past. Nothing in Sheeler’s formal play or use of colour suggests difference or change, only sameness and similarity. In essence, this is less process and more stasis. It is, as Adorno says, more about the traces of history than about growth. On these terms, Sheeler’s late style appears as a kind of navigation backwards towards to a point of origin – the fulfilment of first promise – a closing of the circle. Subsuming the late work/late style into a much broader and inclusive picture of Sheeler’s career manages exactly to repeat/prefigure the microcosmic conventional view of Sheeler’s individual works as pure and harmonious. Under Wright’s rubric, Sheeler’s late period sits rather comfortably amongst its precursors because it is a welcome return, a kind of home, sweet home, the reemerging spirit of Sheeler’s early work in a new and familiar guise: an homage to Sheeler by Sheeler himself. For all this, there is something about Ballardvale and the works Sheeler made at that time that is resolutely expressionless. This is because the Ballardvale series, as Troyen and Hirshler noted earlier, suffer from Sheeler’s ‘repeated working of the same designs in different media’. The Ballardvale series might well remind Wright of Church Street El, but the dynamism of the1921 painting is missing from these later works: they lack the interplay of forms, the subtleties of colour handling and disorientating perspective that actually draws the spectator into the image. Even the ‘Revisited’ works of 1949, with their inference of photographic montage, broader colour palette and more active composition, fail to agitate the viewer in quite the same way as Church Street El. However, it is this refusal on the part of these late works to stand in line, as it were, that makes their status all the more intriguing. Sheeler’s late work adopts the critical rhetoric of earlier accounts of his work to reveal what his work is not: what we now call Precisionist. The form and content of Ballardvale and related works become therefore a parodic play on the language of criticism. Here is the emotionless, expressionless work Sheeler was always supposed to have been making; here is the coolness, the precision and the geometrically accurate working of forms and content now known as Precisionism. Ballardvale is a work by the artist that critics envisioned in their writing and yet, in fulfilling their prescription, Sheeler’s work only nullifies it. One has to wonder how and why Sheeler’s late work, with its unruly denial of convention through the adoption of convention is so easily pacified. Unlike Said’s understanding of Ibsen, whose late work invokes anxiety and denies the possibility of closure in order to ‘leave the audience more perplexed and


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unsettled than before’, the unruly elements in Sheeler’s late work have been consistently bleached of their critical colours. If Ballardvale is a flat refutation of Sheeler’s perceived style, a careful dissection of the prescriptive critical literature through the act of making, then, contra Agee and his declaration that Sheeler is foremost a photographer, the wonderfully titled Counterpoint (1949) [Figure 24] stands as a tour de force. Considered as the artist’s ‘last great conté crayon drawing’, Counterpoint is a work in which Sheeler engages with his earlier art history – the scale of the work, his skill with conté crayon, compositional arrangement, formal experimentation – in a manner that is neither meaninglessly repetitive or subservient to earlier style.24 As important as photography is in Counterpoint, both for preparation and construction, this work quietly explodes Milton Brown’s combative analysis of the artist. Sheeler’s work is neither servile to the fact nor is it a finely orchestrated ‘equilibrium between photography and painting’. Such polarities become inadequate axes on which to judge this work. Compositionally, Counterpoint is at once deceptively simple and simply deceptive. Prefiguring similarly complex montage works like Ore into Iron (1953) [Figure 25], Aerial Gyrations (1953) [Plate 12] and New England Irrelevances, Counterpoint’s composition derives from the overlaying of at least two negatives of Ballardvale Mill (1946). The complicated arrangement on paper occurs because Sheeler places one of the negatives back to front, creating a mirror image that is at odds with itself. Troyen and Hirshler see in this combination of forms ‘a latter-day cubism, analytical and cerebral’, an evocative image of two- and three-dimensional space and forms, echoing his earlier work with Pennsylvania barns. In a similar vein, Ore into Iron and Aerial Gyrations combine the overlapping of negatives to produce intricate formal patterns, drawing out the abstract qualities of the industrial complex from the subject of the original photographs.25 Unlike previous re-presentations of industry, Sheeler excises the almost photo-realistic clarity of City Interior (1935) in favour of a disorienting formal composition, emphasising the intricate interrelation of gangways,

facing page 24. Charles Sheeler, Counterpoint (1949) Conté crayon on wove paper 50.8 x 71.2 cm (20 x 28 in.) Gift of Daniel J. Terra, in Honor of the 50th Anniversary of the National Gallery of Art, Image © 2007 Board of Trustees, National Gallery of Art, Washington


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25. Charles Sheeler, Ore into Iron (1953) Oil on canvas 61.28 x 46.04 cm (24 1⁄8 x 18 1⁄8 in.) Museum of Fine Arts, Boston Gift of William H. and Saundra B. Lane and Henry H. and Zoe Oliver Sherman Fund, 1990.381


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platforms and guard-rails with denser cylindrical masses. Centre top in Ore into Iron Sheeler deftly creates an impossible space where the latticing of guard-rails suggests solidity, safety and resolution, but closer inspection reveals their opposites. Pre-figuring Ore into Iron and Aerial Gyrations, Counterpoint, too, beguiles the viewer through an apparent geometric order, logical and sensible. But this is an image at once suggesting depth and volume sideby-side with transparency and the ephemeral.26 It lays structural forms one over the other to produce impossible spaces with, as ever, windows as reminiscent of transparent thresholds, the shadows of their forms working as pattern whilst offering walls only the impression of depth and architectural stability. The smokestack – centre or centre left in the original photograph and the Ballardvale series respectively – is now positioned to the right, its central column marked out in black, extending beyond the page, bathed in a vertical shaft of light. The progressive lightening in tonal resonance, from the greenery below to the faintly visible eaves of the mill’s gable-ends, and the predominant inverted funnel, a shaded mass that extends from the bottom of the image, finds its own route out of the picture – like smoke itself – via the smokestack, all pointing towards an inevitable end. Counterpoint exists precisely at the borderline of abstraction. The works of the high-period, Home, Sweet Home springs to mind especially, work much harder to hide this kind of formal dissonance. Sheeler’s late style – eclectic, purposeful, knowing – as well as no longer subject to the critical desire of ‘contemporariness’, is no longer interested in resolution because there is none to be had. This extends beyond individual works, too. Sheeler’s late work/late style is scattered, pulling in many directions; at times there is an irreverent flourish underscored with the flair of a virtuoso, at others, the work is sombre and staid. The late work is the factual, photo-realistic Power series of 1940 and the photographic commissions of the entire late period; it is also the metacritical Ballardvale and the irresolvable painted montages of Counterpoint, Ore into Iron, Aerial Gyrations and New England Irrelevancies. The term ‘late work’ might periodise the art that Sheeler produced toward the end of his life; it is, however, unable to secure the capitulation of this work to a reductive category such as Precisionism.


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Afterword

Charles Sheeler’s work is more than an ambivalent reaction to machineage anxieties, more than the art historical category Precisionism can account for, and certainly more than most critical readings are prepared to admit. Analysis of Sheeler’s work and practice has suffered, paradoxically, because of the desire to construct a particular kind of narrative to account for the history of American art. On the one hand, writing a history of American art from scratch, as it were, requires the canonising of certain types of art and artists, who in turn define their ‘time’ and, almost most important, America. With Sheeler, this has meant figuring him as an artist whose Americanness is absolutely crucial, a model readily attributable to Constance Rourke and one used countless times since. On the other, for some, the avant-gardism of pre1945 American modernism is somewhat lame in its assimilation of the principles of Cubism and abstraction, and even an embarrassment when compared with the art and artists related to the Abstract Expressionist movement and beyond. To some degree, of course, it is possible to concede that each argument has a point; there was a need to account for and narrate the development of American art, as well as the need to do so self-reflexively. However, this book has challenged the underlying logic of such arguments because – despite their ideological differences – both produce a remarkably similar effect with respect to Sheeler: a rather reductive and ideologically biased critique of the artist’s work and practice. Hence Sheeler is either, at best, ambivalent about modernity and its effects; or, at worse, an apologist for Henry Ford and the exploitative logic of monopoly capitalism. What this book has explored are the tensions that underscore Sheeler’s intellectual position, aesthetic sensibilities and working practices, aspects of his work previous critical accounts have overlooked. It has discussed how Sheeler’s work and practice negotiate the complex and, I believe, irresolvable tensions extant in the works themselves. These tensions manifest themselves as moments of glaring imprecision and

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geometric inaccuracy in form and content, somewhat surprising in the work of the pre-eminent Precisionist. Moreover, unlike previous critical readings of Sheeler, which have often overlooked or rationalised Sheeler’s imprecision, close study of these pictorial anomalies reveals that the artist’s work is far from ambivalent and certainly not an exercise in apology. Instead, following Adorno, Sheeler’s aesthetic is capable of producing a deeply negative meditation on American modernity and is in itself a serious reflection on modernist artistic practice in America. Of course, not all of Sheeler’s work is rigorous critique, but, as each chapter has shown, to conceptualise Sheeler’s work solely in terms of a machine age aesthetic or Precisionism has become an end in itself, adding little to either debates about early American modernism or the artist’s aesthetic development. Sadly, these critical approaches prevail and continue only to inspire the production of unnecessarily simplistic accounts of the artist and his aesthetic, as well as early American modernism more broadly. As a refined form of realism, drawing on ‘objective’ photography and cubist abstraction, Sheeler’s aesthetic maps the borders of abstraction, often – but not always – producing complex dialectical works in which inherent tensions collide rather than collapse. Here, the semblance of harmonious reality at work in the interplay of form and content seeks, but ultimately fails, to conceal a disharmonious or dissonant relation between them. It is in these moments of dissonance, of pictorial oddness or strangeness that Sheeler’s work deserves our fullest attention; rather than ignoring or discounting these anomalies we should in fact pause and consider them as fundamental to our understanding the artist’s aesthetic, the work and its historical context.

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Introduction 1 From Charles Sheeler’s unpublished autobiography cited in Lillian Dochterman, The Quest of Charles Sheeler (exhibition catalogue, Iowa: University of Iowa, 1963), 9. 2 Karen Tsujimoto, Images of America: Precisionist Painting and Modern Photography (San Francisco: San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, 1982), 23. 3 Dochterman, Quest of Charles Sheeler, 40. 4 Milton Brown, ‘Cubist Realism: An American Style’, Marsyas (1946), 139– 63, 144. On saying this, Brown’s argument here is one of surprise that the machine made nowhere near the expected impact on the American art scene at the turn of the twentieth century. 5 Dochterman, Quest of Charles Sheeler, 25–6. Chapter One: Musing on Primitiveness 1 Constance Rourke, Charles Sheeler: Artist in the American Tradition (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1938), 69. 2 Bridget Riley, ‘Making Visible’, in Robert Kudielka, Paul Klee: The Nature of Creation, Works 1914–1940 (London: Hayward Gallery, 2002), 15. 3 Benjamin H.D. Buchloh, ‘Parody and Appropriation in Francis Picabia, Pop, and Sigmar Polke’ (1982), in Benjamin H.D. Buchloh, Neo-Avantgarde and Culture Industry: Essays on European and American Art from 1955 to 1975 (London: October; Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2000), 343. 4 Buchloh, ‘Parody and Appropriation’, 348. In this chapter the emphasis is placed upon the appropriation of European discourses of modern art, namely those of Cézanne and Picasso’s cubism as well as discourses of American folk art, vernacular architecture and photography. Subsequent chapters will address Sheeler’s appropriation of industrial discourse. 5 Arthur Frank Wertheim, The New York Little Renaissance: Iconoclasm, Modernism, and Nationalism in American Culture, 1908–1917 (New York: New York University Press, 1976), xi. 6 Alan Antliff, Anarchist Modernism: Art, Politics, and the First American Avant-

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Garde (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2001), 12–13. 7 Barbara Haskell, The American Century: Art and Culture 1900–1950 (New York and London: Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, in association with W.W. Norton and Company, 1999), 11. 8 Christopher Lasch, ‘Mumford and the Myth of the Machine’, Salmagundi, 49 (Summer 1980), 12. 9 Calvin Coolidge quoted in William E. Leuchtenberg, The Perils of Prosperity, 1914–32 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958), 188. 10 Douglas Tallack, Twentieth-Century America: The Intellectual and Cultural Context (London and New York: Longman, 1991), 12. 11 The Seven Arts magazine was a small part of the Little New York Renaissance. From a more politicised perspective, another magazine, The Masses, with its editorial board of declared anarchists and socialists, such as John Sloan, Emma Goldman, and Floyd Dell, grew out of the same dissatisfactions. Cultural and political radicalism was at its height, particularly in New York, during this period where the Industrial Workers of the World and the Socialist Party attracted a considerable following and, in 1912, saw Socialists elected to public office. 12 Randolph Bourne, along with Van Wyck Brooks, Paul Rosenfeld, James Oppenheimer and Waldo Frank, were all on the editorial board of The Seven Arts magazine. 13 Van Wyck Brooks, ‘Young America’, in Claire Spague (ed.), Van Wyck Brooks: The Early Years, A Selection from his Works 1908–1925 (Boston, MA: Northeastern University Press, 1993), 169. 14 Van Wyck Brooks, ‘On Creating a Usable Past’, in Spague, Van Wyck Brooks, 220. 15 Wertheim, New York Little Renaissance, 115. 16 William Carlos Williams, ‘Introduction’, in William Carlos Willams, Three Painters of America: Demuth, Sheeler, Hopper (New York: Arno Press, 1969), 6–9. 17 Rick Stewart, ‘Charles Sheeler, William Carlos Williams, and Precisionism: A Redefinition’, Arts Magazine, 58 (November 1983), 100–14. In this article, Stewart highlights the formal similarities between Sheeler’s precisionism and Williams’s poetry. 18 William Carlos Williams, In the American Grain (Harmondsworth: Peregrine, 1971), 121. 19 Rourke, Sheeler, 79. 20 Rourke, Sheeler, 66. 21 Rourke, Sheeler, 116. 22 By the same token, Rourke’s defence of Sheeler is in itself another necessary and inevitable aspect of modern art’s history in America. Although J.M. Mancini identifies a historical precedent where abstraction in the plastic arts was encouraged by professional critics of the late nineteenth century, it remains difficult to ignore the problems facing American artists intent on


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pursuing new forms of expression outside of that dictated by the Academy. See J.M. Mancini, Pre-modernism: Art-World Change and American Culture from the Civil War to the Armory Show (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005). Tallack, Twentieth-Century America, 81. The Eight were: Robert Henri, John Sloan, William J. Glackens, George Luks, Everett Shinn, Ernest Lawson, Arthur B. Davies and Maurice B. Prendergast. Stieglitz’s group included John Marin, Max Weber, Arthur Dove, Edward Steichen and Georgia O’Keeffe. His ‘291’ gallery, situated on New York’s Fifth Avenue, was instrumental in introducing European modernist art into America. Stieglitz showed the work of Matisse, Cézanne, Picasso and Brancusi at ‘291’ between 1907 and 1917. For more on this see Wertheim, New York Little Renaissance, 113–30. Tallack, Twentieth-Century America, 81. For more on the problematical notion of the modern artist in this period with specific reference to the artist Robert Henri, see Allan Antliff, Anarchist Modernism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001) especially the chapter entitled ‘Modernists Against the Academy’, 11–38. Sheeler quoted in Rourke, Sheeler, 15. Sheeler quoted in Rourke, Sheeler, 14. Sheeler quoted in Rourke, Sheeler, 25. Sheeler quoted Carol Troyen and Erica Hirshler, Charles Sheeler Paintings and Drawings (exhibition catalogue, Boston: Museum of Fine Arts, 1987), 64. John Rewald, Cézanne in America (New York: Columbia University Press, 1989), 86, fn. 71. By 1911, perhaps in an effort to assuage this ‘shock’, Sheeler was in possession of a copy of Julius Meier-Graefe’s book on Cézanne, published in Munich in 1910. See Troyen and Hirshler, Charles Sheeler, 62. Johanna Drucker, Theorizing Modernism: Visual Art and the Critical Tradition (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), 38. Theodor Adorno, Philosophy of Modern Music (London and New York: Continuum, 2003), 68. Shierry Weber Nicholsen, Exact Imagination, Late Work: On Adorno’s Aesthetics (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1997), 16. Simon Jarvis, Adorno: A Critical Introduction (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1998), 184. The ‘primacy of the object’ is Adorno’s answer to Kant’s scepticism that we can ever know an object in itself. The importance of the thing-initself for Adorno is related to his idea of the non-identical, of the Other, that which resists identity. Paul Apostolidis, Stations of the Cross: Adorno and Christian Right Radio (Durham, NC, and London: Duke University Press, 2000), 45. Adorno, Philosophy of Modern Music, 68. Apostolidis, Stations of the Cross, 45–6.


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40 Apostolidis, Stations of the Cross, 46. 41 The full quotation reads: ‘The liberation of modern painting from objectivity, which was to art the break that atonality was to music, was determined by the defensive against the mechanized art commodity – above all, photography’, Adorno, Philosophy of Modern Music, 5. 42 Adorno, Philosophy of Modern Music, 5. 43 Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, trans. Edmund Jephcott (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2002), 95. 44 Theodor Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, trans. Robert Hullot-Kentor (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 5. 45 Lambert Zuidervaart, Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory: The Redemption of Illusion (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1994), 93. 46 Zuidervaart, Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory, 57–9. 47 Eugene Lunn, Marxism and Modernism: An Historical Study of Lukács, Brecht, Benjamin and Adorno (Berkeley: University of Californian Press, 1982), 232. 48 Although Adorno revises his relationship to the aesthetic aspect of Marx’s thought, he never abandons its central tenets: commodity fetish, alienation, reification, exchange and use-value, forces and relations of production all remain. Adorno, for better or for worse, also retains the ideas of capitalist development. Only the notion of a revolutionary proletariat is dropped as hopelessly outdated. See Peter Hohendahl, Prismatic Thought: Theodor W. Adorno (Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 1997), 155. 49 Apostolidis, Stations of the Cross, 32. 50 Theodor Adorno, ‘The Actuality of Philosophy’, Telos, 31 (1977), 120. 51 Theodor Adorno, ‘Society’, Salmagundi, 10–11 (1969–70), 146. 52 Hohendahl, Prismatic Thought, 157. 53 Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, 258. 54 Hohendahl, Prismatic Thought, 159. 55 Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, 232. 56 Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, 31. 57 Hohendahl, Prismatic Thought, 159–60. 58 Hohendahl is concerned to show that it is not so clear as to whether or not Adorno is using the term production literally or as an analogy. Adorno plays down the base/superstructure dichotomy in favour of the common ground of material and aesthetic production because ‘this argument allows him to claim that there are similarities between social phenomena and artworks which do not depend on causal connections or the assumptions of some form of Zeitgeist’, Hohendahl, Prismatic Thought, 163. 59 Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, 232. 60 Hohendahl, Prismatic Thought, 170. 61 Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, 184. 62 Hohendahl, Prismatic Thought, 172. 63 Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, 236. 64 Jarvis, Adorno, 120–1. See also Berman, who argues, ‘The work of art can


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offer the promise of autonomy in a world where everything must be good for something else’, Russell Berman, ‘Adorno, Marxism and Art’, Telos, 34 (Winter 1977–8), 162. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, 1. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, 255. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, 5. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, 259. Barbara Rose, American Art Since 1900 (London: Thames and Hudson, 1967), 87. The point being that Cézanne, in his landscape or still life work, neither dispenses with or completely reorders the structural form of the reality within the parameters of the frame in the manner of Picasso and Braque. One is able to distinguish an apple from a bowl, a tree from a mountain. Rourke, Sheeler, 66. Rourke, Sheeler, 65. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, 301–2. Douglas Cooper, The Cubist Epoch (London: Phaidon, 1994), 11. Cooper, Cubist Epoch, 11. Cooper, Cubist Epoch, 11. John Pultz and Catherine B. Scallen, Cubism and American Photography (Williamstown, MA: Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute, 1981), 19. Marius de Zayas was part of the influential ‘291’ circle of American artists and photographers – of which Sheeler was on the periphery –which gravitated around the central figure of Alfred Stieglitz. Pultz and Scallen, Cubism and American Photography, 20. Rourke, Sheeler, 29. Sheeler, quoted in Rourke, Sheeler, 59. See Karen Lucic, Charles Sheeler in Doylestown: American Modernism and the Pennsylvania Tradition (Allentown: Allentown Art Museum, 1997), for an excellent account Rourke, Sheeler, 30. Rourke, Sheeler, 31. Rourke, Sheeler, 41. Rourke, Sheeler, 68. Catherine Scallen, in Pultz and Scallen, Cubism and American Photography, 29 (my emphasis). See also Ellen Handy, who argues: ‘Although this barn is pure Americana, the photograph is coolly modern, as definite and architectonic as anything Mondrian was to paint in the next ten years’, Ellen Handy, ‘The Idea and the Fact: Painting, Photography, Film, Precisionists, and the Real World’, in Gail Stavitsky, Precisionism in America 1915–1941: Reordering Reality (New York: The Montclair Art Museum in Association with Harry N. Abrams, Inc., 1994), 44. Rourke, Sheeler, 70. Theodor Adorno, ‘Cultural Criticism and Society’, in Theodor Adorno,


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Prisms, trans. Samuel and Shierry Weber (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1981), 32. Adorno, ‘Cultural Criticism’, 31. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, 148. Adorno, ‘Cultural Criticism’, 32. Williams, Demuth, Sheeler, Hopper, 6. Williams, Demuth, Sheeler, Hopper, 6. Williams, Demuth, Sheeler, Hopper, 6–8. See Michael Löwy and Eleni Varikas, ‘The World Spirit on the Fins of a Rocket – Adorno’s Critique of Progress’, trans. Martin Ryle, Radical Philosophy, 70 (March/April 1995), 9–15. Troyen and Hirshler, Sheeler: Paintings and Drawings, 68. Troyen and Hirshler, Sheeler: Paintings and Drawings, 68. Rourke, Sheeler, 68. Alfred Stieglitz, quoted in Wanda Corn, The Great American Thing: Modern Art and National Identity, 1915–1935 (California: University of California Press, 1999), 299. Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1986), 30. Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project (London: Harvard University Press, 1999), 221. Sheeler, quoted in Lucic, Doylestown, 19. Bachelard, Poetics, 30. Bachelard, Poetics, 33 (emphasis in original). Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, 180. Lucic, Doylestown, 26. Theodore Stebbins, Charles Sheeler: The Photographs (Boston, MA: Museum of Fine Arts, 1987), 9. See Rachel Bowlby, ‘Domestication’, in Diane Elam and Robyn Wiegman (eds), Feminism Beside Itself (New York: Routledge, 1995), 76–7. See Lucic, Doylestown, 110; Troyen and Hirshler, Sheeler: Paintings and Drawings, 183–5. Sheeler, quoted in Rourke, Sheeler, 109. Rourke, Sheeler, 109. Bachelard, Poetics, 31. Rilke, in Bachelard, Poetics, 35–6. Bachelard, Poetics, 36. Bachelard, Poetics, 33 (emphasis in original). Esther Leslie, ‘Walter Benjamin’s Arcades Project’, at http://www. militantesthetix.co.uk/waltbenj/yarcades.html (accessed 8 August 2007). Berman, ‘Adorno, Marxism and Art’, 161. The phrase ‘sundial of history’ alludes to Adorno’s argument against the New Critics forwarded in his essay ‘On Lyric Poetry and Society’, in Theodor Adorno, Notes to Literature Volume One, ed. Rolf Tiedemann, trans. Shierry Weber Nicholsen (New


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York and Oxford: Columbia University Press, 1991), 37–54. 118 Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, 34. 119 Theodor Adorno, ‘Is Art Lighthearted’, in Theodor Adorno, Notes to Literature Volume Two, ed. Rolf Tiedemann, trans. Shierry Weber Nicholsen (New York and Oxford: Columbia University Press, 1991), 249. Chapter Two: A Photography, a Drawing and a Painting 1 Williams, Demuth, Sheeler, Hopper, 8. 2 William Carlos Williams, A Recognisable Image: William Carlos Williams on Art and Artists, ed. Bram Dijkstra (New York: New Directions Books, 1978), 146. 3 From this point forwards these three works shall be collectively referred to as the New York series. The photograph, New York, Park Row Building, is one of a series of contemporaneous photographs of New York: New York, Temple Court (1920), New York, Towards the Woolworth Building (1920) and New York, Buildings in Shadows (1920). 4 See Karen Lucic, Charles Sheeler and the Cult of the Machine (London: Reaktion, 1993), 53–9, for a discussion of these images. 5 See Rick Stewart, ‘Charles Sheeler, William Carlos Williams, and Precisionism: A Redefinition’, Arts Magazine, 58 (November 1983), 100–14. Stewart summarises the debate surrounding the validity of the term well and makes a strong case for retaining the category of Precisionism. 6 It is these latter attributes that have led may contemporary critics to portray Sheeler’s works as emotionless, see Karen Tsujimoto, Images of America Precisionist Painting and Modern Photography (San Francisco: San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, 1982), 24. Such views contradict those of Sheeler’s biographer, Constance Rourke and his friend, William Carlos Williams from the 1930s. In her biography of Sheeler, Rourke quotes Van Wyck Brooks’ protest that ‘great art is always impersonal’ to account for the appearance of the artist’s work. Likewise, Williams says, ‘Sheeler’s paintings are often spoken of as cold, but when a man is mastered, as he is, by an overwhelming reticence, his paintings are possessed by an emotional power hard to put your fingers on. It is always so with masterwork and the best of the paintings by Charles Sheeler are just that’, William Carlos Williams, ‘Charles Sheeler – Postscript’, in Williams, A Recognisable Image, 147. 7 The ethos of the machine age is best exemplified in Jane Heap’s article, ‘The Machine Age Exposition’, The Little Review, 11 (Spring 1925), 22–4, accompanying the exposition. Heap discusses how it is crucial that the imagination of the engineer and the aesthetic sensibilities of the artist be conjoined in order to transform the world through technology (read rationality and efficiency) and art (giving technology an acceptable face). However, Heap’s utopian vision appears rooted more in commercial acumen and the processes of capitalism than in the aesthetic imagination


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of artist, whose role is distinctly secondary to that of the engineer. 8 Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, 24. 9 Those artists often referred to as Precisionists, other than Sheeler, include Charles Demuth, Georgia O’Keeffe, Louis Lozowick, Niles Spencer, Preston Dickinson and George Ault. However, other than a series of visual similarities, these artists never imagined or conceived of themselves as a group or school of any kind. Any real affinity between Sheeler and the other artists said to be working in a Precisionist mode is limited to a certain artistic style. What does remain of interest is why so many artists, apparently working apart, began to produce work so stylistically similar. 10 In early 1927 Sheeler received a commission from the advertising firm, N.W. Ayer and Son, to photograph the Ford Motor Company’s River Rouge Plant in Detroit. The photographs were used to advertise what was then the largest industrial complex in the world. In 1930, the artist returned to these photographic images and used them as source material for some of his most famous paintings. These include American Landscape and Classic Landscape, the works to which Wolfgang Born refers. For a critical reading of Sheeler’s work for Ford and the images he made after the commission, see Terry Smith, ‘Henry Ford and Charles Sheeler: Monopoly and Modernism’ in Terry Smith, Making the Modern: Industry, Art and Design in America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993). 11 Lucic’s Charles Sheeler and the Cult of the Machine remains a key text on Sheeler and, whilst critical of the notion of Precisionism, the book still maintains that the most important influence on Sheeler and his work is the machine/machine age. It is worth noting again that Lucic’s other key work, Charles Sheeler in Doylestown, is much less concerned with the machine. Miles Orvell expressly discusses Sheeler in ‘The Artist Looks at the Machine: Whitman, Sheeler and American Modernism’, Miles Orvell, After the Machine: Visual Arts and the Erasing of Cultural Boundaries (Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 1995), 3–27. Here, Sheeler’s aesthetic is seen as wholly concerned with the machine: an argument that I believe is based on a narrow view of his artistic output (a point that can also be made of Wolfgang Born’s reading of Sheeler). Additional problems arise with Orvell’s analysis when it becomes clear that it is too concerned in tradition making (Whitman through Stieglitz to Sheeler as American moderns) and not particularly interested in responding critically to Sheeler’s work itself. Furthermore, throughout the chapter there is an uncritical use of and reliance on the notion of Precisionism as something that existed as a tangible set of beliefs and interests shared by Sheeler and other so-called Precisionist artists. In interviews with Michael Fried in the late 1950s, held in the Smithsonian, Sheeler makes it clear that at no time did he or any of the other Precisionists conceive of themselves as a group with a shared aesthetic vision or approach. In the recent past, only James H. Maroney has tried to break free from categorising Sheeler’s work as ‘machine age’.


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Maroney reasons that art historians have been too quick ‘to codify Sheeler’s work from 1927 to 1939 as machine age’, which he sees as an unreflexive impulse that is ‘bound, even when the evidence won’t support them, to supply machine-age motives for his [Sheeler’s] earlier work’. There are issues with Maroney’s own approach to Sheeler’s work that I discuss in later chapters, but suffice it to say that, whilst problematic, Maroney’s work represents a shift away from previous interpretations. See James H. Maroney, ‘Charles Sheeler Reveals the Machinery of His Soul’, American Art, 13:2 (Summer 1999), 27–8. For more on the construction, appearance, and critical reception of the Park Row Building, see Sarah Bradford Landau and Carl Condit, Rise of the New York Skyscraper 1865–1913 (New Haven, CT, and London: Yale University Press, 1996), 255–6. Louis H. Sullivan, ‘The Tall Building Artistically Considered’, in Louis H. Sullivan, Kindergarten Chats and Other Writings (New York: The Gallery Press, 1965), 206 (my emphasis). Sullivan, ‘Tall Building Artistically Considered’, 206. Merrill Schleier, The Skyscraper in American Art 1890–1931 (New York: Da Capo Press, 1986), 81. Schleier, Skyscraper in American Art, 78. Schleier, Skyscraper in American Art, 78. Schleier, Skyscraper in American Art, 78. Troyen and Hirshler, Sheeler: Paintings and Drawings, 85. Paul Strand’s most famous commentary on his photographic work is ‘Photography and the New God’, in Alan Trachtenberg (ed.), Classic Essays on Photography (New Haven, CT: Leete’s Island Books), 141–51. Corn, Great American Thing, 183. Ben Andrews, ‘Visuality in Modern Manhattan, 1920–1931’ (PhD thesis, University of Nottingham, 2000), 172. Andrews, ‘Visuality in Modern Manhattan’, 173. Lucic, Charles Sheeler and the Cult of the Machine, 51. Lucic, Charles Sheeler and the Cult of the Machine, 51. Landau and Condit, Rise of the New York Skyscraper, 252. Landau and Condit, Rise of the New York Skyscraper, 255. Cited in Landau and Condit, Rise of the New York Skyscraper, 255–6. I am limiting myself to the New York series because there is insufficient space to extend the argument to include Sheeler’s work as a whole. It is worth saying here that other images Sheeler produced during 1919–26 are as imprecise as the examples I use here. For example, see the lithograph, Delmonico Building (1926) and again study the imprecise rendering of architectural detail, especially windows, compared with the extremely precise lines of the building itself. The exceptionalist tendencies to which I refer can be identified in the desire by Williams and Rourke (amongst others) to contextualise Sheeler’s art and


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the criticism thereof as rooted in an American sensibility; a sensibility that recent American Studies criticism has ascribed mythological. Both Williams and Rourke claim that Sheeler’s talent lay in his ability to synthesise American artistic tradition with European modernism to produce an artistic form/style of painting that was rooted in the reality of early twentiethcentury America. Accordingly, Sheeler’s work is a pure reflection on the true experience of America and their criticism the identification of the truth of such an American experience. Although it remains important to maintain an awareness of this vein of exceptionalism running through the work of Rourke and Williams, I think it would be a mistake to reject their insights into Sheeler’s work on this basis alone. It is arguable that Williams and Rourke’s critical understandings of Sheeler and his work remains unsurpassed. Rourke, Sheeler, 65. Victor Burgin (ed.), Thinking Photography (London: Macmillan, 1982), 9 (emphasis in original). Burgin, Thinking Photography, 11. Susan Fillin-Yeh, The Technological Muse (exhibition catalogue, New York: Katonah Museum of Art, 1990), 15. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, 148. Maroney, ‘Charles Sheeler Reveals the Machinery of his Soul’, 36. Burgin, Thinking Photography, 11. Lucic, Charles Sheeler and the Cult of the Machine, 52. This does raise questions, which are addressed later in the book, as to why Sheeler’s work slowly becomes less and less abstract throughout the 1920s. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, 61. Burgin, Thinking Photography, 9. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, 232. Adolf Loos, ‘Ornament and Crime’ (1908), in Ludwig Münz and Gustav Künstler, Adolf Loos: Pioneer of Modern Architecture (London: Thames and Hudson, 1966), 226–7. Louis H. Sullivan, ‘Ornament in Architecture’ in Sullivan, Kindergarten Chats, 187. Frank Lloyd Wright, ‘The Art and Craft of the Machine’, in Patrick J. Meehan (ed.), Truth Against the World: Frank Lloyd Wright Speaks for an Organic Architecture (New York: Wiley, 1987), 71–2. Sullivan, ‘Ornament in Architecture’, 188. Sullivan, ‘Ornament in Architecture’, 189. Wright, ‘The Art and Craft of the Machine’, 72 (emphasis in original). Cecelia Tichi, Shifting Gears: Technology, Literature, Culture on Modernist America (Chapel Hill and London: University of North Carolina Press, 1987), 133. Veblen’s views are substantiated by the experiences of his youth, and his break with Marxist orthodoxy on the source of class


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antagonism enables him to shift away from any conception of a proletarian revolution and, instead, toward a technical revolution. At the heart of Veblen’s writing was the belief that social change must necessarily follow technological innovation. In a similar vein, Adorno also distances himself from Marx on exactly the same issue – the possibility of proletarian revolution – but, unlike Veblen, Adorno’s work is marked by a perpetual scepticism of a purely positive relationship between enlightened progress and technology. Veblen, on the other hand, does not share Adorno’s reticence because powering technological changes are the enlightened league of ‘engineers, scientists, technicians and industrial workers’ with whom Veblen so closely allies himself and in whom he places so much confidence. See Theodor Adorno, ‘Progress’, in Theodor Adorno, Critical Models: Interventions and Catchwords, trans. Henry W. Pickford (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998), 143–60. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, 61. Paul Strand, quoted in Orvell, After the Machine, 11. Orvell, After the Machine, 11. John A. Kouwenhoven, The Arts in Modern American Civilisation (New York: Norton Library, 1967), 1. Kouwenhoven, Arts in Modern American Civilisation, 2. John F. Kasson, Civilising the Machine: Technology and Republican Values in America 1776–1900 (New York: Grossman, 1976), 147. Heap, ‘Machine Age Exposition’, 22. Heap, ‘Machine Age Exposition’, 22. Siegfried Giedion, Mechanisation Takes Command (New York: Oxford University Press, 1948), 38. Giedion, Mechanisation, 38. Giedion, Mechanisation, 38–9. Thorstein Veblen, The Theory of the Leisure Class: An Economic Study of Institutions (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1924), 349. Theodor Adorno, ‘Veblen’s Attack on Culture’, in Adorno, Prisms, 76. Adorno, ‘Veblen’s Attack’, 79. Tichi, Shifting Gears, 64. Kasson, Civilising the Machine, 155. Kasson, Civilising the Machine, 158. Kasson, Civilising the Machine, 160. Kasson, Civilising the Machine, 154. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, 54. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, 263. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, 60. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, 60. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, 55. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, 57–8.


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Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, 58. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, 44. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, 44. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, 44. Thomas A. Leeuwen, The Skyward Trend of Thought: The Metaphysics of the American Skyscraper (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1988), 28. Sullivan, Kindergarten Chats, 202; Wright, ‘The Art and Craft of the Machine’, 93. Adorno and Horkheimer Dialectic, 120. Rosalind Krauss, The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other Modernist Myths (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1987), 10. Richard Sennett, The Conscience of the Eye: The Design and Social Life of Cities (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1990), 12. Sennett, Conscience of the Eye, 12. Sennett, Conscience of the Eye, 13. Sennett, Conscience of the Eye, 13 (my emphasis). Sennett, Conscience of the Eye, 15. Sennett, Conscience of the Eye, 47. Leeuwen, Skyward Trend of Thought, 39. As Douglas Tallack notes in his essay ‘Accident and Exigency’, Hybridity, 1: 1 (2001), 105–25, this fate also befalls Sheeler’s Church Street El and denies the works their status as modern art. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, 55.

Chapter Three: The Disappearing Subject 1 Georg Simmel, ‘The Sociology of the Senses’, in Georg Simmel et al., Essays on Sociology, Philosophy and Aesthetics, ed. Kurt H. Wolff (New York: Harper Row, 1965), 112–13. 2 Georg Simmel, ‘The Aesthetic Significance of the Face’, in Simmel, Essays on Sociology, Philosophy and Aesthetics, 278. 3 For a more biographical account of this image, see Troyen and Hirshler, Sheeler: Paintings and Drawings, 96. 4 Audubon 451- has been confirmed as Sheeler’s own telephone number, although this is not literally correct; see Troyen and Hirshler, Sheeler: Paintings and Drawings, 96. On closer examination, there is an extra digit to the telephone number obscured by the mouthpiece of the telephone. 5 Troyen and Hirshler, Sheeler: Paintings and Drawings, 96. 6 Adorno’s argument is everywhere evident in works entitled ‘Untitled’. 7 See Dickran Tashjian, Skyscraper Primitives: Dada and the American AvantGarde, 1910–1925 (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1975), 21– 6. 8 Shierry Weber Nicholsen, Exact Imagination, Late Work: On Adorno’s Aesthetics, (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1997), 112 9 Karen Lucic has pointed out with respect to my observation that Self-Portrait


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(1923) eventually becomes the work’s permanent title and that Adorno is more then likely referring to the raft of post-1940s works that, although given the title ‘Untitled’, remain untitled. I agree, but what interests me here is the shifting relationship between work and title, and the shifting meanings and interpretations that exist before Self-Portrait becomes permanent. Theodor Adorno, Negative Dialectics, trans. E. B. Ashton (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1973), 162. Theodor Adorno, ‘Titles’, in Adorno, Notes to Literature Volume Two, 3–11. Adorno, ‘Titles’, 4. Adorno, ‘Titles’, 4. Adorno, ‘Titles’, 4–5. Martin Jay, Force Fields: Between Intellectual History and Cultural Critique (London and New York: Routledge, 1993), 2. Jay, Force Fields, 3. Nicholsen, Exact Imagination, 123. Rourke, Sheeler, 95. Sheeler’s drawing is linked in particular with Francis Picabia’s ‘mechanomorphic’ portraits (of which Here, This is Stieglitz Here (Ici c’est ici Stieglitz) (1915) [Figure 9] – a mechanomorphic portrait of Alfred Stieglitz – is the most well-known). Picabia produced five mechanical portraits whose subjects were: Alfred Stieglitz, Agnes Ernst Meyer (a wealthy art collector), Marius de Zayas (owner of the Modern Gallery) and Paul Haviland (a wealthy art collector, author and photographer). Rather than straightforward equations of each individual with a machine, Picabia’s machinist representations are nuanced interpretations of each of his subjects. These works were entitled respectively: Here, This is Stieglitz Here (Ici c’est ici Stieglitz), The Saint of Saints/This is a Portrait About Me (Le Saint des saints/C’est de moi qu’il s’agit dans ce portrait), Portrait of a Young American Girl in a State of Nudity (Portrait d’une jeune fille américaine dans l’état de nudité); De Zayas! De Zayas!; and Here is Haviland (Voilà Haviland). All ‘mechanomorphs’ appeared in a special six-page foldout in the July/ August 1915 issue of 291; see Francis M. Naumann, New York Dada 1915–23 (New York: Harry N. Abrams, Inc., 1994), 60–1. Tashjian, Skyscraper Primitives, 225. For example, the titles of Side of White Barn, Barn Abstraction, and the New York series (New York, Park Row Building, Offices (1920) and Skyscrapers) have more of a naming function. In general, these titles are used to redeem the more representational or realistic elements of the artworks despite the more formal qualities of abstraction employed. Rourke, Sheeler, 95. Here, Rourke omits to say who considered the telephone an unfit subject and is perhaps overstating the case with regard to Sheeler’s depiction of a telephone. Other artists had included the telephone on their work many years before Sheeler, including his close friend, Morton


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Schamberg in Telephone (1916). 23 Susan Fillin-Yeh, ‘Charles Sheeler’s 1923 Self-Portrait’, Arts Magazine, 52 (January 1978), 106. 24 Tashjian, Skyscraper Primitives, 206. 25 Lucic, Charles Sheeler and the Cult of the Machine, 120, 26 Alan Trachtenberg, The Incorporation of America: Culture and Society in the Gilded Age (New York: Hill and Wang, 1982), 38. 27 Trachtenberg, Incorporation of America, 61. In the chapter ‘Mechanisation Takes Command’, Trachtenberg traces the development of the impact of the machine on the psyche of America. The power of the railroad owners first accounted for America being divided into four ‘time zones’ because of the desire for standardised time. The result of this was the reduction of space to time. 28 Troyen and Hirshler, Sheeler: Paintings and Drawings, 96. 29 Susan Fillin-Yeh, ‘Charles Sheeler’s Rolling Power’, in Susan Danly and Leo Marx (eds), The Railroad in American Art: Representations of Technological Change (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1988), 150. 30 Williams, Recognisable Image, 146. Here Williams notes Sheeler’s interest in photography and its incorporation into the artist’s aesthetic practice. 31 See Theodore Stebbins, ‘Bucks County, 1917’ and ‘Film Making’, in Theodore E. Stebbins, Jr and Norman Keyes, Jr, Charles Sheeler: The Photographs (Boston, MA: Museum of Fine Arts, 1987), 8–23. 32 See Sheeler’s commissioned photographs of Henry Ford’s River Rouge Plant (1926) and his later paintings Classic Landscape and American Landscape. Compare also the photograph New York, Park Row Building, with the drawing Offices and the oil Skyscrapers. 33 Lucic, Charles Sheeler and the Cult of the Machine, 118. 34 Walter Benjamin, ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’, in Walter Benjamin, Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn (London: Fontana, 1992), 211–44. Hereafter cited in the text as ‘Artwork’ essay. 35 Lucic, Charles Sheeler and the Cult of the Machine, 136. 36 Nicholsen, Exact Imagination, 217. 37 Nicholsen, Exact Imagination, 218. 38 Without replaying the intricacies of this complex argument, it perhaps worth noting that, for Nicholsen, what divides the two on the issue of the ‘Artwork’ essay is a difference in philosophical emphasis, not a difference of philosophical position. 39 Benjamin, ‘Artwork’, 223. 40 Nicholsen, Exact Imagination, 187. 41 Sheeler, quoted in Rourke, Sheeler, 144. 42 Sheeler, quoted in Rourke, Sheeler, 144. 43 Rourke, Sheeler, 188. 44 Troyen and Hirshler, Sheeler: Paintings and Drawings, 96.


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45 Troyen and Hirshler, Sheeler: Paintings and Drawings, 96. 46 Simmel, ‘Aesthetic Significance of the Face’, 277. Reading Simmel’s ideas on the aesthetic significance of the face in terms of various elements held together in a meaningful relationship, it is difficult not to recall the Benjaminian and Adornian concept of the constellation. 47 Walter Benjamin, ‘Franz Kafka: On the Tenth Anniversary of his Death’, in Benjamin, Illuminations, 115. 48 Nicholsen, Exact Imagination, 188. 49 Nicholsen, Exact Imagination, 189. 50 Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, 79. 51 Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, 244. 52 Theodor Adorno, ‘Notes on Kafka’, in Adorno, Prisms, 253. 53 Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, 230. 54 Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, 230. 55 Adorno, quoted in Nicholsen, Exact Imagination, 40. 56 Nicholsen, Exact Imagination, 22. 57 Michael Cahn, ‘Subversive Mimesis: Theodor W. Adorno and the Modern Impasse of Critique’, in Mihai Spariosu, Mimesis in Contemporary Theory: An Interdisciplinary Approach: Volume I (Philadelphia: John Benjamin, 1984), 31. 58 Cahn, ‘Subversive Mimesis’, 63, fn. 44. 59 Zuidervaart, Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory, 168. 60 Cahn, ‘Subversive Mimesis’, 33. 61 Cahn, ‘Subversive Mimesis’, 34. 62 G. Gebauer and C. Wulf, Mimesis, Culture, Art, Society, trans. Don Reneau (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985), 286. 63 Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, 117. 64 Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, 41–2. 65 Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, 176. 66 Jarvis, Adorno, 122. Chapter Four: Is it Still Life? 1 Benjamin, The Arcades Project, 220–1. 2 Agnes Heller, ‘Where Are we at Home?’, Thesis Eleven, 41 (1995), 1–18, 2. 3 Papastergiadis, ‘The Home in Modernity’, Excavating Modernism, ed. Alex Coles (London: BACKless Books, 1996), 97. 4 Christopher Reed, (ed.) Not At Home: The Suppression of Domesticity in Modern Art and Architecture (London: Thames and Hudson, 1996), 7. 5 Reed, Not At Home, 7. 6 See Bowlby, ‘Domestication’, 76–7. 7 Wanda Corn, ‘Home, Sweet Home’. in Corn, Great American Thing, 298–9. 8 See View of New York (1931), which contains a ‘safari’ chair by Kaare Klint and Portrait (Katherine) (1932), where Sheeler’s first wife, Katherine, sits in Breuer’s ‘Wassily’ chair. According to Troyen and Hirshler, Sheeler: Paintings


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and Drawings, 146, it was possible that Sheeler owned the definitive model of the chair produced by Breuer in his studio at the Bauhaus in 1927–8, as he was a great admirer of Shaker furniture and artefacts, as well as more contemporary design, including pieces of furniture by Marcel Breuer and Kaare Klint. Susan Fillin-Yeh, Charles Sheeler: American Interiors (exhibition catalogue, New Haven, CT: Yale University Art Gallery, 1987), 12–13. Sheeler in Rourke, Charles Sheeler, 136. Walter Benjamin, ‘Unpacking my Library: A Talk About Book Collecting’, in Benjamin, Illuminations, 62. Benjamin, ‘Unpacking’, 62. As Derrida notes, ‘The archivization process produces as much as it records the event. This is our political experience of the so-called news media’ (Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression, trans. Eric Prenowitz (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 17) and is best exemplified by news media endlessly re-showing of the images of the two planes hitting the World Trade Center on 11 September 2001. The point of this kind of repetition works on many levels, which of course I cannot discuss here, but edited film clips of the two crashes that present them as though they occurred within seconds of each other is not at all the truth of the ‘event’. Derrida, Archive, 15 (emphasis in original). Virilio echoes this Derridan concern when he says that ‘the idea of a prosthesis takes on a visionary character. It’s no longer “I speak for you” but “I see for you’’’ (Paul Virilio, The Third Window in C Schneider and Brian Wallis (eds.), Global Television (New York and Cambridge, MA: Wedge Press and MIT Press, 1988), 187). Derrida, Archive, 11. See Lucic, Doylestown, 18–19. Charles Brock, Charles Sheeler: Across Media (exhibition catalogue, National Gallery of Art, Washington, Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press, 2006), 163–4. Rick Stewart, ‘Charles Sheeler, William Carlos Williams, and Precisionism: A Redefinition’, Arts Magazine, 58 (November 1983), 104. This is not to suggest that the artist’s still life work goes without critical comment (for example, see Lucic’s Charles Sheeler and the Cult of the Machine, or Troyen and Hirshler, Sheeler: Paintings and Drawings). See Maroney, ‘Charles Sheeler Reveals the Machinery of his Soul’. Theodor Adorno, Minima Moralia: Reflections from Damaged Life (London: Verso, 1997), 50. see Brown, ‘Cubist-Realism: An American Style’, 138–69. Brown’s essay is a broad articulation of the reception and impact of Cubism on America and American artists. According to Brown, cubist-realism ‘was a recognisable and influential American style. In it, an attempt was made to impart to all matter a sense of fundamental mass, clarity and precision. Ornament


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as such was eliminated, as were the peculiarities and accidents of light, texture and atmosphere . . . Demuth and Sheeler approached it from different angles, and if Demuth arrived at the kernel of the idea first and was the innovator, Sheeler carried it to a more complete fruition and was its leading exponent’ (p. 146). Importantly, Brown notes that cubist-realism was a phase in Sheeler’s developing aesthetic and not a catchall to describe all of his work. On saying this, whilst Brown offers a brief adulatory comment on Sheeler’s successful development of cubist-realism through a three-dimensionality lacking in Demuth, he is scathing about the influence of photography on Sheeler’s work in the late 1920s. According to Brown, Sheeler moves from cubist-realism to ‘a mere transcription of reality’ (p. 151). Although Barn Abstraction is more realistic, the title hints at the process used to arrive at the final image. Flower Forms, whilst more abstract, relies on the title’s suggestion of a real subject. Norman Bryson, Looking at the Overlooked : Four Essays on Still Life Painting (London: Reaktion, 1990), 11. See Bryson, Looking at the Overlooked. Bryson, Looking at the Overlooked, 12. Bryson, Looking at the Overlooked, 12. Bryson, Looking at the Overlooked, 12 (emphasis in original). Bryson, Looking at the Overlooked, 13. Bryson, Looking at the Overlooked, 13. Bryson, Looking at the Overlooked, 13. Bryson, Looking at the Overlooked, 13. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, 6. See Zuidervaart, Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory, 125. See Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, 355–7. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, 356. Zuidervaart, Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory, 125. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, 148. Rourke, Sheeler, 109. Bryson, Looking at the Overlooked, 78. Troyen and Hirshler, Sheeler: Paintings and Drawings, 85. Henry McBride, The Flow of Art: Essays and Criticisms of Henry McBride (New York: Atheneum, 1975), 155. From Brown, ‘Cubist-Realism’, 151. The title, Interior, as is the case with many of Sheeler’s titles, is not the original title of the work. Sheeler changed the title from more the personal Interior, South Salem to Interior when it was first exhibited in 1927. For Troyen and Hirshler the change is in keeping with Sheeler’s ‘characteristic reluctance to reveal himself’, but they add – and this, I think, is important – that ‘perhaps he [Sheeler] was eager to stress the painting’s broader meanings’ (see Troyen and Hirshler, Sheeler: Paintings and Drawings, 110).


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Troyen and Hirshler, Sheeler: Paintings and Drawings, 110. Troyen and Hirshler, Sheeler: Paintings and Drawings, 110. Troyen and Hirshler, Sheeler: Paintings and Drawings, 110. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, 251. Fernand Léger, Functions of Painting, ed. Edward F. Fry (London: Thames and Hudson, 1973), 52 (italics in original). Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, 301–2. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, 79. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, 15. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, 84. Troyen and Hirshler, Sheeler: Paintings and Drawings, 128. See Corn, ‘Home, Sweet Home’, 293–338. Corn, ‘Home, Sweet Home’, 305. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, 94. Bryson, Looking at the Overlooked, 79. Martin Friedman, ‘Oral History Interview with Charles Sheeler June 18, 1959’, Smithsonian Archives of American Art, available at: http:// artarchives.si.edu/oralhist/sheele59.htm, accessed 4 August 2007. Martin Heidegger wrote the essays ‘Building Dwelling Thinking’ (1951) and ‘. . . Poetically Man Dwells . . .’, both in Martin Heidegger, Poetry, Language, Thought (New York: Harper and Row, 1971). For a lucid explanation of Heidegger’s notion of dwelling see Hilde Heynen, Architecture and Modernity: A Critique (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999), 14–18. Heynen also compares the notions of dwelling in both Adorno and Heidegger throughout her text. Heynen, Architecture and Modernity, 14. Adorno, Minima Moralia, 38. It is worth adding that agreement between Adorno and Heidegger on dwelling does not extend beyond the notion that modernity has radically changed the notion of dwelling. For Adorno, confronting impossibility of dwelling is an ethical question, one with its roots in the social. For Heidegger, dwelling is beyond the social and is related to his view of Being and the ‘four-fold’. Heynen, Architecture and Modernity, 18. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, 31. Adorno, Minima Moralia, 40. Adorno, Minima Moralia, 40. See also Bachelard, Poetics, 15, in which he recalls how ‘The feel of the tiniest latch has remained in our hands’. Theodor Adorno, ‘Functionalism Today’, in Neil Leach, Rethinking Architecture: A Reader in Cultural Theory (London: Routledge, 1997), 9. Adorno, Minima Moralia, 40–2. Christa Bürger, ‘Expression and Construction: Adorno and Thomas Mann’, in Andrew E. Benjamin and Peter Osborne (eds), Thinking Art: Beyond Traditional Aesthethics (London: Routledge, 1991), 135. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, 110.


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Chapter Five: Between Commission and Autonomy 1 Smith, Making the Modern, 109. 2 Wolfgang Born, American Landscape Painting: An Interpretation (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1948), 211. 3 Walter Benjamin, One-Way Street and Other Writings, trans. Edmund Jephcott and Kingsley Shorter (London: Verso, 1997), 255. 4 Hal Foster, Rosalind Krauss, Yve-Alain Bois and Benjamin H.D. Buchloh, Art Since 1900 (London: Thames and Hudson, 2004), 225, my emphasis. 5 Foster et al., Art Since 1900, 225. 6 Sheeler, quoted in Stebbins, Sheeler: The Photographs, 25. The full quotaton, taken from a letter written by Sheeler to Walter Arensberg discussing his work at Condé Nast, is as follows: ‘I know little or nothing but my job which is by this time has come to be like a daily trip to jail. It continues just as strenuous as ever, and more irksome.’ 7 Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, 104. 8 Adorno, Minima Moralia, 102–3. 9 Troyen and Hirshler, Sheeler: Painting and Drawings, 17. 10 Stebbins, Sheeler: The Photographs, 34. 11 Troyen and Hirshler, Sheeler: Painting and Drawings, 17. 12 Mary Jane Jacob and Linda Downs, The Rouge: The Image of Industry in the Art of Charles Sheeler and Diego Rivera (Detroit, MI: Detroit Institute of Arts, 1978), 11. 13 Jacob and Downs, The Rouge, 11. 14 Stebbins, Sheeler: The Photographs, 31. 15 Jacob and Downs, The Rouge, 11. 16 Adorno and Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 147. 17 As Stebbins notes, during the1920s Sheeler made photos for the advertising campaigns of Firestone tyres, Champion spark plugs, L.C. Typewriters and the Kodak Company (Stebbins, Sheeler: The Photographs, 23). 18 Smith, Making the Modern, 440. 19 Michelle H Bogart, Advertising, Artists, and the Borders of Art (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 166. 20 Adorno, Philosophy of Modern Music, 22. 21 Adorno and Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 86. 22 Adorno and Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 88 (my emphasis). 23 Adorno and Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 121. 24 Adorno and Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 10. 25 Eric L Krakauer, The Disposition of the Subject: Reading Adorno’s Dialectic of Technology (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1998), 4. 26 Adorno and Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 4. 27 Adorno, Minima Moralia, 235. 28 Adorno and Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 123. 29 Adorno and Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 162. 30 Adorno and Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 122.


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31 Granted, the Ford Motor Company and the N.W. Ayer advertising agency had the final say on whether or not to approve the images, which is in line with Adorno and Horkheimer’s observations, but what must be borne in mind is the fact that these images were passed as suitable. 32 Troyen and Hirshler, Sheeler: Painting and Drawings, 17. 33 Dominic Ricciotti, ‘City Railways/Modernist Visions’, in Danly and Marx, Railroad in American Art, 140. 34 Ralph Waldo Emerson, Essays and Poems (London: Everyman, 1995), 169. 35 Born, American Landscape Painting, 206. 36 Born, American Landscape Painting, 206. 37 Born, American Landscape Painting, 206. 38 Smith, Making the Modern, 7. 39 Smith, Making the Modern, 440. 40 Smith, Making the Modern, 126. 41 Lucic, Doylestown, 89. 42 Adorno and Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 148. 43 Adorno and Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 148. 44 Walter Benjamin, ‘Theses on the Philosophy of History’, in Benjamin, Illuminations, 249. 45 John Stomberg, ‘A “United States of the World”: Industry and Photography Between the Wars’, in Kim Sichel, From Icon to Irony: German and American Industrial Photography (exhibition catalogue, Boston: Boston University Art Gallery, 1995) 18. 46 Sichel, From Icon to Irony, 5. 47 Sichel, From Icon to Irony, 5. 48 Sichel, From Icon to Irony, 2, also identifies another American/German connection in the work of Margaret Bourke-White and Germaine Krull. 49 Sichel, From Icon to Irony, 3. 50 Stomberg, ‘Industry and Photography Between the Wars’, 18. 51 Stomberg, ‘Industry and Photography Between the Wars’, 18. 52 Stomberg, ‘Industry and Photography Between the Wars’, 20. 53 Walter Benjamin, ‘The Author as Producer’, in Andrew Arato and Eike Gebhardt, The Essential Frankfurt School Reader (New York: Continuum, 1994), 262. 54 Benjamin, ‘The Author as Producer’, 262. 55 Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, 61. 56 Benjamin, ‘The Author as Producer’, 263. 57 Theodor Adorno, ‘Commitment’, in Adorno, Notes to Literature Volume Two, 87. 58 Benjamin, ‘The Author as Producer’, 263. 59 Adorno and Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 135. 60 Adorno and Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 126 (my emphasis). 61 Troyen and Hirshler, Sheeler: Paintings and Drawings, 18. 62 Troyen and Hirshler, Sheeler: Paintings and Drawings, 18.


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63 Maroney, ‘Sheeler Reveals the Machinery of his Soul’, 34. 64 To contextualise the rift between the two parties, the photographs Sheeler produced were never published and ‘only three prints resulting from the assignment have come to light’ (Troyen and Hirshler, Sheeler: Paintings and Drawings, 115): the most famous being the photograph which forms the ‘blueprint’ for the oil Upper Deck itself. 65 Maroney, ‘Sheeler Reveals the Machinery of his Soul’, 34. 66 Troyen and Hirshler, Sheeler: Paintings and Drawings, 18. 67 Troyen and Hirshler, Sheeler: Paintings and Drawings, 18. 68 For Maroney, the significance of Sheeler’s subject matter – the ship’s breathing apparatus – is a symbolic gesture towards Spirit. Constructing the central theme of his essay around notions of Zen Bhuddism and Spirit, Maroney outlines the idea of the ship as a container. As in the barns and silos of Pennsylvania, the factory buildings of the Rouge and the images of Chartres, Maroney argues that Sheeler is not engaged with machine-age concerns but with the spirit. Each of these objects is approached by Sheeler in terms of interior/exterior. 69 Fernand Léger, ‘The Machine Aesthetic: The Manufactured Object, the Artisan, and the Artist’ (1924), in Léger, Functions of Painting, 54. 70 Sheeler quoted in Rourke, Sheeler, 143. 71 Rourke, Sheeler, 143. 72 Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, 33 (my emphasis). 73 Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, 34. 74 Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, 60. 75 Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, 60. 76 Jarvis, Adorno, 9. 77 Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, 34. 78 Troyen and Hirshler, Sheeler: Paintings and Drawings, 118. 79 Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, 157–8. 80 See Troyen and Hirshler, Sheeler: Paintings and Drawings, 118–23. 81 Troyen and Hirshler, Sheeler: Paintings and Drawings, 118. 82 Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, 184. 83 Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, 184. 84 Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, 184. 85 Jarvis, Adorno, 100. 86 Ernst Bloch, ‘Something’s Missing: A Discussion between Ernst Bloch and Theodor W. Adorno on the Contradictions of Utopian Longing’, in Ernst Bloch, The Utopian Function of Art and Literature (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1988). 87 Adorno, in Bloch, ‘Something’s Missing’, 3–4. 88 Adorno, in Bloch, ‘Something’s Missing’, 4. 89 Bloch, ‘Something’s Missing’, 2. 90 Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, 32. 91 Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, 32.


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Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, 104. Adorno, ‘On Lyric Poetry, 39. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, 130–1. Adorno, ‘Actuality of Philosophy’, 120. Jarvis, Adorno, 104–5. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, 104. Adorno, ‘Actuality of Philosophy’, 120. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, 101. Jarvis, Adorno, 115. Jarvis, Adorno, 116. Jarvis, Adorno, 119. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, 107. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, 127. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, 133. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, 144. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, 133–4.

Chapter Six: Late Work/Late Style 1 William Carlos Williams, ‘Forward’, in Frederick S. Wright, Charles Sheeler: A Retrospective Exhibition (exhibition catalogue, Los Angeles: University of California at Los Angeles Art Galleries, 1954), 7. Williams adds: ‘By sticking to his style a man establishes himself. He strives to prove the innerness of his primary vision, to make it more clearly apparent to the beholder, to slough aside all extraneous matter, that his meaning may always be clearer. The better his picture the more that meaning stands out’. 2 Adorno and Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 109. 3 Brown, ‘Cubist-Realism’, 151. The full quotation reads: ‘Sheeler soon lost the equilibrium between photography and painting, between reality and abstraction, which he attained in [the] works of the early twenties, and regained it only spasmodically in the years to follow, as for example in Upper Deck (1929) and Barn Reds (1939)’. 4 Sheeler, quoted in Foster et al., Art Since 1900, 223. One wonders whether the problem Foster et al. find in Sheeler relates to the artist’s expressed, and hence intentional, desire to make the artwork ‘disappear’ before the eyes of the viewer. As such, Sheeler’s commentary articulates an archaic return to the kind of illusionism that pure modernism rejects outright, which in turn relegates or, worse still, actively rejects Sheeler’s work from the critical frame of modernism itself. 5 Troyen and Hirshler, Sheeler: Paintings and Drawings, 42. Troyen and Hirshler’s commentary, ‘The Late Work: Painting and Photography’, is worthy of note, not only for its full and informative biographical and historical detail but also for the fact that, despite the former, very little is actually written about the late work itself. What is also worth mentioning is that where Troyen and Hirshler, when writing in 1987, find Sheeler’s use


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of different media an obstacle, writing in 2006, Charles Brock rescues this form of repetition and raises it to the status of creative activity. Troyen and Hirshler, Sheeler: Paintings and Drawings, 132. William C. Agee, ‘“Helga” and Other Problems’, New Criterion, vol. 6, April 1988, 44. 1931 was the year in which Sheeler completed View of New York, a work that, Troyen and Hirshler argue, with its covered camera represents the artist’s coming to terms with Halpert’s advice vis-à-vis photography and painting. It was also the year he showed Home, Sweet Home, Classic Landscape, Cactus, and Tulips, as well the conté crayon drawings, including Ballet Mechanique. Agee, ‘“Helga” and Other Problems’, 48. For Agee, Sheeler’s greatest achievements are in photography, and his review is underscored by the determination to present this decision as a great loss, rather than seeing Sheeler’s painting as a great gain in American modernism. Brown, ‘Cubist-Realism’, 151. Lillian Dochterman, ‘Charles Sheeler’, in Dochterman, Quest of Charles Sheeler, 27. Adorno, Philosophy of Modern Music, 123. Adorno, Philosophy of Modern Music, 124. Edward Said, On Late Style: Music and Literature Against the Grain (New York: Pantheon Books, 2006), 7 Said, On Late Style, 7. Said, On Late Style, 7. See Troyen and Hirshler, Sheeler: Paintings and Drawings, 115 From the very beginning of his career, deliberately or not, Sheeler was forever on the periphery, not in a liminal sense but more as a presence to be felt after the fact. According to Martin Friedman, Sheeler found the art of the European émigrés who dominated the early salons of New York odd but interesting. Apparently, Sheeler was just too American, and by this I think Friedman means pragmatic, to be swayed completely by the likes of Duchamp, Picabia and Gleizes. Instead, Sheeler is often one star in rather large constellations of other, generally brighter (read pushier) stars. The fact that he chose to take up an orbit in relation to some very important stars is most significant, however. Stieglitz might well have sarcastically referred to Sheeler’s love of the Doylestown cottage as his ‘hut aesthetique’, and Sheeler might well have developed a somewhat reserved relationship with Duchamp and to Dada but, despite his outsider pose, he was very much part of the earliest, and some of the most radical avant-garde salons in New York. Wright, Charles Sheeler: A Retrospective Exhibition, 36. Brock, Charles Sheeler: Across Media, 126. Brock notes that Sheeler began work on and completed a drawing, Reflections, temperas, The Mill, Andover, Mass. and The Mill – Ballardvale and the oil, Ballardvale. Troyen and Hirshler, Sheeler: Painting and Drawings, 35. The December


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22 23 24 25 26

205

1940 issue of Fortune magazine contained ‘Power: A Portfolio by Charles Sheeler’. The Power series, described as a picture essay, was one that traced the progress of technological forms of power from ‘the overshot waterwheel . . . to radial motor of the Yankee Clipper’. Commissioned by the magazine in late 1938, the Power series appears an unapologetic paean to American technological ingenuity. Each of the six images reproduced in the magazine are accompanied by a text shot through with a shameless tone of national self-promotion. The praise heaped on Sheeler, ‘one of the greatest living American artists’, whose style is defined by a ‘heavenly serenity’ is, of course, meant to reflect back on the artist’s employer, Fortune. In essence, the commission serves to show the foresight of Fortune in hiring a talent like Sheeler to convince its readers that forms of technological power, such as those subject to the artist’s gaze, ‘are more deeply human than the muscles of the human torso because they trace the form pattern of the human mind as it seeks to use co-operatively the limitless power of nature’. The Power series is in reality an unashamed advertisement of American business and its ability to realise its objectives (all quotations from Fortune (December 1940), 73. Brock, Charles Sheeler: Across Media, 126. Wright, Charles Sheeler: A Retrospective Exhibition, 36. Troyen and Hirshler, Sheeler: Painting and Drawings, 192. Of Sheeler’s earlier conté crayon drawings, Ballet Mechanique (1931) and Tulips (1931) are exemplary. In 1952, Sheeler was commissioned to photograph the US Steel Plant, Pittsburgh. That year he received commissions from the Pabst Brewery in Milwaukee and the Meta-Mold Corporation in Wisconsin. Troyen and Hirshler, Sheeler: Painting and Drawings, 192.


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Index

A Adorno, Theodor 4–7, 17–24, 28–31, 35, 39, 42–3, 48, 54, 57, 59–60, 62, 63, 67, 69–71, 79–80, 89, 92–8, 106, 112, 113, 118–20, 122, 123, 124–6, 132, 137, 139, 142, 144–5, 153–5, 159–63, 164, 165, 167–9 and Horkheimer 3, 73, 136–9, 142, 147 Aerial Gyrations 176, 179 Agee, William 165–6 African Musical Instrument 105 Americana 109, 113, 148 American Landscape 2, 7, 49, 116, 128, 129, 132, 140, 145, 148, 155, 156–9, 161–3, 164 Amoeskeag Canal 173 Apostolidis, Paul 20 Arensberg, Walter and Louise 13, 79, 92 Armory Show 15 Artist Looks at Nature, The 39, 172

B Bachelard, Gaston 34–5, 38, 41–2 Bachelin, Henri 41 Ballardvale 172, 173, 175–6 Ballardvale Mill 176 Barn Abstraction 8, 10, 24, 28–33, 42, 62, 63, 81, 109, 115, 116 Beethoven, Ludwig van 7, 165, 167

Sheeler11 index.indd 207

Benjamin, Walter 4, 34, 35, 80, 89, 90–1, 92, 93, 95, 99, 100, 103, 104, 128, 142–5, Berman, Russell 42 Blast Furnace Interior 134 Bloch, Ernst 159–160 Blossfeldt, Karl 143 Born, Wolfgang 48–9, 128, 140–1 Bourne, Randolph 12 Bowlby, Rachel 38, 100 Braque, Georges 23 Brecht, Bertolt 128 Breuer, Marcel 102, 111, 113 Brock, Charles 165, 173 Brooks, Van Wyck 13 Brown, Milton W. 2, 109, 164–5, 166, 176 Bryson, Norman 109, 110–11, 112, 114, 117, 119, 121, 122, 126 Buchloh, Benjamin 11 Burgin, Victor 55, 56, 57, 59

C Cactus 109, 113, 114, 120–1 Cahn, Michael 95–6 Camera Work 25 Canal with Salvage Ship 156 Caravaggio, Michelangelo Merisi da 122 Cézanne, Paul 5, 23, 26 Chase, William Merritt 5, 15

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208 Church Street El 52, 62, 175 City Interior 176 Classic Landscape 2, 49, 128, 129, 132, 140, 148, 155, 156–7, 159, 161–3 Coburn, Alvin Langdon 53 Convergence 166 Coolidge, Calvin 12 Cooper, Douglas 24 Corn, Wanda 3, 100–2, 121–2, 125, 156 Counterpoint 176, 179 Crawford, Ralston 2 Criss-Crossed Conveyors 130, 140, 143, 146–7

D Dan Mask, Female Style (Ivory Coast) 55, 56, 105 De Zayas, Marius 23, 105 Demuth, Charles 2, 78 Derrida, Jacques 103–4 Dochterman, Lillian 165 Dodge, Mabel 13, 79 Doylestown House: Downstairs Window 152 Doylestown House: Interior with Stove 39, 40 Doylestown House: Stairway with Chair 31, 37, 38 Doylestown House: Stairwell 36, 38 Driggs, Elsie 2, 45 Duchamp, Marcel 2, 52, 78

E Emerson, Ralph Waldo 140

F Fang Figure 105 Fillin-Yeh, Susan 56, 82, 89, 101–2, 105 Flower Forms 8, 24, 29, 31, 42, 109 Ford, Henry 13


Index Fordism 4, 12, 30 Forging Die Blocks 134 Foster, Hal, et al. 89, 165 Freud, Sigmund 38, 63 Futurism 23

G Giedion, Siegfried 66

H Halpert, Edith 165 Hayes, Bartlett 173 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich 112 Heap, Jane 61, 65, 66, 68, 70 Heidegger, Martin 123, 124 Heller, Agnes 99–100 Here, This is Stiegltiz, Here (Ici, C’est ici Stieglitz) (Francis Picabia) 82 Heynen, Hilde 123 Hohendahl, Peter 20 Home, Sweet Home 99, 105, 106, 109, 113, 114, 116, 118–27, 148, 164, 179

I Ingot Molds, Open Hearth Building 130, 134, 152 Interior 109, 113, 117–20

J Jacob, Mary Jane 133–4 Jarvis, Simon 22, 159, 161, 162

K Kafka, Franz 91, 92, 93–4, 96 Kant, Immanuel 95, 112 Kasson, John F. 64–5, 67–8, 71 Klee, Paul 69–70, 142, 155 Klint, Kaare 113 Kouwenhoven, John A. 64

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Index Krauss, Rosalind 73 Krull, Germaine 145

L Landau, Sarah Bradford, and Carl Condit 53 Léger, Fernand 119, 151–2 Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm 35 Leeuwen, Thomas van 72–3, 75 Loos, Adolf 60, 61, 66 Lucic, Karen 6, 35, 39, 49, 52, 84, 90, 100, 141 Lukács, György 128–9 Lunenburg 172

M McBride, Henry 116 Man Ray 52 Manchester 173 Manhatta 51–2, 64 Marin, John 45 Maroney, James 150 Marx, Karl 138 Marx, Leo 49 Marxism (Adorno and) 19–20 Mechanical Abstraction (Morton Schamberg) 83 Mercer, Henry 104 Mill – Ballardvale, The 173 Modern Gallery, The 92 Mumford, Lewis 12 Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) 3

209 New York 45, 47, 49, 54, 58, 62, 151, 152 Skyscrapers (formerly Offices) 45, 49, 51, 54, 59, 62, 151, 152 Nicholsen, Shierry Weber 80, 90, 91, 94

O O’Keeffe, Georgia 2, 45, 136 Orvell, Miles 49 Others Group, the 13 Ore into Iron 176, 179

P Pablo, Picasso 23, 71 Picabia, Francis 2–3, 78, 82–4, 86, 89 Portrait of Katherine 111

Q Quinn, John 105

R Reed, Christopher 100 Renger-Patzsch, Albert 143–4, 145 Riley, Bridget 10–11 Rilke, Rainer Maria 41 Rockefeller, Abby Aldrich 78 Rolling Power 166 Rose, Barbara 23 Rourke, Constance 3, 11, 14–16, 18, 24, 26–8, 30, 33, 34, 41, 42, 80, 81, 89, 91, 102, 113, 141, 151, 153, 156, 180

N

S

Nation’s Capital, The 166 New England Irrelevancies 172, 176 New York Series 5, 44, 53, 54, 59, 62, 154 New York, Park Row Building 45, 46, 49, 53, 54, 55, 58, 62

Said, Edward 169 Salvage Ship – Ford Plant 156, 157 Satie, Eric 52 Scallen, Catherine 27 Schamberg, Morton 15, 26, 35, 78, 83–4


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210 Schleier, Merrill 50–1, 54, 59, 60, 65 Schoenberg, Arnold 17, 71, 112, 154 Self-Portrait (also known as Nature Morte-Telephone and Audubon-451) 6, 77–98, 109, 116, 153 Sennett, Richard 74–5 Seven Arts, The 12–13 Sheeler, Charles 1, 15, 16, 26, 34, 41, 55, 68, 89, 91, 102, 106, 113, 122–3, 129, 153 and Cézanne 5, 16–18, 26 and construction 69–71 and Cubism 1, 5, 16, 18, 23–7, 43, 54 and Functionalism 72–3, 75 and machine age aesthetic 2–3 and modern artist 8–18 and photography 2, 5, 23–6, 45, 48, 55–8 and Precisionism 1–3, 5–7, 48, 63 and primitive forms 5, 10, 30, 34–42 and River Rouge 3–4, 6 Sichel, Kim 143, 145 Side of White Barn 8–9, 24, 26–7, 32, 42, 54, 56, 81, 105 Simmel, Georg 77, 92 Slag Buggy 140 Sloan, John 45 Smith, Terry 128, 136, 141, 145 Spring Interior 91 Stebbins, Theodore 37, 89, 133 Stella, Joseph 2, 45 Steichen, Edward 129, 137 Stieglitz, Alfred 13, 15, 34, 35, 50, 51, 81, 82–3 291 Gallery 15 Still Life and Shadows 106, 109, 114 Stomberg, John 143 Strand, Paul 51, 64 Suhrkamp, Peter 79, 80 Sullivan, Louis H. 50, 60, 61, 73


Index Suspended Forms (Still Life) 115

T Tallack, Douglas 15 Tashjian, Dickran 81, 89 Taylorism 4, 12 Telephone (Morton Schamberg) 84, 85 Tichi, Cecelia 63, 67 Troyen, Carol and Erica Hirshler 16, 34, 51, 53, 78, 87, 91–2, 117–18, 156, 158, 165, 173, 175 Tsujimoto, Karen 2 Tulips and Etruscan Vase 114, 115 Tulips – Suspended Forms 106, 111, 113, 115

U Upper Deck 7, 132, 148–53, 170–2, 173

V Veblen, Thorstein 60, 63, 65, 66–7, 68, 70, 71 View of New York 6, 78, 148

W Weber, Max (sociologist, 1864–1920) 73 Weber, Max (artist, 1881–1961) 45 Wertheim, Arthur 11, 13 Whitman, Walt 52 Williams, William Carlos 11, 13–15, 18, 29–31, 34, 44, 89, 164 Windows 166 Wright, Frank Lloyd 60, 61, 73 Wright, Frederick S. 173–4

Z Zuidervaart, Lambert 19, 20, 112

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