Charles Sheeler Analysis

Charles Sheeler understood machines as life’s meaning. To him, these structures were awe-inspiring, not because of what they produced, but because of the grandeur of their conception in the first place. Sheeler found his initial artistic identity in the detached nature of modernist world of architecture. However, throughout his career, Sheeler used his photographic skills to bring nostalgic emotions into his paintings of industrialization. Through the analysis of four of Sheeler’s paintings, View of New York, Fugue, New England Irrelevancies, and On a Shaker Theme, this evolution becomes evident. Even though his works are void of figures or symbols, Sheeler is able to evoke a sense of timelessness in his viewer by bring the past to the present, combining personal memories with modern machinery. …show more content…
The subject matter of Precisionism celebrated the Machine-age, depicting skylines, buildings, and industrial landscapes, devoid of human activity. “Precisionism is not an art of social criticism. Precisionism is a “cool” art, keep[ing] the viewer at a distance; the artist’s attitude seems to be one of complete detachment, in which [the artist] achieves largely by smoothing out his brushstrokes, erasing, as it were, his personal handwriting” (Britannica). Sheeler pioneered the Precisionist style by incorporating more crisp, clean edges and flattened shapes which exposed a clinical sense of detachment, further accentuated by the total lack of figures. However, while Precisionism “seems to celebrate the machine as a sign of America’s international hegemony in the industrial sphere, it also reveals signs of anxiety about the threats to a humanist definition of artistic identity in the machine age” (Lucic). What Lucic observes about Precisionism overall is exactly what Sheeler deals with throughout his artistic career: the balance of idolizing machinery while maintaining