Lot 135 : CHARLES SHEELER (1886-1965)

Charles R Sheeler - 1883-1965

Auction Location: United States of America - 2005
Please sign in or subscribe to Artfact Premium or Artfact Fine Art to see auction date and house information.

Please sign in or subscribe to Artfact Premium or Artfact Fine Art to view enlarged images.

Artist or Maker:

CHARLES SHEELER (1886-1965)

Title:

Buggy (Bucks County), c. 1915-1917

Description:

Buggy (Bucks County), c. 1915-1917
gelatin silver print, printed before 1929
printed on mount 'Christmas Greetings 1928 Katharine Sheeler Charles Sheeler'
3 3/8 x 4 5/8in.(8.6 x 11.7cm.)

Provenance:

From the artist to Maurice Bratter, a friend;
Sotheby's New York, October 31, 1989, lot 154;
to the present owner

Exhibited:

Bawag Foundation, Vienna, 3 November 1994- 20 December 1994

Published:

Stebbins and Keyes, Charles Sheeler: The Photographs, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, 1988, pl. 22; Lucic, Charles Sheeler in Doylestown: American Modernism and the Pennsylvania Tradition, University of Washington Press, 1997, p. 75; Stebbins, Mora and Haas, The Photography of Charles Sheeler: American Modernist, Little, Brown and Co., 2002, p. 35

Notes:

Buggy, 1917, one of Charles Sheeler's early Bucks County pictures, is part of a body of work the artist made while weekending at the country house he shared with fellow painter and former art school classmate, Morton L. Schamberg. It was during this time that Sheeler began using photography as an artistic medium. Until then, photographing art and architecture was a means for Sheeler to support his painting career. Influenced by Picasso and Cézanne, as well as African, Asian and American Indian art, Sheeler framed rural landscape and industrial machinery into modernist works of art, documenting a way of life soon to be extinct, with gas and steam-powered vehicles taking the place of horse and buggies.

In this image the photographer lit the buggy from the front, deep within the barn, giving spatial depth and allowing for a dramatic contrast between the blacks and whites. The end result is a compositional masterpiece. Sheeler's geometric, minimal style can be compared to other photographers working at the time, notably Paul Strand. Sheeler was part of the group of American modernists led by Alfred Stieglitz.

"It is Sheeler's photographs themselves- not their subjects- that embody the transcendent language of modernism with all its emphasis on stylistic experimentation, purity of vision, and underlying realities over surface appearances." (Daniell Cornell, "Transforming Documents: Charles Sheeler, Walker Evans, Barry Le Va," Imaging African Art, p. 5)
From 1929 on, Sheeler concentrated on painting and drawing, but the photographs he made in the first part of his career were used as a reference point and visual tool for further work. (See fig. 1)

Only three prints of this image are believed to exist.