Lot 91 : Charles Sheeler

Charles R Sheeler - 1883-1965

Auction Location: United States of America - 2001
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Description:

Charles Sheeler
(1883-1965)
'SLAG BUGGY, FORD PLANT, DETROIT'
mounted, signed by the photographer in pencil on the reverse, matted, 1927, printed in 1941
9 by 7 1/2 in. 22.9 by 19.1 cm.
Provenance
Gift of the photographer, 1941, to replace another print of the image given by Lincoln Kirstein in 1935
Exhibited
Art of the Twenties, 1979
Montclair Art Museum, Precisionism in America, cat. no. 56
Literature
Art of the Twenties, p. 63, cf. p. 141
Montclair Art Museum, Precisionism in America, cat. no. 56 (this print)
Stebbins and Keyes, Sheeler: The Photographs, pl. 52
Smithsonian, Charles Sheeler, cat. no. 50 (variant cropping)
Detroit Institute of Art, The Rouge, cat. no. 13
This photograph from the River Rouge series shows a slag buggy (or slag pot), which serviced the cast house of either Blast Furnace A or B. Slag-a by-product of steel production-floated to the top of molten iron produced by the furnaces, was skimmed off in the cast house, and then carried away by the buggies. In her detailed commentary on Sheeler's Ford photographs in The Rouge: The Image of Industry in the Art of Charles Sheeler and Diego Rivera (Detroit, 1978), Mary Jane Jacob writes, "Sheeler, attracted to the simple geometric form of these pots, here isolated a single one and dealt with it directly as a centralized, almost abstract image. The power and classical simplicity of this work has made it one of the most acclaimed of the River Rouge series" (p. Sheeler:25).
In 1930, the young Lincoln Kirstein (see Lot 37) reproduced four of Sheeler's River Rouge photographs in the April-June issue of Hound & Horn (Volume III, No. 3) The quarterly journal Hound & Horn was begun by Kirstein and fellow Harvard sophomore Varian Fry as a reaction to the staid Harvard Advocate and Harvard Monthly. Taking their inspiration from the English Criterion, edited by Harvard alumnus Thomas Sterns Eliot, Kirstein and Fry solicited original articles, criticism, and verse from, among others, Henry-Russell Hitchcock, Richard Blackmur, A. Hyatt Mayor, James Agee, and Eliot himself.
Hound & Horn's first numbers were illustrated with traditional graphic work by such artists as Max Parrish, Arthur Rackham, and Edmond Dulac. But "we discovered Walker Evans as well," Kirstein wrote in his memoirs, "and soon documentary photography began to supplant book illustration as my pictorial gloss on history" (Mosaic, p. 109). From 1929, until the journal's last issue in 1934, Hound & Horn published photographs by artists as diverse as Walker Evans, Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, and Charles Sheeler.
The spring 1930 issue of Hound & Horn published, as full-page illustrations, four of Sheeler's River Rouge photographs, each titled simply 'Ford Plant.' The pictures are known today by their subject titles: Bleeder Stacks; Blast Furnace and Dust Catcher; Pulverizer Building; and Slag Buggy. The photograph of Slag Buggy that Kirstein gave to The Museum of Modern Art in 1935 was probably the very print used for reproduction in Hound & Horn. It was this print of the image that was replaced by Sheeler in 1941, with the print offered here.
In April 1931, a year after Sheeler's photographs were published in Hound & Horn, Samuel Kootz wrote about the Ford series in Creative Art magazine: "The language of art is always dominant in these Ford photographs. The fine drawing, the athletic tenseness of line, the plastic sequences, the exquisite textures, the intricate rhythms, are as sure, as conscious, as the best modern painting" (quoted in Stebbins and Keyes, p. 34).
At the time of this writing, one other print of the Slag Buggy has been located, in the Lane Collection, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.