Charles Sheeler: Fashion Photography and Sculptural Form

About this book

Philadelphia native Charles Sheeler (1883-1965) is recognized as one of the founding figures of American modernism. Initially trained in impressionist landscape painting he experimented early in his career with compositions inspired by European modernism before developing a linear hard-edge style now known as Precisionism. Sheeler is best known for his powerful and compelling images of the Machine Agestark paintings and photographs of skyscrapers factories and power plantsthat he created while working in the 1920s and 1930s. Less known and even lesser studied is that he worked from 1926 to 1931 as a fashion and portrait photographer for Cond Nast. The body of work he produced during this time mainly for Vanity Fair and Vogue has been almost universally dismissed by scholars of American modernism as purely commercial the results of a painters "day job " and nothing more. Charles Sheeler contends that Sheelers fashion and portrait photography was instrumental to the artists developing modernist aesthetic. Over the course of his time at Cond Nast Sheelers fashion photography increasingly incorporated the structural design of abstraction: rhythmic patterning dramatic contrast and abstract compositions. The subjects of Sheelers fashion and portrait photography appear pared down to their barest essentials as sculptural objects composed of line form and light. The objective distant and rigorously formal style that Sheeler developed at Cond Nast would eventually be applied to all of his artistic forays: architectural industrial and vernacular. The contributing essays to Charles Sheeler expose the artistic breadth and depth of Sheelers Cond Nast oeuvre over 300 images of which are gathered in this volume. Michener Art Museum curator Kirsten M. Jensen provides the historical context for Sheelers experimentation in the years preceding his time at Cond Nast as well as a comprehensive analysis of the artists Cond Nast photography alongside his Precisionist work. Further essays explore the role of Cond Nast the individual in shaping the eras culture; investigate how Sheelers work reinterpreted and shifted contemporary trends in architecture and fashion; examine the influence of Sheelers experimentation with filmmaking on his later work; and analyze Sheelers influence on later generations of fashion photographers who have continued his studies into the model as a sculptural form.