ABSTRACT
The career of Charles Sheeler traces a complex course—more complex, in fact, than the art that resulted from it. In his life as an artist, Sheeler touched most of the major points on the compass. He was, first and last, a convert to Cubism. Cubism helped strip the subject of stale associations, facile emotions, the old conventions. But Sheeler's Cubism is not a language of pictorial invention. Cubism was made to serve an almost antiquarian function. There is a history to be written of the influence of the Protestant mind on Cubist aesthetics—on what happened to Cubism when it was removed from Paris to the colder climates—and Sheeler would have a place in that history. For Sheeler was a romantic in the American grain. Those Bucks County barns were yet another up-to-date avowal of the pastoral ideal. The pastoral sensibility shuns the ironical—everything in Sheeler is "straight.".
