ABSTRACT
A gadabout from his early years at Yale, Charles G. Shaw—poet, journalist, photographer, and artist—was a true Manhattan bon vivant. His paintings, inspired by the New York skyline, are infused with a life intimately connected to the city and its haunts. During the early years of the 1930s, Shaw traveled to Paris, where he visited the studios of Pablo Picasso, Georges Braque and Fernand Leger, three artists who were becoming increasingly popular among American abstractionists. In 1933 Shaw commenced work on the plastic polygons, his most influential and well-known series. In the 1920s an intense fascination with Manhattan had dominated his writing. Shaw now applied this to painting; his plastic polygons make manifest the ever-evolving urban landscape. The fundamental concepts inherent to Shaw's paintings are further refined in his Plastic Polygon, 1937, in which the towering skyscrapers of the Twilight scene are translated into simple geometric shapes.
