ABSTRACT
Forming Charles Sheeler’s earliest identifiable aesthetic style are the photographs, drawings and paintings of the Doylestown House and Bucks County barns he produced from c.1915. Sheeler’s aesthetic is made up of a combustible mix of primary and secondary elements; one might say that both the foundations and building blocks of his aesthetic are contradictory and, sometimes, counter-intuitive. A major hurdle was the trenchant position of the academies, which remained impervious to the radical changes taking place in European art. The most influential of the academies, the New York-based National Academy of Design, founded in 1825, stuck to its belief in a strict classical education of life drawing and anatomy classes for its students, placing ‘a premium on the imitation of nature’. Aesthetic production is both specific and part of the larger process of social production: an individual act of making related to the productive practices found in society’s other institutional practices.
