ABSTRACT
William Carlos Williams describes the art of friend and fellow modern artist, Charles Sheeler, as a search for ‘illumination’ through the ‘use of the photographic camera in making up a picture’. This chapter argues that there exists a dialectical tension between photography and painting, and between competing modes of representation that reveal Sheeler’s aesthetic as highly critical of the notions of rationalisation and efficiency, so crucial to the development of American modernity. It discusses the issues through a variety of works that Sheeler produced during the 1920s but which can be divided into two sets: those concerned with the exterior architecture of the city and those with architectural interiors. The chapter extends to account for Sheeler’s technological work of art, an analysis that will consider more carefully the adoption and incorporation of photography and its impact on Sheeler’s aesthetic. Adorno’s notion of construction offers a framework for reading the tension in Sheeler’s aesthetic between complicity and critique.
