ABSTRACT
This chapter traces how Charles Sheeler’s experimentation with photography, Cubism and the genre of still life collide in this painting, and the ways in which this work addresses head-on the problem of dwelling in early twentieth-century modernity. It examines the significance of the pictorial problems in Sheeler’s later interior works as they appropriate and develops, in this instance, the genre of life. Rachel Bowlby’s insightful reading of the domestic, especially the connotations of ‘to domesticate’, highlights precisely why the house and home remain out of bounds for the avant-garde. Domesticity and domestication are by definition negatives: ‘to domesticate’ something is to tame it, to make it suitable for the home. The critical reception of Charles Sheeler’s still life work is at best disappointing. The absence of criticism is more remarkable when one considers that around seventy per cent of the artist’s recorded works between 1920 and 1926 are lifes.
