ABSTRACT
This chapter re-examines Charles Sheeler late period with reference to Adorno’s insightful writings on style in the late work of Beethoven, writings that address precisely the inconsistencies in the artist’s late work. The clarity and coherence associated with Sheeler’s work of the late 1920s and early 1930s gradually splinters and disintegrates throughout the late work of the 1940s and 1950s. Few works of this late period match the harmony of form and content apparent in works of his so-called high period, paintings such as American Landscape or Home, Sweet Home. The relationship between conventional criticism of late work and artistic convention can be framed more generally in terms of judgement about the quality of the work, often driven by the notion of consistency. Terms like cubist-realism or precisionism might be helpful, but overall the price paid is the production of an unrealistic and genuinely unrealisable conception of a unifying vision in Sheeler’s work of the 1920s and 1930s.
