ABSTRACT
Charles Sheeler’s work is more than an ambivalent reaction to machine-age anxieties, more than the art historical category Precisionism can account for, and certainly more than most critical readings are prepared to admit. Analysis of Sheeler’s work and practice has suffered, paradoxically, because of the desire to construct a particular kind of narrative to account for the history of American art. The avant-gardism of pre-1945 American modernism is somewhat lame in its assimilation of the principles of Cubism and abstraction, and even an embarrassment when compared with the art and artists related to the Abstract Expressionist movement and beyond. As a refined form of realism, drawing on ‘objective’ photography and cubist abstraction, Sheeler’s aesthetic maps the borders of abstraction, often – but not always – producing complex dialectical works in which inherent tensions collide rather than collapse.
