charles sheeler – greg.org

Charles Sheeler Barns Collection

Charles Sheeler, *Barn Abstraction*, 1917, chalk on paper, 14 1/8 x 19 1/2 in., collection: Phila Museum

Speaking of Doylestown,

I was so immediately in love with the precisionist paintings, and the dramatic photos, that it took me a while to appreciate the late, semi-abstract barn paintings of Charles Sheeler.

Charles Sheeler, *Bucks County Barn*, 1915, gelatin silver print, sheet 10×8 in. mounted on 18×14 in., from a $10 edition of 10 made for sale at MoMA in 1941, and sold at Christie’s in 2012

It was probably the early photos from Doylestown and Bucks County that opened it up for me, and realizing that the barns were not late and out, but early and the whole point.

installation view of *Barn Abstraction*, 1917, in *Charles Sheeler*, Oct. 1939, The Museum of Modern Art, photo: Beaumont Newhall

I mean, making a drawing like Barn Abstraction in 1917 is kind of amazing. This one, at the Philadelphia Museum, because it was owned by the Arensbergs, was literally the first work in Sheeler’s 1939 retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art. It feels like Sheeler was in his Morton Schamberg era, in a good way.

Charles Sheeler, *Barn Abstraction*, 1918, lithograph, sheet: abt 19 1/2 x 24 1/2 in., selling at Christie’s 23 Oct 2024

In 1918 Sheeler used the drawing as the basis for his first print, a lithograph, of which maybe ten copies exist? That’s the number MoMA uses, and it’s cited in the lot description for the example being sold tomorrow at Christie’s. It’s the first of five Sheeler prints being sold—he only made six, and they’re all low volume.

Installation view of *Charles Sheeler* at MoMA in 1939, showing *Upper Deck*, 1929, from the Fogg, and *American Landscape*, 1930, from MoMA, photo by Beaumont Newhall

But that’s all less important than this installation photo from MoMA’s 1939 show, in which two of Sheeler’s precisionist masterpieces—Upper Deck (1929) and American Landscape (1930)—look like they’ve been reworked into a resin pour by Anicka Yi. What would Sheeler do with a painting of this photo? Is that even possible?

Who Is Aunt Mary?

Charles Sheeler, *Aunt Mary*, a 1941 print of a 1935-36 image, deaccessioned from the Museum of Modern Art, via Christie’s in 2018.

Since not buying the print of it MoMA deaccessioned three years ago, I’ve been low-key fascinated by Charles Sheeler’s photo of “Aunt Mary,” and the elderly Black woman in 18th-century costume seated in a kitchen at Colonial Williamsburg. Sheeler made the picture in 1935-36, while visiting at the invitation the Rockefellers. They donated this print to The Modern for a 1941 exhibition. This is the only Williamsburg photo Sheeler made public; the rest he used as reference for his paintings.

But that’s not important now. While ostensibly depicting the past, Sheeler’s photo of “Aunt Mary” captured a complicated aspect of its present, when a Black woman was hired to perform as an enslaved woman in a vast, celebratory fabrication of US colonial history, built by the richest man in the country, in the still foundationally racist Virginia of the 1930s. I’ve wanted to figure out who this woman was, and what her experience was like.

Because public versions of the photo and postcards over several decades referred to different interpreters as “Aunt Mary,” I assumed it was a Mammy-like role, trying to recast slavery as a benevolent family relationship. Some historic mentions even say the woman playing “Aunt Mary” was born into slavery, a real possibility for an elderly Black woman in 1933, but less plausible in the 1950s.

During pandemic-related shutdowns in the Summer of 2020, I emailed folks at the John D. Rockefeller, Jr. Library at the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation to see if their archives might shed any clues on this woman’s identity, and on the experience of her and other Black historic interpreters at the time. I was grateful and fascinated to receive from archivist Sarah Nerney who, with limited library access, managed to answer some of my questions, and inspire a whole bunch more.

Charles Sheeler, Lady At The Piano, before 1926

Have I just been skating past this picture my entire Charles Sheeler-lovin’ life without noticing it? Is it in my books wherever, and I’ve missed it? How do I have to discover it via one of the most haphazard paths possible, three images deep in a Charles Sheeler eBay tangent?

“Lady at the Piano” is the title found nowhere but Robert Allerton Parker’s May 1926 article in International Studio, “The Classical Vision of Charles Sheeler,” the first extended discussion in print of the artist’s work.” Nowhere except the recap of Parker’s article in The Literary Digest a month later, two pages of which are being sold on eBay.

Charles Sheeler, New York – Washington Square, 1920s photo of Houses, Washington Square, a 1924 oil on canvas, collection: The Met

If it’s out there, it probably has a different title. A painting the Digest unhelpfully captioned with, “Greenwich Village on Good Behavior,” is now known as MacDougal Alley (1924), but was Houses, Washington Square when it was shown at MoMA in 1939. Keeping with the sepia & charcoal theme, the image above is of a 1920s photo of the (very brick red) painting, from The Metropolitan’s collection, where it’s titled New York – Washington Square.

Charles Sheeler, Self-Portrait, 1923, 50×65 cm, conté crayon, gouache, and pencil on paper, collection: MoMA, a 1935 gift of Mrs. Rockefeller

No connected work appears in Sheeler’s 1939 MoMA retrospective, either, but there are comparables. This cropped lady and her highly reflective piano remind me of my first favorite Sheeler, the 1923 Self-Portrait, which used to hang next to the Wyeth and the Tchetchilew in the hallway just outside The Modern’s March of European Modernism galleries. These smoky works on paper are a seemingly impossible mix of precision and sfumato, drawings that looked like photographs.

Anyway, in the immortal words of Monique reaction dot gif, I would like to see it.

Huguette Clark Paintings??

Huguette Clark, Scene from my window – Night, 50×46 in., image via christies

Wow, just when I thought we were having something very special when considering the implications of portraiture and erasure in a found real estate listing photo of a laundry dungeon in an epically gross American University flophouse–and I don’t mean to imply I’m not grateful for The Discourse–but anyway, y’all* were apparently also fine with letting me go yet another year without knowing that forgotten heiress recluse who kept up her sprawling Fifth Avenue co-op and Santa Barbara mansion like she’d be back any minute but actually checked herself and her doll collection into a midtown hospital room and only left decades later when she died in 2011 at 104 Huguette Clark made paintings?

Huguette Clark, self-portrait with palette, image: christies

And that except for a few included in a two-week show at the Corcoran Museum in Washington in Spring 1929–four years after her father’s death and the bequeathing to the Museum of 800 artworks and a Clark Wing–they were only first seen publicly in the jumble of an estate sale at Christie’s in 2014, where they sold for not that much money? Anyway, seventeen paintings by Clark were included in that sale, and she had some moments, mostly that window above, with the geisha lamp reflected in it. [Another four signed paintings, plus a couple of attributions, some prints, and an album of reproductions of her paintings, were auctioned in New Jersey in 2017, leftovers from Christie’s cataloguing. A highlight was this painting of a Dutch doll, which checks a lot of Clark boxes.

Huguette Clark, painting of a Dutch doll, image: Millea via liveauctioneers

Also, though her teacher Tadeusz Styka specialized in painting portraits of socialite women, and once painted Clark appearing to paint a nude man, many of Clark’s surviving paintings are of Japanese women.

Wait, WHAT? Charles Sheeler Invented The Salt & Pepper Shaker?

Charles Sheeler, salt & pepper shakers, aluminum, 1935, gift of Edith Gregor Halpert, image: SAAM

I am just cruising along through the utterly riveting, hilarious, and outrageous and insightful interview the American Art dealer Edith Gregor Halpert did for the Archives of American Art, when she just offhandedly mentions Charles Sheeler is the one who invented putting the S and P on the top of salt and pepper shakers??

In a sense it should not be surprising. Sheeler’s salt and pepper shakers have been around. They show up most recently last year, in Rebecca Shaykin’s show at the Jewish Museum on Halpert and her Downtown Gallery, along with a silver brooch and ring he designed for Halpert when he was trying to woo her.

In 1934, to help drum up interest for artists during the Depression, Halpert had curated a groundbreaking show of her own, “Practical Manifestations in American Art,” that paired a fine artist’s work alongside an item of industrial design: Yasuo Kuniyoshi wallpaper, Edward Steichen textiles–and Sheeler salt & pepper shakers.

And then she says this:

We got the biggest silver company [International Silver Co., or ISC], and they stole the design. Sheeler conceived the idea of the S and the P, but he didn’t patent it, so they stole that.

Really? I will look into it. Halpert gave her Sheeler salt shakers to the Smithsonian in 1968.

[a little while later update: lol while researching these salt shakers, I come to wonder if I have them. There was a show from the Musée des Arts Décoratifs de Montréal called What Modern Was that came to New York, at the IBM Gallery, which was actually a thing, in the IBM Building, which was also a thing, and my favorite indoor garden space when I moved to the city. Anyway, I think these were in there, and between that, the 1939 World’s Fair, and Shmoo, I went on kind of a salt & pepper shaker binge. [I know, but also, I managed to block out the memory of it until at least this afternoon. Anyway, they’re somewhere. Doesn’t answer the question of the headline, though.]

Salt and Pepper Shakers [americanart.si.edu]
Oral history interview with Edith Gregor Halpert, 1962-1963 [aaa.si.edu]
Buy Shaykin’s Edith Halpert, the Downtown Gallery, and the rise of American Art [bookshop.org]

Charles Sheeler Annunciation

Yesterday while searching for lion embroidered Qing rank badges at the Metropolitan Museum, I saw many of them photographed in black & white, which made me wonder if any had been photographed by Charles Sheeler.

It appears not, but Sheeler’s Met photos are always interesting to me. While I ‘ve never imagined buying a Sheeler, I have fantasized about running across a stray print of an African mask or an Egyptian torso in some photodealer’s bin some day. [That has not happened.]

What I did not expect, though, was jamming so hard on this 1943 detail of Antwerp painter Joos van Cleve’s c.1525 Annunciation. Sheeler shows just a dynamic section of the archangel Gabriel’s flowing drapery, embroidered cope, and swirling sash–and just a hint of ankle.

The Annunciation, Joos van Cleve, c. 1525, oil on panel, image: metmuseum.org

Sheeler certainly made stylized, even dramatically composed images for his day job [he worked as a photographer at the Met in 1942-43.] He even took detail shots of other artworks, particularly the museum’s extraordinary Assyrian wall sculptures. [I have an old photobook of them somewhere, published by the museum in 1946.] But this sort of tightly cropped image with such elaborate internal composition feels like he was shooting for himself.

Another thing that comes to mind is Sheeler’s work as a fashion and socialite photographer for Condé Nast between 1926 and 1931. [Though he was quoted in the 2017 show of that work as hating the gig, comparing it to going to jail every day.]

Only a couple of Sheeler’s Assyrian prints are in their collection database, so those might be catalogued as something else. But this was one of a group of Sheeler photos printed and acquired as works in 1982.

It is also my second sixth favorite artwork based on someone else’s Annunciation, after Richter’s first five, but before his next 53.

The Annunciation by Joos van Cleve, Charles Sheeler, 1943, printed 1982 [metmuseum.org]
Annunciation, Joos van Cleve, c. 1525 [metmuseum.org]
Previously, related: LLOLZ On Gerhard Richter’s Annunciation After (A Postcard Of) Titian; Gerhard Richter Facsimile Objects

On Shaker Gift Drawings

Semantha Fairbanks & Mary Wicks, A Sacred Sheet Sent from Holy Mother Wisdom by Her Angel of Many Signs, c. 1843, collection: NGA

I can only be grateful to Léonie Guyer for writing about her transformative encounter with Shaker gift drawings, even though she’s been sleeping on this info for twenty two years.

Shaker gift drawing exhibited in Heavenly Visions, Nov 2011, The Drawing Center

It’s not her fault The Drawing Center held its exhibition of Shaker gift drawings and gift songs in November 2011–wasn’t everyone downtown a bit preoccupied?

Shaker gift drawing attributed to Sister Sarah Bates, Mount Lebanon, NY, collection: Philadelphia Museum of Art

And there are enough conflicting, self-serving accounts of its creation that it’s understandable, I guess, if it’s not yet universally recognized graphic design history that the CBS logo came from a detail of a Shaker gift drawing, an all-seeing eye spotted in 1950 by William Golden in Alexey Brodovich’s magazine.

Anonymous tantric painting, c. 1970, “Energy traveling through, and regulating the colors of the world”; Udaïpur, Rajasthan, image via archive/featureinc

Shaker furniture, via Sheeler, was my bridge from American antiques to modernism. I practice a religion founded in the same mid-19th century hothouse of spiritualism that had Shaker “instruments” seeing visions and dreams and visitations and translating them to “makers,” who drew them on paper. I made my Father Couturier pilgrimages early at Dominique de Menil’s urging at the Rothko Chapel. I swooned over Hudson’s tantric paintings [which were meditative objects, not products, but still]. I MEAN, HILMA AF KLINT, PEOPLE.

And I still can’t help feel that the world has somehow conspired to keep me from ever hearing about Shaker gift drawings. And I am shook.

In The Place Just RIght [openspace.sfmoma.org]

A Complicated Charles Sheeler

Charles Sheeler, Aunt Mary, 1941, just deaccessioned from the Museum of Modern Art, image via Christie’s

Where to even start? As a huge Charles Sheeler fan from early on, my first reaction was “GET IT.” This 1941 Sheeler photo is unusual so many ways. First off, the subject is a person, though one who is surrounded by the artifacts of early Americana that provided a grounding for the artist’s own modernist and precisionist leanings.

More on this person in a second, but second, this print was just deaccessioned by the Museum of Modern Art, and I missed the end of the Christie’s online auction because I was driving–and I forgot.

Installation view of Portraits, a 1943 photo exhibition at MoMA, featuring Berenice Abbot’s Atget (L) and Sheeler’s Aunt Mary (R). via MoMA

2.A? It was a new acquisition included in a 1943 exhibition of portrait photography. It hung next to Berenice Abbott’s portrait of Atget, which was a loan from the artist.

The print was a gift of Abby Aldrich Rockefeller, the Modern’s co-founder. It is unsigned. The back has adhesive residue and an accession number. So I guess technically it might have been an exhibition print; back in the day, the connoisseurial taxonomies of photography were obviously less rigid, as were the accession guidelines of the Department, never mind there was a war on.

Anyway, such an illustrious provenance should smooth over any concerns. And yet the Christie’s estimate was only $5-7,000, a tiny fraction of a more typical Sheeler print. And the thing only got one bid, $1,500, and sold for just $1,875.

Maybe it’s time to go back to the first and most obviously striking thing about this portrait: the subject, an elderly African American woman with an apron, sitting in an antique kitchen, who, according to the photo’s title, is “Aunt Mary.” But whose Aunt Mary? Not the photographer’s, presumably, and not Abby Rockefeller’s, right? Well.

photo of an unidentified African American performer as “Aunt Mary” at Colonial Williamsburg, c. 1933

“Aunt Mary” turns out to be a character, a fictional enslaved worker in the kitchen of the Governor’s Palace at Colonial Williamsburg, another Rockefeller-founded culture venue that had just opened in 1934. On decades worth of Williamsburg postcards “Aunt Mary”, described as a “servant,” sits, head down, in a placid, domestic tableau.

Colonial Williamsburg postcard featuring “Aunt Mary” from eBay

To his credit, Sheeler photographed this unidentified performer as a person, not as a prop. Who was she? What was her job like? Assuming she’s from the area, southern Virginia, she looks too young to have been enslaved herself, but certainly old enough to be the child of former slaves. Until a push by activists and historians in the 1970s, “Aunt Mary” was one of the very few non-white historical characters in Williamsburg.

But why was Sheeler making it? I know and love his documentary photos from the Metropolitan Museum, but did he cover Williamsburg, too? Last year Kirsten Jensen curated a show of Sheeler’s fashion photography for the Michener Art Museum in Pennsylvania. What other Sheeler series and projects are lurking undiscovered in archives out there?

[2020 update:] While looking at some Met Museum Sheelers I’m reminded that Rockefeller was a supporter and collector of Sheeler’s art, and also invited him to photograph Colonial Williamsburg in 1935-36, thanks to Edith Halpert. So there are indeed more images out there, including Stairwell, Williamsburg, and whatever he used to make Kitchen, Williamsburg, duh.]

[2020 update again:] I just found this image was reproduced in a Life Magazine profile of Sheeler in 1938. The caption is pretty bad. This woman is identified as “Aunt Mary,” the enslaved character, even as she’s quoted–in Sheeler’s telling to the reporter–as the re-enactor she is: “Mr. Rockefeller has taken photos of me, so I guess you might as well, too.”

And then, “Because she is a stuffed shirt in a kitchen where nothing is cooked. Aunt Mary is an exception to the Sheeler fondness for functionalism.” Because LIFE does not understand the concept of performance, or a job, or a person, when that person is Black. Or maybe it’s Sheeler.

There Is Another Sheeler Photo Of Baroness Elsa’s Duchamp Portrait

Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven, Portrait of Marcel Duchamp, 1920, photo: Charles Sheeler, published in the Little Reiew, 1922. image: brown.edu

After 6 years and 72 issues, I am sure glad Margaret C. Anderson hung in there to publish one more issue of her avant-garde poetry magazine The Little Review in the Winter of 1922. Because it includes a different Charles Sheeler photo of Baroness Elsa’s Portrait of Marcel Duchamp.

The one that’s been floating around, via Duchamp dealer Frances Naumann, mostly, is a more clinical, perhaps Sheeler-esque photo [below].

Charles Sheeler
The Baroness’s Portrait of Marcel Duchamp, ca. 1920
Gelatin silver print
9 5/8 x 7 5/8 inches, via francesnaumann

But besides the dramatic lighting, the Little Review version actually reveals more of the cocktail of feathers, gears, and flywheels that filled Baroness Elsa’s glass. Also it’s sitting on a plate.

All of this matters to me because this, my second favorite portrait of Duchamp after Florine Stettheimer’s, is lost, destroyed. And so this kind of documentation will help make a reconstitution of it truer to the original, and less of an inspired-by approximation.

Brown University and the University of Tulsa have digitized The Little Review as part of their Modernist Journals Project [brown.edu]

Previously, related Elsa-iana: In The Beginning

In The Beginning

God, Elsa Baroness von Freytag-Loringhoven, photo: Morton Schamberg, 1917, collection: metmuseum.org

The claim that Duchamp “stole” Fountain from Elsa Baroness von Freytag-Loringhoven was brought to the fore recently. The ostensible hook was a criticism of the reissue of Calvin Tomkins’ Duchamp bio, which doesn’t credit Freytag-Loringhoven. But authors Julian Spalding and Glyn Thompson’s real goal is the delegitimization of Duchamp, and with him, the entire post-war art and theory that flowed out of Fountain. It’s the reactionary art historian’s equivalent of traveling back in time to kill teen Hitler. Here is Dr. Thompson trolling his commenters at The Art Newspaper:

Any of the global curatorial elite contemplating changing a label also have the problem of what to attach labels to, because the problem for a work art that draws its legitimacy from the acceptance by Duchamp of the attribution of Mutt’s urinal is that it is now required to obtain it’s legitimacy from somewhere else. Had Duchamp merely exhibited a urinal at the Janis Gallery in 1950 and explained it as homage to Elsa, whose urinal had been rejected by the Independents in 1917, there would be no problem, but there is, because the replica of 1950, attributed to Duchamp, and signed R Mutt, drew its authenticity from the attribution of Mutt’s original to Duchamp, a process which had begun with no complaints from Duchamp in 1935.The implications of this conundrum for the future of avant-garde art must now be addressed…

“Duchamp’s mean and meaningless urinal has acted as a canker in the heart of visual creativity,” they kicked, “Elsa’s puts visual insight back on to the throne of art,” as if they would for a minute support the artistic reign of Queen Elsa, whose outrages and transgressions troubled even the Dada-est of her contemporaries.

Fountain, 1917 assisted readymade by R. Mutt, apparently photographed by Alfred Stieglitz, as it was first seen and known via its publication in The Blind Man 2, May 1917

Which doesn’t mean they’re wrong. Their claims are not based on their own work, but on many years of carefully researched and argued publications of scholars like William Camfield, Irene Gammel, Amelia Jones, and Francis Naumann. Among the evidence: a letter Duchamp wrote to his sister in April 1917, just days after Fountain was rejected, attributing it to “one of my female friends,” which was only discovered and published in 1983. Also bolstering the case: the similarity of Fountain to God, top, Freytag-Loringhoven’s plumbing fixture-based sculpture of the same period. No brainer, right?

Portrait of Marcel Duchamp, c. 1920, Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven, photo: Charles Sheeler, via francisnaumann

Except that for decades God was considered to be the work of Dada/precisionist painter Morton Schamberg. Schamberg was a close friend of decidedly un-Dada Charles Sheeler. Both Schamberg and Sheeler photographed artworks for money. Freytag-Loringhoven’s found object assemblage Portrait of Marcel Duchamp exists only in Sheeler’s photo of it, above, which was only discovered in the 1990s. They have separate billing. Naumann, who has written several of The Books On Duchamp, re-attributed God to Elsa in the mid-00’s, but so far she gets, at best, shared credit. One of the photos Schamberg took of God includes his own machine-inspired painting in the background, but two do not. This is the only sculpture associated with Schamberg, who died in the 1918 flu pandemic.

Morton Schamberg photo of God, image via christies

This Schamberg-less Schamberg photo of God sold at Christie’s in 2011. The estimate of $5-7,000 was in line with his market history; the result, $390,000, makes me think that the Baroness’s history was a factor and that someone out there believes in her God.

This God talk was weighing on my mind for a couple of months when I stumbled across a 200+ page oral history from UCLA of the pioneering West Coast abstractionist Lorser Feitelson, whose career began in New York in the 1910s and 20s:

[Freytag-Loringhoven] would come up to visit us, …and she’d bring up all kinds of –I think I told you this–a cluster of pipes that she picked up right around the corner (they had razed one of those buildings), dragging this thing up the stairs. [It sounded like] somebody was busting the building. And she said, “Isn’t this a grand sculpture?” And she wasn’t kidding. Accident made this thing. What the hell difference does it make if the guy intended it or not? It wasn’t difficult to convince us.

The awesomely gossipy Feitelson tells the Baroness’s endless demands for sexual services from men and women alike, and of her many arrests for indecent exposure for “the way she dressed, in batik, with an opening there and dyed pubic hair, walking down Fifth Avenue.” And of how taking his young nieces to Elsa’s studio turned out to be “the worst mistake I ever made in my life,” when she identified the glittery pink nebula painting they were looking at as a belfie.

For all this, though, Feitelson’s most interesting story is of his first, daunting encounter with Freytag-Loringhoven, who picked up the young student at a live modeling session in Gertrude Whitney’s Studio Club and took him home.

Geez, I mean, what the hell kind of a gal is this? And here on the walls were shovels and all kinds of things. I said, “Marcel Duchamp.”* She said, “Yes, I know him very well.” I don’t mean to say that she took it from him–and I’m not sure. She was playing around with “found discoveries.” She would take the shovel and put it up against a background of some kind of a colored paper or materials. She had many such things, and they were wonderful.

God, cast iron plumbing trap on miter box, 1917, attr. to Schamberg & von Freytag-Loringhoven, collection: philamuseum

In a deal engineered by Duchamp, God was acquired in 1950, along with many major Duchamp works, by the Philadelphia Museum.. The Large Glass joined the museum two years later. God is currently credited to both Schamberg and Freytag-Loringhoven.

What if Elsa took the original In Advance of A Broken Arm? What if she helped make it? What if she and Duchamp conspired to create R. Mutt’s Fountain–which, remember, was identified almost immediately as a Buddha–and submit it to the Independents? Feitelson wrapped up his discussion of the Baroness with a segue to Duchamp: “[s]he had to have this terrific conceit and faith in her convictions. And I still say you cannot talk about Marcel Duchamp detached from other people.” In its own fitful way, the art world’s conversation is starting to shift.

* OK, I’ve wondered about this for a while, and now it’s a year later, and I am still wondering. I have a hard time figuring out how Feitelson would see a shovel hanging in a stranger’s studio and immediately associate it with Duchamp.

Feitelson actually said this drawing studio was before Whitney started her Studio Club, but that was 1914. And Duchamp only hung In Advance Of A Broken Arm in the studio he shared with Jean Crotti in November 1915. So no.
Feitelson said he was in NYC “during the war,” which would be 1918-19 from the US view of things. Whitney Studio Club was on W 4th St, and moved to W 8th in 1923. So that’s a possibility. But again, Duchamp had his shovel in his studio, and Feitelson never seems to have gone there. He never mentioned Crotti. He never mentioned the Arensbergs, the center of Duchamp’s circle, and exactly the kind of folks a namedropper like Feitelson would go on about. Did people talk about Duchamp’s studio objects? Because I don’t think he showed them publicly. Instead, I suspect this Elsa memory is a retrofit, Feitelson trying to make it sound like he knew what was going on in Elsa’s studio. There may have been a shovel, which would be interesting, very interesting! But I highly doubt if he saw it, Lorser Feitelson connected it at the time to Duchamp.

MoMA’s Murals By American Painters And Photographers, 1932

New York, montage photomural, Berenice Abbott, all images via moma’s 1932 catalogue
I’ve been meaning to post this for a couple of months, but with museum censorship battles and political mural controversies in the news, what better time, right?
When I started researching the history of photomurals–or more precisely, the photomurals of history, since I was mostly just posting various photomurals I’d discovered–I was interested in their context, in the exhibitions and expos they were created for, and whether they were considered or treated as art.

Metal, Glass and Cork, Hendrick Duryea and Robert Locher

Continue reading “MoMA’s Murals By American Painters And Photographers, 1932”

What I Looked At Today – More Charles Sheeler

To be honest, I’ve never felt very interested in the late paintings of Charles Sheeler. After his Precisionist, industrial peak, and his consistently strong, modernist photography, the delicate, highly constructed, cubist/abstract Pennsylvania barn compositions seemed a little twee. They certainly weren’t where the action was in the 40s and 50s, either; that would be Action painting.
But I guess I’ll need to take another look. I kind of like this loose little tempera study for one of his last paintings. Apparently, Sheeler would work out his composition in several preliminary stages; after paper came this one here, tempera on Plexiglass, which seems an odd step. Then came board, and finally canvas.

Maybe it’s nothing great. Maybe it’s just nice to be able to zoom all the way in and see what brushstrokes look like on a glossy, hard surface. Heritage Auction in Dallas certainly wins the prize for best online photodocumentation of its lots.
Lot 66036: Barn Decorations (Hex Signs), 1959, Charles Sheeler, tempera on plexiglass, 6.5 x 9.5 inches [ha.com]
Previously: starting the dutch landscape paintings project

The City As A Living Thing With A Giant Mailbox-Shaped Building In It

Hilary Harris’s 1975 Organism feels like a missing link in the chain of film portraits of New York City as a pulsing, living thing. Like Whitman, whose “Leaves of Grass” provided the text for their1921 film Manhatta Paul Strand and Charles Sheeler showed “million-footed Manhattan…descend[ing] to her pavements” and forests of buildings growing up to the sky. Then, by the time Godfrey Reggion made Koyaanisqatsi in 1982, the metaphor was solid enough to use the time-lapse photography Harris pioneered to diagnose the city’s terminal illness.
Maybe what modern city life needs to return it to full health is more post offices shaped like mailboxes. I combined frames from the various cuts of Harris’s slow, time-lapse pan in order to get a picture of the whole thing. Anyone know where this was?

Watch Manhatta and Organism at Ubu [ubu.com, via brian sholis]

The Modern’s Image Of Freedom Competition

News that the Amon Carter Museum in Fort Worth acquired a painting by Charles Sheeler of the Boulder Dam sent me looking for more, and guess what I found? Sheeler’s painting is one of six commissioned in 1938 by Fortune Magazine for a series on “American industrial power.” He also made at least 20 photos of the dam, including the print above, which was sold by The Museum of Modern Art in a large sale of photography held at Sotheby’s in 2001.
But why stop at pushing the deaccession button, when there’s the accession, curatorial stunt, war, and government involvement in the arts buttons to be pushed, too? From the lot description:

This photograph was one of the prize-winning images in the Museum’s Image of Freedom contest and exhibition, in which photographers were asked to ‘interpret a facet of the American spirit.’ Of the 799 photographs entered, 95 were selected as prize- winners and bought by the Museum for $25 each. The photographer’s identities were concealed while their entries were reviewed by a judging panel consisting of Ansel Adams, Beaumont and Nancy Newhall, Monroe Wheeler, James Thrall Soby, David McAlpin, Alfred Barr, Jr., and A. Hyatt Mayor.

Now truth be told, that’s a pretty unimpeachable panel, as far as the history of photography goes. Adams and Barr, you know. Beaumont Newhall helped form MoMA’s photography department under trustee/collector McAlpin’s watch; Nancy Newhall was an influential critic and close collaborator with Adams and Brett Weston; Wheeler and Soby were both senior officials and/or curators at the Modern as well as trustees; and Mayor was a pioneering print curator at the Met. Still, an anonymous contest where the prize is $25 and entry of your work into the Modern’s collection? Would any museum try such a thing today?

And what about this whole Image of Freedom competition itself? The contest, organized in conjunction with the US Office of Civilian Defense, took place in 1941, before the country actually entered WWII. [The exhibition opened in October, hot on the heels of the National Defense Poster Competition show, part of a double bill with the debut of Picasso’s Guernica (above). The goal of this contest was to “urge artists to create posters that would encourage citizens to support the war effort through personal and economic commitment.” The posters later appeared in Army recruiting offices and on billboards around the country.]
In the invitation, photographers were asked, “What, to you, most deeply signifies America? Can you compress it into a few photographic images?” and charged to capture “the spirit of our thoughts, our ways, our homes, our jobs.” Which doesn’t exactly sound the same as our awesome dams, our giant parades, and our suspension bridges [that’s one of Brett Weston’s award-winners above, which was also sold at Sotheby’s].

In his review for Photo Notes, Walter Rosenblum found the Images of Freedom didn’t show enough of The People:

Isn’t the Image of Freedom something bigger, something more vital [than the natural beauty of the country]? Isn’t it that very human quality that differentiates a Nazi Storm trooper from a real American. Isn’t it that which is reflected in the workers of Lewis Hine, the people who built the Empire State building, the oppressed who come to this country for refuge?
Isn’t it the farmer of Dorothea Lange, the sharecropper’s brave wife? Isn’t it the complete body of work of the F. S. A.? Isn’t it the worker in the mill, in the shop, in the factory? The teacher who can teach as he pleases, without following a regimented text book drawn up by the Nazis? Isn’t it reflected in these people who have a stake in our democracy that they are proud of and are willing to fight for to defend?
Isn’t it the people who organized Ford at the cost of their lives, the American boys who went to Spain to stop the fascist invader before he was able to spread his power. Isn’t it the air raid warden in the city streets, who stands with his head so high, because he is doing his bit for his country? Isn’t it that American, who after a hard day’s work, visits a Red Cross Station in order to donate his blood to the cause of democracy, to that cause which will give us a better chance of retaining our own freedom.

Rosenblum namechecks a few of his favorite Working Man images from the show. Which is all fine, I suppose, though all that union talk sounds like a lot of Ruskie happytalk to me.
But that discussion still ignores the show’s remarkably problematic [or not?] core assumption, namely that a museum–not just a museum, The Museum–should be organizing exhibits for the government and rallying artists to support preparations for war. Or maybe it just baffles me, living as I do in a moment of history where jingoist wingnuts see an NEA conference call as evidence that an army of brainwashing artists is about to enslave America under Obama’s tryannical thumb–and where self-important critics make naive, grand pronouncements on the sanctity of Art.
How does MoMA account for its own deep, involved history of colloboration with the government to produce exhibitions and to promote The American Way or whatever? The short answer is with careful ambivalence that tries to distinguish, at least in retrospect, the independently artistic from the overtly propagandistic. Here’s the introduction to an exhibition in the Museum Archive called, “The Museum and The War Effort: Artistic Freedom and Reporting for ‘The Cause,'” organized last year by two folks in the Archive, Miriam Gianni and MacKenzie Bennett:

In the United States in the 1930s and the early 1940s, many people believed that modern art could pave a pathway to democracy. Numerous exhibitions at The Museum of Modern Art were produced in collaboration with the United States government. The Museum also continued to organize shows that were aligned with its mission to exhibit the best of recent works of art.
Artists in the United States, Europe, and Asia used art as a medium through which they could voice their opinions about political regimes, war, and social turmoil. From 1938 onward, a variety of compelling exhibitions featuring works produced by artists motivated by wartime experiences were organized at the Museum. In Luis Quintanilla: An Exhibition of Drawings of the War in Spain, Art from Fighting China, and Yank Illustrates the War, MoMA provided its public with a glimpse into war-torn Europe and Asia and an inside look at the difficulties of military life.
In addition to exhibiting war-focused artworks, the Museum played an active role in seeking out artists to assist in government campaigns for the war effort. Staff from the Museum acted as liaisons between government agencies and artists. In 1942 James Thrall Soby became director of the Museum’s Armed Services Program, which functioned as an intermediary between government agencies and the Museum. Under its auspices, exhibition and film programs designed to rally support for the war and solidify America’s image as a society interested in spreading democracy and freedom were added to MoMA’s roster.

Weston’s images were included in a collection survey in 1944, but Sheeler’s photo was apparently never exhibited again by the Museum. It makes me wonder how other Image of Freedom winners fared after the war, artistically speaking, I mean. Maybe despite its long history as an official partner of government propaganda, the Modern has managed to keep its independent artistic and curatorial efforts clear of interference from The Man. Just like how a fine art photographer keeps her commercial work separate from her art.
Or maybe that’s exactly what they want you to think.