|
Charles Sheeler (painter) American, 1883 - 1965 Classic Landscape, 1931 oil on canvas Overall: 63.5 x 81.9 cm (25 x 32 1/4 in.) framed: 72.9 x 91.1 x 7 cm (28 11/16 x 35 7/8 x 2 3/4 in.) Collection of Barney A. Ebsworth 2000.39.2 Not on View |
Charles Sheeler was a master of both painting and photography, and his work in one medium influenced and shaped his work in the other. In 1927 he was commissioned to photograph the Ford Motor Company's new River Rouge Plant near Detroit. Then the world's largest industrial complex employing more than seventy-five thousand workers, the plant produced Ford's Model A, successor to the famed Model T. Sheeler's photographs were used for the company's advertising, but he found himself greatly inspired by the subject, which he declared "incomparably the most thrilling I have had to work with."1 In 1930 he began painting oils of the plant, creating over the next six years American Landscape (1930, The Museum of Modern Art, New York), Classic Landscape (1931), River Rouge Plant (1932, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York), and City Interior (1936, Worcester Art Museum).
Classic Landscape depicts an area of the plant where cement was made from by-products of the manufacturing process. The silos in the middle distance stored the cement until it could be shipped for sale. Sheeler's choice of this rather anonymous scene, rather than one connected with the production of automobiles, suggests that his interest lay in making a generalized portrait of the landscape of industry. That, in part, may explain his use in the painting's title of the word "classic," with its connotations of typical or standard. But "classic" also evokes the culture of ancient Greece and Rome, and Sheeler certainly implies that this modern American scene can be compared to the high achievements of the classical past. One might well be reminded of classical architecture by the templelike form of the silos and the pedimentlike roofs of the nearby buildings, but the matter clearly went beyond superficial resemblance. Like others of his day, Sheeler admired architecture that was functional and straightforward, with shape and plan determined by specifics of use rather than by conventions of style and decoration. For the great French architect Le Corbusier, whose influential Towards a New Architecture Sheeler probably read about this time, the timeless principles of good design embodied by ancient architecture were indeed still at work in "the American grain elevators and factories, the magnificent first-fruits of the new age."2
The iconic power and special importance of Classic Landscape were recognized from the time of its first public exhibition in New York in 1931. Through the years, it has become one of the most widely exhibited and best-known works of its era, and today it stands as a key masterwork of twentieth-century American art.
(Text by Franklin Kelly, published in the National Gallery of Art exhibition catalogue, Art for the Nation, 2000)
Notes
1. Letter to Walter Arensberg, 25 October 1927; quoted in Theodore E. Stebbins Jr. and Norman Keyes Jr., Charles Sheeler: The Photographs [exh. cat., Museum of Fine Arts] (Boston, 1987), 25.
2. Le Corbusier, Towards a New Architecture, trans. Frederick Etchells (London, 1927), 21.