Charles Sheeler: Across Media
June 11, 2006
East Building Auditorium
Held in conjunction with the exhibition
Charles Sheeler:
Across Media
Following the four lectures, the speakers will be joined by Charles Brock, assistant curator of American and British paintings, National Gallery of Art; Sharon Corwin, Carolyn Muzzy Director and Chief Curator, Colby College Museum of Art; and Carol Troyen, John Moors Cabot Curator of American Paintings, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, for a panel discussion.
Across Media and Across the Borders of Art: Sheeler's Advertising Pictures in Historical Perspective
Michele H. Bogart, professor and director of graduate studies,
Stony Brook University
Charles Sheeler's photographs for the Ford Motor Company are well-known icons of American art. The broader sociological and commercial context in which Sheeler was operating, however, is less familiar. He was not the only artist whose career cut across the worlds of fine art and advertising. Indeed, his activities were comparable to those of artists as diverse as N. C. Wyeth, Maxfield Parrish, Rockwell Kent, Anton Bruehl, and Georgia O'Keeffe. Numerous others, less widely known today but famous in their time, practiced painting, photography, and advertising illustration in a similar vein. This twinning of artistic and commercial identities posed challenges for both the artists and their advertiser clients during the first half of the twentieth century, prompting debates about the meaning and merit of modern art in the realm of publicity.
The lecture will examine these circumstances. It will provide an overview of the emergence of art in advertising, then explore the implications of these developments for Sheeler and others whose work spanned multiple media and served both aesthetic and commercial purposes. The lecture will demonstrate that, even early on, the artists' and the clients' attitudes toward the marriage of art and commercial imagery were ambivalent at best. Sheeler was acclaimed for his River Rouge pictures, Parrish for his Edison Mazda fantasies, and Kent for his exotic prints for Marcus Jewelers. Nevertheless, the persistence of "creator-oriented" romantic ideals led many modern artists to feel extremely conflicted about the commercial artistic transactions that enabled them to undertake their independent paintings. Perhaps not surprisingly, advertising art occasionally revealed these personal and professional tensions.
Charles Sheeler and Paul Strand Make Manhatta
Jan-Christopher Horak, curator, Hollywood Entertainment Museum; professor, University of California, Los Angeles; and editor, The Moving Image
Manhatta, a seven-minute film portrait of New York City, is acknowledged by many to be the first genuine avant-garde film produced in the United States. Working essentially as amateurs, the team of Sheeler and Strand created a film whose complex mode of address has been undervalued by photo-historians who see it merely as a documentary.
Sheeler and Steichen: Photography, Advertising, and Modernism in the 1930s
Patricia Johnston, professor of art history, Salem State College
Between the World Wars it was common for modernist photographers to make both art and commercial photographs. As the history of photography was written, these practices became increasingly separated and the definition of modernism became more closely associated with fine art. This lecture explores the images and ideas of Charles Sheeler and Edward Steichen in regard to their views of advertising photography in the 1930s. Their ideas will be placed in the context of the concurrent debates over the politics of mass culture that were so crucial to shaping modernism's history.
Deconstructing Documentary: Ben Shahn's Use of Photography
Laura R. Katzman, chair of the art department, associate professor of art, and director of museum studies, Randolph-Macon Woman's College
American artist Ben Shahn (1906–1969), best known for his social content paintings and his politically progressive graphic work, also created an impressive body of documentary photographs in the 1930s. Until the last decade, however, Shahn's photographs—used by him as both a vehicle to document urban and rural conditions in the United States and as source and inspiration for his art in other media—had not been given much scholarly attention. Despite the fact that Shahn was one of the early influential photographers on the now famous Farm Security Administration Project (FSA), his larger involvement in the medium as well as the relationship between his photography and his painting had been cursorily treated. Reasons for this situation range from the tenuous status of photography as a fine art in Shahn's day to the taboos surrounding an artist's use of photography and the fact that Shahn only seriously practiced photography for a brief yet intense time in the 1930s. And although Shahn recognized the critical importance of photography to his work, his politics, and his social vision, he chose to promote himself primarily as a painter. He could be dismissive of photography, especially matters of technique, and distanced himself from his photographic past at critical moments in his career.
Recent scholarly examination of Shahn's photographic production has revealed the fascinating and innovative ways that he engaged the medium during the hard times of the Great Depression. As a political artist who worked briefly for the Communist Party, Shahn used the newly available 35 mm Leica as a means to record the immigrant street life of New York's ethnic neighborhoods and the protest activity of unionizing artists in lower Manhattan. Most fundamentally, Shahn used the camera as an aide memoire, more efficient than the pencil in helping him remember details for future paintings—details that would add the kind of historical specificity and “authenticity” that was central to his generation of painters. Shahn maintained a clipping archive of both his own photographs and photos from newspapers, categorizing them into alphabetized files for later reference. Sometimes he used the same photograph as a source for more than one painting, thereby acknowledging how photographs take on new meanings in different contexts. Shahn not only culled his photographs for subjects/content, but also to assist in the rendering of compositional perspective and space. He even embraced that strange, telescoped space often seen through the camera's eye. At times, Shahn could use photographs more conceptually, for example, to make works of art in other media that comment on the medium of photography itself, reflecting on the nature of representation.
The lecture will address the complex ways in which Shahn used photography, focusing on key paintings in his oeuvre that offer provocative meta-commentary on photography and on the documentary mode in particular. It will demonstrate how examining the photographic origins of Shahn's paintings reveals layers of meaning previously unacknowledged in art historical literature. This approach, in turn, challenges longstanding perceptions of American social realist painting as merely straightforward illustration or didactic leftist propaganda, allowing for more a nuanced understanding of the movement. Such examination, which links Shahn to both modernist and post-modernist pictorial strategies, brings him closer to Charles Sheeler, a fellow painter-photographer whose cool, precisionist, and seemingly detached vision seems worlds apart from Shahn's grittier, expressive, and overtly engaged sensibility. Shahn's example not only makes a compelling comparison to Sheeler's but may offer new insights into the latter's work as well.