Charles R Sheeler (1883-1965)

Aliases: Charles Sheeler; Charles R. Sheeler; Charles Rettew (Junior) Sheeler

Professions: Painter; Lithographer; Photographer

• 

  

  Stacks in Procession

• 

  

  CHARLES SHEELER 1883-1965 SHAKER BARNS Measurements: 12.5in. by 19in Alternate Measurements: (31.8 by 48.2 cm) signed Sheeler and dated 1945, l.r. tempera on board Provenance: The Downtown Gallery, New York Mrs. J. Cheever Cowdin, New York, 1945

• 

  

  Stacks in Celebration

• 

  

  CHARLES SHEELER 1883-1965

• Charles R Sheeler Related Content
• Charles R Sheeler at Auction Now
• Charles R Sheeler Sold at Auction

Charles R Sheeler Biography

(b Philadelphia 1883; d New York City 1965) American painter and photographer. Charles Sheeler began studying art at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Art in 1903. Around 1910 he began commercial photography while supporting himself as a painter. He became known for his stark photographs of Philadelphia’s buildings and industrial areas. Throughout his career Sheeler chose functional subjects and depicted them with sharply defined forms, capturing and abstracting existent patterns in his paintings as only a photographer could. Sheeler's ability to find beauty in the functional and create reductive images free from superlative detail spoke both to the nation's Puritan history and its industrial future, pioneering a new American aesthetic. Sheeler depicts industrial subjects as the temples of urban modernity, eliminating the unattractive side of industry and reducing it to a pristine, Utopian ideal. Indeed, many critics have regarded him as an artist whose work epitomizes a clear-eyed native, visual tradition; he has been considered a pragmatic Yankee whose no-nonsense, efficient approach to picturemaking reflects America's historic virtues. (Credit: Christie’s, New York, Important American Paintings, Drawings, and Sculpture, May 24, 2007, Lot 28).

Back to the Top

Charles R Sheeler Related Content

• Auction Houses

  Genres/Artists

• Featured Houses (6)

  • Barridoff Galleries
  • Doyle New York
  • Freeman's
  • Grogan & Company
  • Sloans & Kenyon
  • Swann Auction Galleries
  • Other Houses (15)
  • Bonhams
  • Christie's
  • Heritage Auctions
  • Kaminski Auctions
  • Keno Auctions
  • Leslie Hindman Auctioneers
  • Louisiana Auction Exchange
  • Morton Goldberg Galleries
  • Mystic Fine Arts
  • Phillips de Pury & Company
  • Skinner
  • Sotheby's
  • South Bay Auctions Inc
  • Wright
  • Young Fine Arts Auctions

• Precisionism (12)

  • George Copeland Ault
  • Peter Blume
  • Ralston Crawford
  • Francis Hyman Criss
  • Charles Henry Demuth
  • Preston Dickinson
  • Elsie Driggs
  • O Louis Guglielmi
  • Edmund D Lewandowski
  • Louis Lozowick
  • Morton Livingston Schamberg
  • Niles Spencer

• American Modernism (21)

  • George Copeland Ault
  • Milton Clark Avery
  • Oscar Florianus Bluemner
  • Patrick Henry Bruce
  • Charles Ephraim Burchfield
  • Ralston Crawford
  • Andrew Michael Dasburg
  • Stuart Davis
  • Manierre Dawson
  • Charles Henry Demuth
  • Arthur Garfield Dove
  • Marsden Hartley
  • Karl Knaths
  • John Marin
  • Alfred Henry Maurer
  • Georgia O'Keeffe
  • Joseph Stella
  • Paul Strand
  • Max Weber
  • Marguerite Thompson Zorach
  • William Zorach

Back to the Top