Skip to main content

Charles Sheeler from Doylestown to Detroit

Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
July 22–November 5, 2017

This exhibition celebrates the MFA’s unparalleled holdings of works by Charles Sheeler (1883–1965), presenting 40 photographs from three significant series created during the heyday of his career as a founder of American modernism.


Side of White Barn, Bucks County, Pa., 1915. (Charles Sheeler/The Lane Collection, courtesy of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston)
After enjoying success as a painter, Sheeler initially took up photography as a way to make a living.


 Buggy, Doylestown, Pa., 1917. (Charles Sheeler/The Lane Collection, courtesy of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston)

His experiments with the medium included the 1916-17 series of photographs capturing various elements of an 18th-century house he rented in Doylestown, Pennsylvania. The sequence of stark, geometric compositions was among the most abstract and avant-garde work being made in the US at the time—created in response to the Cubist art of Picasso and Braque that Sheeler had previously encountered in Europe.


Manhatta – Through a Balustrade (1920), Charles Sheeler. © The Lane Collection

In 1920, Sheeler collaborated with fellow photographer Paul Strand on the short film Manhatta, presenting dramatic views of lower Manhattan. Abstract stills from the 35mm film, which was shot from steep angles, are presented alongside larger prints of Sheeler’s cinematic images of New York City, produced shortly after Manhatta—which he used as source material for his paintings.

 
Criss-Crossed Conveyors — Ford Plant, 1927. (Charles Sheeler/The Lane Collection, courtesy of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston)

The exhibition culminates with the 1927 photographs of the Ford Motor Company plant in River Rouge, Michigan, commissioned to celebrate the introduction of Ford’s Model A. The cathedral-like scenes convey an optimism for American industry, and are now considered icons of Machine Age photography.

All of the photographs in the exhibition are drawn from the Museum’s Lane Collection—one of the finest private holdings of 20th-century American art in the world, including Sheeler’s entire photographic estate—given to the MFA in 2012.  

More images

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Món ăn làm đẹp da, chống nếp nhăn, trị nám da hiệu quả nhất

Yến sào hầm nước dừa, hạt sen -Công dụng: Nhuận phổi ngưng ho, giảm béo, trắng da, trị nám da hiệu quả. -Nguyên tố vi lượng: Calci, acid amin, chất nhựa. Protein trong yến sào tự nhiên chiếm khoảng 50%, thành phần còn lại là calci, acid amin, sulfor. Vậy làm sao hằng ngày chúng ta có thể hấp thu được lượng sữa uống? Điều quan trọng là, trong yến sào có chứa phân tử sinh trưởng biểu bì và hormon thúc đẩy quá trình phân chia tế bào, thúc đẩy sự tái tạo mới, tăng cường sức đề kháng cho cớ thể, khôi phục nguyên tố, cho bạn một làn da trắng và mịn màng. -Nguyên liệu: Yến sào 30g, nước dừa 200ml, đường phèn, hạt sen 60g. -Cách làm: 1. Yến sào ngâm vào nước khoảng 4 giờ, loại bỏ tạp chất, lông vụn, rửa sạch, để ráo nước, chuẩn bị sẵn. Hạt sen ngâm mềm, loại bỏ tim, để sẵn. 2. Bỏ đường phèn vào 600ml nước để sooim cho đường tan ra, sau đó cho yến sào và hạt sen vào, đậy nắp lại, chưng cách thủy khoảng 1 giờ 30 phút, rồi cho nước dừa vào nấu 15 phút. -Mẹo nhỏ: 1. Yến...

Turner and the Sun

The Gallery, Winchester Discovery Centre 5 August – 15 October 2017, Sainsbury Gallery, Willis Museum, Basingstoke 21 October – 16  December 2017,    In the weeks prior to his death, J.M.W. Turner is said to have declared (to John Ruskin) ‘ The Sun is God’ –  what he meant by this, no-one really knows, but what is not in any doubt is the central role that the sun played in Turner’s lifelong obsession with light and how to paint it. Turner and the Sun , an exhibition curated by Hampshire Cultural Trust, will be the first ever to be devoted solely to the artist’s lifelong obsession with the sun. Whether it is the soft light of dawn, the uncompromising brilliance of midday or the technicolour vibrancy of sunset, his light-drenched landscapes bear testimony to the central role that the sun assumed in Turner’s art. Through twelve generous loans from Tate Britain – the majority of which are rarely on public display – this focused exhibition...

Sotheby's IMPRESSIONIST & MODERN ART 14 November 2017 Updated

IMPRESSIONIST & MODERN ART EVENING SALE  Auction 14 November 2017  Works from the Mellon Family Collection are led by    Claude Monet’s Champ d’iris à Giverny, painted in 1887 during a period of respite from the artist’s extensive travels in Holland, Brittany and, finally, his newly- established permanent studio at Giverny (estimate $3/5 million) . The idyllic , pastoral subject matter of this work encapsulates the central focus of Monet’s oeuvre toward the end of the 19 th century, when he divorced himself from painting urban scenes of Paris and devoted himself fully to his beloved countryside in Giverny.  The present work was acquired by the Mellons in 1953 and has remained in the family’s collection since .  Jeanne dite Cocotte, et Ludovic Rodolphe Pissarro sur un tapis is one of the remarkable compositions in which Camille Pissarro turns his at ention to his own family as the subject for his art (estimate $800,000/1.2 million...