Charles Sheeler was the stark poet of the machine age. Photographer of the Ford Motor Company and founder of the painting movement Precisionism, he is remembered as a promoter of - and apologist for - the industrialised capitalist ethic. This major new rethink of one of the key figures of American modernism argues that Sheeler's true relationship to progress was in fact highly negative, his 'precisionism' both skewed and imprecise. Covering the entire oeuvre from photography to painting and drawing attention to the inconsistencies, curiosities and 'puzzles' embedded in Sheeler's work, Rawlinson reveals a profound critique of the processes of rationalisation and the conditions of modernity. The book argues finally for a re-evaluation of Sheeler's often dismissed late work which, it suggests, may only be understood through a radical shift in our understanding of the work of this prominent figure.

Publisher description

Charles Sheeler (1886-1965) was one of the most noted American painters and photographers to embrace the iconography of the machine. But was he high priest or heretic in the religion of mass production and technology that dominated his era? Karen Lucic considers this intriguing question while telling us Sheeler's story, and showing us how Sheeler produced images of extraordinary aesthetic power that provocatively confirmed America's technological and industrial prestige in vivid detail.

Charles Sheeler in Doylestown investigates one artist's lifelong engagement with the rich, distinctive traditions of rural Bucks County, Pennsylvania. It charts Sheeler's discovery of the region's architecture and artifacts beginning about 1910, when he and fellow artist Morton Livingston Schamberg rented an 18th-century farmhouse in Doylestown. It assesses the impact this seminal event had on Sheeler's early career, and how his cyclical return to Bucks County themes in later life reveals poignant attachments and emotional depths not usually ascribed to this 20th-century painter and photographer -- known primarily as an iconographer of the machine.

Essays by leading authorities on the artist's work accompany a stunning collection of nearly two hundred photographs by modernist American photographer Charles Sheeler, offering a landmark retrospective of of the work of the influential master of twentieth-century photography. 15,000 first printing.

This book presents the fascinating untold story of art-world tastemaker Edith Halpert, who sold, promoted, and effectively defined American art in the 20th century.