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Show focuses on media connections

June 22, 2006 12:50 am

By SHEILA WICKOUSKI

For THE FREE LANCE-STAR

"Charles Sheeler: Across Media," on view at the National Gallery of Art through Aug. 27, gives viewers a lot to wonder about.

Unlike recent retrospectives of the American modernist and photographer, the NGA exhibit has focused on exploring the complex relationships among Sheeler's photography, film, painting and drawing. While the show is about the artist, it also serves as a lesson on how these varying media affect the visual interpretation of an image.

The chronological arrangement of the exhibit takes viewers on a journey through Sheeler's career and the themes of his work.

Starting with his famous 1917 photos taken inside an 18th-century house in Doylestown, Pa., one can trace the evolution of his art. A marvel at precision, Sheeler used his early training in industrial drawing and decorative painting to make these early pieces admirable technical works.

The influence of the European modernists he met in his brief time in Paris, his regard for the work of James Abbott McNeill Whistler and his experience as a professional photographer all come through.

But something else is key to the approach of this particular exhibit. For those who harbor questions about the distinctions between painting, drawing, photography and film, Sheeler's work gives one artist's exploration of possibilities.

The cubistic lines, and the nuances of white, gray and black, are evident in his photographs, his charcoals and drawings, and his paintings.

His work includes more than the lines and shadows of specific images, such as a door or a stove in an early American house, the Ford Motor Company plant or New York City skyscrapers. Sheeler's images also portray what he sees in his surroundings, what is natural in his world.

He is a master technician of the powers and distinctions of each medium. Using charcoal for drawing is as old as cavemen, while moving picture cameras were new to the 20th century.

Since photographs are created by mechanical means and seem to be representations of reality, the mind easily suspends the possibility that the artist has deliberately set up the scene.

Painters have a set of tools, a palette of colors, a choice of paints. Like photographers, they choose between abstract and realistic portraits and landscapes. And what all of the visual arts share is the power to convey emotions and ideas without words.

Sheeler's collaboration with photographer Paul Strand in the documentary film of the early 1920s "Manhatta" provides clues to Sheeler's thought process concerning the relationship between photos and movies. The 65 shots of lower Manhattan used in the 10-minute film of photographs, which was regarded as the first avant-garde film made in the United States, were taken in one day.

Sheeler would be dubbed the "true artist of corporate capitalism" for some of his classic representations of the Ford Motor Company plant in 1927 and of New England mills later on.

Another point of wonder is the absence of humans in his works. However, there is ample evidence of human life both domestic and industrial.

Only in his "Self-Portrait at Easel" is there a human figure. In "The Artist Looks at Nature," painted more than a decade later, Sheeler incorporates his self-portrait into a landscape work that has been compared to Rene Magritte's visual puzzles. An artist looking at nature outdoors in daylight is sketching the interior of a room illuminated by artificial light at night. Stairs and walls divide the landscape but go nowhere.

Whether your focus is on the philosophy behind the art, or the techniques that produced it, it is a wonder to behold the work of this American artist.