Nude Torso

Charles SheelerWW-1903-129364

1903·Graphite and black pencil, with stumping and erasing, on ivory wove paper, laid down on off-white wove paper·11.5 × 16 cm (4 9/16 × 6 5/16 in.)

<p>A painter, photographer, printmaker, and draftsman, Charles Sheeler became the major exponent of Precisionism, a style that employed clean-cut lines, simple forms, and sharp focus. He was part of the New York avant-garde art world that also included Charles Demuth and others associated with Alfred Stieglitz. In his quest for elegant simplification, Sheeler was drawn to a wide variety of sources, from Shaker artifacts to modern industrial architecture. His keen eye and delicate touch oscillate between realism and abstraction in this depiction of a section of a woman’s torso.</p>

Catalogue

Year: 1903
Medium: Graphite and black pencil, with stumping and erasing, on ivory wove paper, laid down on off-white wove paper
Dimensions: 11.5 × 16 cm (4 9/16 × 6 5/16 in.)
Collection: Art Institute of Chicago
Artist: Charles Sheeler

Artist

Charles Sheeler

Painting

A leading figure of the Precisionist movement of the 1920s – 30s, Charles Sheeler is known for his crisply-articulated interpretations of the modernizing American landscape, from the urban monoliths of the New York City skyline to the sprawling factories of the industrial Midwest. In his carefully balanced compositions, Sheeler explored aesthetic and conceptual tension, chiefly between abstraction and representation; objectivity and subjectivity; painting and photography; and the past and present. Sheeler employed a novel process for creating paintings based on his photographs, once observing: “Photography records inalterably the single image, while painting records a plurality of images willfully directed by the artist.” The process-driven dialogue between media and object endures as one of Sheeler’s greatest contributions to American modernism.

Philadelphia, PA, USA

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