"Mother and Child", Early Stage of Roughing Out with Pointed Chisel

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