U.S. Classicist

U. S. Classicist

The late William Merritt Chase, instructor in painting at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, was born in Indiana and adored Velasquez. His pointed beard and the Bohemian elegance of his clothes assisted his talent in making him the most popular teacher of his time. In the early 1900s, one of his favorite pupils was a spindly, silent young Philadelphian named Charles Sheeler. On seeing many a Sheeler sketch, the master would drop his beribboned eyeglasses and cry, "Don't touch it!", meaning that deliberation was bad for brilliance. If Charles Sheeler has proved anything in the past 40 years it is that his teacher was wrong on that point.

Last week his paintings, unique, strongly composed and immaculately clear, were praised as classic U. S. works of art by an enthusiastic biographar.*

Sheeler, born in 1883, was in his late 20s when the bravura of Sargent and Chase was superseded by two major influences: 1) realism from New Yorkers Sloan, Bellows and Luks, 2) Cubism from Parisians Braque, Picasso, Duchamp. It is Biographer Rourke's thesis that Charles Sheeler, by conspicuously keeping his head through a wild & woolly period, "submerged" the French abstract influence in native U. S. forms just as "real" as the street scenes of the Realists and more significant. These forms Sheeler found first in the old farmhouses, barns and functional handicraft of Bucks County, Pa., where he spent weekends for ten or twelve years. Surfaces and textures he studied with the camera.

"I have come to value photography more and more," says Charles Sheeler, "for those things which it alone can accomplish rather than to discredit it for the things which can only be achieved through another medium. . . ."

Probably the only U. S. artist equally eminent in photography and painting, Sheeler spent six weeks in 1927 photographing the Ford plant at River Rouge. Doubting critics to whom Charles Sheeler's industrial paintings seem to deviate from photographic realism only in their fine selectivity and arbitrary color values may disagree with Biographer Rourke about the degree of three-dimensional design underlying them. More clearly a fusion of abstraction and realism are earlier paintings of farmhouse interiors, later paintings of patterned objects in Artist Sheeler's home at Ridgefield, Conn. Few critics will deny that his work proves Sheeler an exquisite draftsman, an orderly spirit and a sophisticated man. His Self Portrait (see cut) is a prim parable: "The artist remains in shadow . . . and the cord is there to pull down the shade at any time. . . . If one chooses to go farther one may infer that he does not speak directly but through an instrument. . . . This happens to sum up the relationship of the classic artist to his subject."

*CHARLES SHEELER, ARTIST IN THE AMERICAN TRADITION--Constance Rourke--Harcourt, Brace ($3).

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