Precision's Reward

Only once every five years does the American Academy of Arts and Letters give its Award of Merit Medal to a painter--a procedure that prevents hasty recognition of a talent that might turn out to be only one year's fad. Last week, as if underlining its case for judging in perspective, the academy presented the award and $1,000 to an artist who is three years retired from a careful half-century of working in a style far removed from the painting that dominates today's galleries.

Charles Sheeler, 78, was cited for the ''classical spirit, formal elegance and technical mastery" of his paintings.*

Scarcely anyone would deny Sheeler these virtues. He is one of the few American artists who was a photographer as well as a painter, and some of his painting is difficult to tell from his photography.

His well-known Rolling Power, picturing the wheels of a steam locomotive, could be mistaken for a tightly composed close-up photograph. But gradually Sheeler came to believe that "a picture could have incorporated in it the structural design implied in abstraction and have a wholly realistic manner." Often picking for his subjects simple, linear masses--barns, bridges, machines--Sheeler drafted knife-sharp contours and smooth surfaces, sometimes with bright and unrealistic colors.

From photography he learned that "light is the great designer." Whether praised as the father of the precisionists or derided as the head of the Frigidaire School, Sheeler never caused a stampede to the museums with his almost antiseptic canvases. But he did become one of the most accomplished of U.S.

painters--a man, according to his friend William Carlos Williams, with a "bewildering directness" of vision.

A wry, reticent man, Sheeler has often seemed as enamored of his powerful planes as more romantic artists were of their human models. He once spent six weeks photographing the Ford plant in Detroit, filled his home with the severe Shaker furniture that he loved to photograph.

Until he was halted by a stroke in 1959, Sheeler's working habits at his home in Irvington, N.Y., were as precise as his paintings. Often painting from photographs, he worked through the good light every day, meticulously turning out four or five oil paintings a year. Of the cold, uncluttered results he once said: "I favor a picture which arrives at its destination without the evidence of a trying journey rather than the one which shows the marks of battle. An efficient army buries its dead."

*Previous winners in painting: Charles Burchfield, Andrew Wyeth, Rico Lebrun and Raphael Soyer. In other years, the award is given for sculpture, the novel, poetry and drama.

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