Lot Essay
A master of Precisionism, Charles Sheeler combined a thoroughly modern approach to painting with a keen understanding of traditional American themes and sensibilities. Martin Friedman writes, "Even after Sheeler's exposure to the radical styles of early twentieth-century French art, he saw America through the eyes of a villager. A singular detachment pervades his art because he was the anonymous observer who managed to remain outside the mundane subjects he selected and reordered. Underlying this seemingly dispassionate attitude was an idealism about America's history and destiny. Indeed, many critics have regarded him as an artist whose work epitomizes a clear-eyed, native, visual tradition; he has been considered a pragmatic Yankee whose no-nonsense, efficient approach to picturemaking reflects America's historic virtues. He seemed to fit the stereotype. "Sheeler is truly an American with American ancestors behind him," wrote Forbes Watson. (Charles Sheeler, Paintings, Drawings, Photographs, New York, 1975, p. 209)
Improvisaton on a Mill Town is a classic example of Sheeler's unique fusion of art, industry and the Modern American landscape. In the painting the artist has abstracted the industrial landscape into a heroic vision of color, form and geometry. A bold smokestack rises into the center of a clear blue sky. Both organic and man-made forms stretch across the foreground, suggesting the confluence with and distinction between the machine and the natural world. Carol Troyen writes, "The best of Sheeler's work, early and late, is about the conflation of shadow and substance, of the remembered and freshly seen, and how a new vision triggers treasured memories. Sheeler's paintings, with their photographic underpinnings to reflect 'nature seen from the eyes outward' comprise nothing less than a fifty-year exploration of his understanding of reality. At the same time, they are a nostalgic attempt to bring the past forward into the present. That such an intellectually ambitious program could be visually satisfying in so many different media is a tribute to the romantic soul behind the disciplined hand that crafted them." (Charles Sheeler: Paintings and Drawings, Boston, 1987, p. 43)
Improvisaton on a Mill Town is a classic example of Sheeler's unique fusion of art, industry and the Modern American landscape. In the painting the artist has abstracted the industrial landscape into a heroic vision of color, form and geometry. A bold smokestack rises into the center of a clear blue sky. Both organic and man-made forms stretch across the foreground, suggesting the confluence with and distinction between the machine and the natural world. Carol Troyen writes, "The best of Sheeler's work, early and late, is about the conflation of shadow and substance, of the remembered and freshly seen, and how a new vision triggers treasured memories. Sheeler's paintings, with their photographic underpinnings to reflect 'nature seen from the eyes outward' comprise nothing less than a fifty-year exploration of his understanding of reality. At the same time, they are a nostalgic attempt to bring the past forward into the present. That such an intellectually ambitious program could be visually satisfying in so many different media is a tribute to the romantic soul behind the disciplined hand that crafted them." (Charles Sheeler: Paintings and Drawings, Boston, 1987, p. 43)