Yachts (Gordon 3)

Although he only experimented briefly with lithography during the 1920s, his compositions Yachts, Delmonico Building, and Industrial Series #1 perfectly exemplify Sheeler's Precisionist aesthetic. Based on Cubism, Precisionism offered a reductivist, formal aesthetic of clarity, geometry and order. In these three compositions, as in his Precisionist paintings, Sheeler sought to depict an idealized and stylized world, rendering the forms in both Yachts and these two urban landscapes with flattened blueprint-like geometry. A quintessential avant-garde artist, Sheeler took advantage of a wide range of media; the few lithographs he executed make one wish today that the artist had had the opportunity for further experimentation in printmaking.
The provenance of these three lithographs lies particularly close to the artist. Robert Theophilus Miller, employed by the United States Steel Company in the early 1950s, hired Sheeler to photograph the Pennsylvania mills. A friendship blossomed between the Sheeler and the Miller families, and the two men corresponded over a period of years. Miller had a deep respect for the artist's work and purchased an impression of The Delmonico Building from the Downtown Gallery. In following years, Sheeler presented the Miller family with gifts of two more lithographs (see lots 67 and 68) and several photographs which will be included in Christie's Photographs sale on October 13,2000.