Charles Sheeler 1883-1965

Richard Kyle (the artist's nephew), 1930 (wedding gift from the artist)
James Maroney, New York
Acquired by the present owner from the above, circa 1981

Boston, Massachusetts, Museum of Fine Arts; New York, The Whitney Museum of American Art; Dallas, Texas, Dallas Museum of Art, Charles Sheeler: Paintings and Drawings, October 1987-July 1988, no. 30, pp. 106-107, illustrated in color
Houston, Texas, Museum of Fine Arts, The Private Eye, Selected Works from Collections of Friends of the Museum of Fine Arts, June-August 1989
Allentown, Pennsylvania, Allentown Art Museum; Fort Worth, Texas, Amon Carter Museum of Western Art; Cincinnati, Ohio, Cincinnati Museum of Art, Charles Sheeler in Doylestown, American Modernism and the Pennsylvania Tradition, 1997, no. 19

Charles Sheeler produced precisely delineated paintings that often bear a close relationship to his own photography, the aim of which he stressed as "accounting for things seen in the visual world with an exactitude for their differences which no other medium can approximate" (Charles Sheeler, from Martin Friedman et. al., Charles Sheeler. Washington, D.C., 1968, p. 81).  ‘Precisionism’ is the term most frequently used to characterize Sheeler’s paintings during the 1920s, including a singular series of still lifes, among them Red Tulips (1925-26). A photographic esthetic combined with cubist space characterized his variety of the Precisionist style.

An earlier association may also be inferred from the composition of Red Tulips, which evokes in certain respects a painting by Marsden Hartley, Movement No. 6 Provincetown (1916) (figure 1) and relates Sheeler’s work to the orbit of Hartley’s dealer, the photographer Alfred Stieglitz and his circle of avant-garde artists. Just as Sheeler was becoming increasingly engaged by the art scene in New York, to which he would move from his native Philadelphia in 1919, he would have seen this particular canvas by Hartley in Stieglitz’s personal collection at his gallery called ‘291’ for its address on Fifth Avenue.

Just six years younger than Hartley, Sheeler became an habitué of the collector Walter Conrad Arensberg’s New York salon during the late 1910s, where he saw Hartley and occasionally Stieglitz. The Arensberg salon became the nerve center of New York Dada, an aesthetic response to the horror of World War I, attracting both American and European artists from Marcel Duchamp to Francis Picabia. It was Arensberg who purchased one of the two paintings that Sheeler showed in the first Society of Independent Artists show in 1917, the time when the two became friends.

Red Tulips shares with Hartley’s picture a tilted table top, a goblet, and flower, as well as a flat ground that makes no particular spatial illusion. Sheeler’s painting is more realistic, not without a touch of refinement, while Hartley’s earlier work is more abstract, moving toward an imposed flatness, inspired here by folk painting on the back of glass. Sheeler, however, shared Hartley’s admiration and enthusiasm for folk art, even collecting American antique crafts and furniture—especially simple country and Shaker pieces, including this octagonal topped candle stand from the late eighteenth century.

This favorite object and style of Sheeler’s appear in several other paintings, including his Still Life (1925, private collection), Gladioli in White Pitcher (1925, Santa Barbara Museum of Art, figure 2), Geranium (ca. 1926, Whitney Museum of American Art) and Spring Interior (1927, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, figure 3). In another Still Life (1925, Fine Arts Museums of  San Francisco, figure 4), Sheeler depicted, on a table top similarly tilted toward the viewer, the same clear glass vase empty, the same hand-crafted blown blue-green glass goblet, and instead of the top of the octagonal candle stand, an octagonal plate with three pieces of fruit. The contrast of the angular octagonal shape juxtaposed with the curvilinear vase and the curves of either the fruit or the tulips must have appealed to Sheeler’s formal sensibilities. Some years later, he commented: " . . .when we look at the next thing in sequence to the first object that we have gazed at, there's still an overtone carried over of what the retina has just previously recorded. . . . There may be two such images playing against each other or possibly three, no definite number arbitrarily decided, but certainly two" (Charles Sheeler to Martin Friedman, June 18, 1959, Archives of American Art).

Speaking about another one of the still life pictures from this period, Sheeler told Constance Rourke that he had consciously made a table appear to stand out in space "through the subterfuge of suppression of environment as in 'Chrysanthemums'" (1925, private collection) (Constance Rourke, Charles Sheeler: Artist in the American Tradition, New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1938,  p. 107). Clearly he deployed the same subterfuge to telling effect in Red Tulips.

Sheeler had also felt the influence of Cézanne, even borrowing from the Arensbergs one of that artist’s simpler still lifes, which Constance Rourke described as “a glass of water, a plate of fruit, a portion of a pitcher and a bowl, part of a table” (Rourke, Charles Sheeler, pp. 45-46).  The work was almost certainly the small canvas,  Still Life with Apples and a Glass of Wine (1877-79, Philadelphia Museum of Art, Arensberg Collection)(figure 5). The table top tilted toward the picture plane, as well as the shapes and forms, would soon inform Sheeler’s own ventures into still life.

Still life was very popular among a number of American modernist painters during the 1920s. Though each may have seen somewhat different possibilities in the genre, the likelihood was evident that the familiar subject matter would ease acceptance among buyers not quite comfortable with avant-garde styles. Not only Sheeler and Hartley painted still lifes then, but also Charles Demuth, Stuart Davis, and Georgia O’Keeffe, among a host of others. ‘There's a large element of symbolism in O'Keeffe's work, as you can readily see, and none whatever in mine," Sheeler insisted, "It's purely a visual thing..." (Sheeler to Friedman, AAA).

In Red Tulips of 1925-26, it is not only the animated forms of the bright blooms on floppy stems that engage the viewer, but the rendering of the delicate transparencies of the glass vase and goblet. Their intersections and the visible reflections make for lyrical passages of paint that clearly delighted the accomplished Sheeler. He welcomed the contrast not only of their rounded forms with the angular, octagonal stand, but also the difference between the solidity of the wood and the fragility of the glass. Painted shadows of the vase and goblet falling across the table add to the visual drama. The composition telegraphs the painter’s tour-de-force in the painting, no lurking symbolism needed.

We would like to thank Dr. Gail Levin for the preceding essay.