Charles Sheeler

The artist Charles Sheeler, one of the founders of American modernism, developed his vision simultaneously in photographs, drawings, paintings and films. The 1910s and 1920s were particularly fertile years for Sheeler as he created a number of the works that are still considered his finest. The photographs of this period - the Doylestown House series (1917), the film collaboration with Paul Strand Manhatta (1920), and the Ford Motor Company commission of the River Rouge Plant (1927) - all found their way into Sheeler's work in other media. His first exhibition of paintings and drawings was in 1916 and of photographs in 1917, both at New York's Modern Gallery.

Sheeler studied applied design at the School of Industrial Art in Philadelphia in 1900 and later in 1903 entered the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, also in the city. Trips to London, Paris, Spain and Holland between 1904 and 1909 exposed Sheeler to the avant-garde art of Europe which made a deep impression. His interest in photography began as a means of earning a living but it is clear that his work as a commercial photographer beginning in 1910, specializing in architecture and later advertising, developed his aptitude for the medium and helped to define his key subjects.

The advent of photographically-illustrated magazines in the 1920s in the United Stated continued to feed - and perhaps accelerated - the late 19th century interest in photographs of notable public figures, including stage and film stars. Publisher Condé Nast and his art directors at Vogue and Vanity Fair cannily hired the best photographers of the day to create the most visually arresting portraits. Sheeler published his first photograph in Vanity Fair - an image of a Brancusi sculpture - in 1917, others would follow, and he would be one of the subjects of a feature article on the best American painters in 1923. In April of 1926, chief photographer and friend Edward Steichen offered Sheeler a job with Condé Nast. While by 1927 Sheeler was referring to this work as a "daily trip to jail" (which likely prompted him to seek the Ford commission), he clearly embraced the new challenge in his first few months - in 1926 he had the greatest number of page credits for a photographer, second only to Steichen. In this way, it is possible to consider Sheeler's tenure at Condé Nast as yet another element of the modernist context of his career.