The Present and Past in the Work of Charles Sheeler

This dissertation examines the role of the American vernacular tradition in Charles Sheeler's art. Shaker furniture, folk art, and the architecture and craft traditions of Bucks County, Pennsylvania, emerge in this study as important elements in a process of self-definition for the artist that was at once self-consciously public and intimately personal. In his depictions of barns, farmhouses, and handcrafted furniture, Sheeler aligned his art with avant-garde ideas and values. He also used these subjects in a search for a more private sense of at-homeness in the world. Chapters I through III focus on Sheeler's images of an eighteenth-century house in Doylestown, which served the artist as a weekend and summer retreat from about 1910 to 1926. The first chapter discusses the personal significance the building had for Sheeler and analyzes his photographic portrait of the house, as well as the later paintings and drawings based on these photographs. The second chapter addresses the ways in which the doors, windows, and interior spaces in these works suggest a broader concern with positioning the self in the world, one that derives from a shared cultural environment. Chapter III relates the material to its contemporary context of preservationist concerns and aesthetic theory. Chapter IV deals with Sheeler's photographs of Bucks County barns and describes how the artist contributed to a reevaluation of rural architecture in America by representing it in a context foreign to its origins. Chapter V analyzes Sheeler's drawings and paintings of Bucks county barns and investigates his imagery against the background of the movement to create a native school of modernism based on the American folk tradition. The final chapter concludes with a discussion of the paintings of the early 1930s, such as American Landscape, Classic Landscape, Americana, and Home Sweet Home, which gesture towards--and at the same time undermine--a reconciliation of machine production and the handcraft vernacular tradition. The chapters move from an investigation of the artist's private concerns to broader issues of national identity that affected not only Sheeler but a whole generation of American modernists.