Charles Sheeler : across media

Charles Sheeler (1883-1965) is recognized as one of the founders of American modernism and one of the master photographers of the twentieth century.

His work is synonymous with precisionism, a crisp, clean, hard-edged style that reconciled cubist abstraction and the machine aesthetic of Marcel Duchamp with American subject matter.

Trained in industrial drawing, decorative painting, and applied art at the School of Industrial Art in Philadelphia, Sheeler also attended the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, where he learned an impressionistic, painterly style.

He later embraced European modernism and taught himself photography.

Sheeler fully absorbed the lessons of each discipline and forged his own singular approach.