Existing comment:
Charles Sheeler
Steel-Croton, 1953
Charles Sheeler, a leading 20th-century modernist, is associated with a group of artists known as precisionists. Focusing their descriptive method of monuments of the machine age -- factories, skyscrapers, bridges -- these artists were acclaimed by critics for producing work distinctly "American" in character, if stylistically informed by French cubism. In postwar years, Sheeler adopted a more systematically geometric approach to his subjects, exemplified by this semiabstraction. Steel-Croton represents a steel-open bridge -- what the artist called a "beautiful combination of delicacy and strength" -- located near his home in New York's upper Hudson River Valley.
The painting was featured in VMFA's contemporary art exhibition American Painting 1954 and purchased for the collection. In a letter to museum director Leslie Check Jr. -- whom Sheeler had met tin the mid-1930s while working on a Rockefeller commission at Colonial Williamsburg -- the artist expressed his pleasure in the museums' acquisition. |