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Charles Sheeler, 1883-1965
In 1924, Charles Sheeler -- who rarely ventured into self-portraiture -- composed this pastel with a modernist's sensibility and a photographer's eye. That same year, an exhibition at the Whitney Studio Club called attention to his enigmatic realism -- what his friend the poet William Carlos Williams later referred to as the "bewildering directness of his vision, without blur." The portrait initially appears more conventional than the painted still lifes, cityscapes, industrial land- scapes, and domestic interiors that Sheeler preferred. But his works share many characteristics, revealing what he called "the absolute beauty [of] . . . objects suspended in a vacuum." This pastel parallels Sheeler's approach to photog- raphy, particularly in the strong, artificial lighting that throws the head into sharp relief, casting abstract patterns of light and shadow. Sheeler understood, Williams wrote, that through the camera, the subject could "be intensified, carved out, illuminated." A similar heightened reality enhances his self-portrayal with its intensely focused, melancholy gaze.
1924 |