AMERICAN.COM

A Magazine of Ideas, Online

Heirs to Sheeler

By Nord Wennerstrom

Monday, December 11, 2006 Who are the best industrial artists today? We make the introductions.

Painters and photographers in the early 20th century were captivated by the vitality and power of urban and industrial landscapes. The skyscrapers of New York, in the hands of artists Georgia O’Keeffe and Margaret Bourke-White, were unimpeachable symbols of progress heralding the country’s modernity, and the giddy, gritty day-to-day of urban life that writer John Dos Passos captured in his trilogy U.S.A. was lusciously rendered in paintings by George Bellows, John Sloan, and Reginald Marsh.

Within this context, Charles Sheeler created his meticulous photographs and paintings of Ford Motor Company’s River Rouge Plant—paintings that celebrated a booming industry and found beauty in structures whose form was based on function rather than architectural aesthetics. The tradition of urban landscape painting has been carried on
by artists such as Rackstraw Downes, Richard Estes, and Robert Cottingham. But who today depicts industrial subjects? Who is our Charles Sheeler?

Fact is, the heavy industry that Sheeler lionized in the 1920s and 1930s has become a disappearing part of our cultural landscape. In our collective consciousness, it is seen as our legacy rather than our future.

But in spite of this change (or perhaps because of it), the nation’s industrial patrimony has gained renewed potency as a source of inspiration for contemporary artists. Indeed, for several, there’s an urgency to record and contextualize industry’s presence before it falls to the wrecking ball. Here are our best heirs to Sheeler:.....

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A contemporary painter who readily acknowledges a debt to Sheeler is Stephen Dolmatch. Like Sheeler, he works from an extensive body of photographs, and his style resembles Sheeler’s precisionism. Dolmatch uses a cool, subdued palette and has been rendering crisp, quietly dramatic urban and industrial landscapes of New York and New Jersey for more than 20 years. He focuses on the design elements of a subject rather than its physicality. He recently said he’s intrigued in how an image “breaks down into a series of diagonals and rhythmic geometries.”

In “Network,” a glimpse upward at an elevated railway’s metal supports is rendered as a wild visual symphony of shadow and light, and an otherwise forgettable New Jersey oil tank farm—“Hackensack River”—is transformed into a lean and elegant study of form.

Nord Wennerstrom is an art critic whose work appears in Artforum. He is a Washington, D.C., correspondent for Art & Antiques.