Two wonderful examples of modern art will be one display in New York starting in June. On June 3rd, The Metropolitan Museum of Art will open its exhibition of 120 photographs by Charles Sheeler (1883-1965), one of the most important American artists of the first half of the 20th century and a pioneer of American modernism. Also, starting June 26, The Museum of Modern Art will present the works of leading German modernist painter Max Beckmann (1884-1950) in what will be the first comprehensive survey of his oeuvre to be featured in New York since 1964.
The Photography of Charles Sheeler
The Photography of Charles Sheeler is the first major exhibition to concentrate on each of Sheeler’s major photographic series made between 1915 and 1939, and will consist of rare vintage prints. The exhibition will reveal the full significance of Sheeler’s photographic works as the foundation from which his better-known works in other mediums were derived.
The exhibition focuses in depth on Sheeler’s inventive intertwining of the American vernacular with European abstraction, beginning with Cubist-inspired photographs of a simple farmhouse in Doylestown, Pennsylvania (1915-1917). Sheeler became familiar with the latest European artistic innovations during a trip to Europe with his friend Morton Schamberg in 1908-1909 and from his association with members of the American avant-garde, whom he encountered at the home of collectors Walter and Louise Arensberg in the late 1910s and the 1920s. As he adapted the lessons of Paul Cezanne, Pablo Picasso, and Marcel Ducamp—artists whose work he saw and photographed at the Arensbergs’ apartment—to his own interests, he created work in a number of mediums simultaneously. All were vital in formulating his artistic approach, as suggested by the selected paintings and drawings that punctuate The Photography of Charles Sheeler.
As his next two series—Nudes (1918-19) and New York (1920)—reveal, however, photographic media formed the foundation of his pictorial expression, especially in the early years of this career. On view will be the complete set of semi-abstract photographs of his first wife Katharine—the only nude photographs Sheeler is known to have taken—which were created from a now-lost film produced in about 1918 with a 35mm hand-cranked movie camera.
Also on continuous view in the galleries will be the groundbreaking Manhatta made by Sheeler and Paul Strand in 1920, and considered the first American avant-garde film. In seven minutes, Manhatta spans an imaginary day in the life of New York City, beginning with footage of Staten Island Ferry commuters and culminating with the sun setting over the Hudson River. Brief shots and dramatic camera angles emphasize the city’s photogenic disposition, and 14 extant still photographs made from the footage are in the exhibition. Shortly after making the film, Sheeler produced large-format photographs of New York—seven views of Broadway that employ a particularly cinematic effect. One of the photographs, New York, Park Row Building (1920), intones a visual duet with the painting Skyscrapers (1922, Phillips Collection, Washington, D.C.) displayed alongside it.
The Photography of Charles Sheeler includes an extensive selection of the images Sheeler made at the Ford Motor Company’s River Rouge plant, near Detroit, in 1927. Created to celebrate the introduction of the new Model A automobile, this series is regarded by many as the high point of American machine-age photography. Criss-Crossed Conveyors—one of Sheeler’s best-known works and an icon of modern photography—is featured alongside such images as Pulverizer Building and Ladle on a Hot Metal Car. Sheeler documented the many functional design elements of the vast complex, conveying the mysterious beauty of the machines rather than trying to capture the expanse of the plant. The River Rouge pictures make a fascinating contrast to Sheeler’s views of Chartres Cathedral made in France in 1929, also featured in the exhibition. Consistent with his modernist approach, Sheeler chose to focus on the Gothic cathedral’s architectural details.
With the painting Upper Deck (1929, Fogg Art Museum, Harvard University Art Museums)—included in the exhibition and heralded by many as a masterpiece of American modernism—Sheeler began to enfold his photographic activity into the process of his painting. The full transition occurred during the 1930s, when Sheeler’s photographic series became ever more personal, as he focused on the various aspects of Americana that interested him. Included in the exhibition are photographs of antique and Shaker furnishings in his own home, as well as the painting Americana (1931, The Metropolitan Museum of Art), depicting the same subject matter.
By the late 1930s, Sheeler had ceased to practice photography as an independent creative endeavor. Instead it had become part of a systematic and increasingly complicated technique that conflated the processes of painting and photography, as in his Power Series (1939), made on commission for Fortune magazine. Taken during his travels to such places as the Boulder Dame and the Tennessee Valley, these photographs—including the iconic Wheels—were made as studies for closely related paintings. The paintings were then photographed and published in the magazine.
Max Beckmann
Max Beckmann was a leading modernist painter who followed a notably individualistic path in a prolific career spanning most of the first half of the 20th century. While he never led a school or professed a particular formal approach, Beckmann made a profound mark on painting in that period, and his impact can still be seen on current generations of painters. The first comprehensive retrospective of the artist’s work in New York since 1964, and the first in the United States since 1984, the exhibition comprises 107 works, focusing primarily on painting—including four large-scale triptychs—augmented by sculptures, drawings, and prints. The show concentrates on three pivotal periods of Beckmann’s career: 1918-1923, 1927-1932, and the late 1930s into the late 1940s.
A naturalist and symbolist early in his career, Beckmann reacted to the shock of World War I, in which he served as a medic, by radically altering his artistic approach. Through the 1930s, he was among the painters associated with the New Objectivity, a movement that portrayed the violence and conflict of postwar German society. Responding to Cubism and Expressionism, Beckmann also looked back to German Gothic sculpture and painting, and developed a distinctive style that combined intense color, angular and increasingly flattened forms, and bold gestural outlines that he used to portray frequently apocalyptic visions of current events.
He also painted numerous portraits and self-portraits of striking psychological intensity. Widely admired by the 1920s as one of Germany’s most important modernist painters, Beckmann was subsequently denounced by the Nazis—he was the most heavily represented artist in their polemical anti-modernist exhibition Degenerate Art of 1937—and he fled to Amsterdam, where he remained in isolation through World War II, developing a complex, extremely personal mythological treatment of a world in crisis, which is most fully represented by his triptychs and complex allegorical paintings. Beckmann came to the United States in 1947 and taught at Washington University in St. Louis before moving to New York City, where he died in 1950.
Max Beckmann is jointly organized by The Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Musee national d’art moderne/Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; and Tate Modern, London. This institutional collaboration enabled The Museum of Modern Art to gather works of art not often lent, offering a rare opportunity to view masterworks from Beckmann’s entire oeuvre. The New York presentation also includes eleven works not exhibited in Paris or London, including two triptychs and several self-portraits.
