C sheeler windows

Free floating in space characterizes the former work; claustrophobic compression, the latter. The light-filled, beckoning destination of Stairs from Below is completely unlike the threshold presented in Stairwell , which is so dark and threatening, one can barely imagine summoning up the courage to cross it.

The possibility of ascent in Stairs from Below is hopeful if undefined. The implications of descent in Stairwell call up deep human fears about falling into subterranean realms.

Stairway with Chair cat. Taken from outside of the stairwell, we now see the door hanging open, casting a dark shadow to the left. Along the photograph's left margin appears the edge of the deeply recessed doorway leading outside, and high on the wall is a small mirror in a deep, molded frame.

Beyond the mirror is a window, receding about a foot from the surface of the plastered interior walls and extending a bit into the stairwell. The fenestration creates an eerie shadow behind the door, obscuring an unidentifiable form on the window ledge that resembles a pile of mechanical objects. The unconventional lighting of the scene casts strong shadows similar to those in Stairwell and Stairs from Below.

Yet here Sheeler provides a more comprehensive context for the previously disorienting subject. We now know more about how the stairwell actually functions in the Doylestown house, and it seems less threatening from this expanded perspective. The avenue of vertical transit has become domesticated, made part of everyday experience. Thematically, each image represents a different embodiment of threshold experience, a different symbol of transit between higher and lower realms.

Formally, each merges abstract composition with representational exactness, synthesizing stylistic innovation with the highly descriptive potential of the photographic medium. Another subset of images focuses on openness and closure, paralleling the staircase views with their emphasis on ascent and descent.

These oppositional elements appear in repeated images of doors and windows, such as Open Door, Stairway , Open Door ; and Downstairs Window cats. In Open Door , the first-floor stairwell again appears, but now the viewer's position is opposite the southeast wall. Therefore, the composition centers not so much on the stairs but on the door leading to them. Instead of viewing it sideways, as in Stairway with Chair , we now face its inside surface with a crude patch just above the bottom brace.

A smaller exterior door stands slightly ajar to the left, its wrought-iron fixtures silhouetted against the whitewashed surface of the wooden planks. Between the door and window hangs the same small mirror also visible in Stairway with Chair. Because of the camera angle, its mirrored surface is completely blank; no image reflects back at us.

Here again, Sheeler limits his subject to a small corner of the room, yet the composition is characteristically minimal and at the same time thematically complex. The interior door blocks the window behind, and the exterior door neither frames a welcoming vista nor assures comfortable security for the inhabitants within. These two thresholds suggest open-ended possibilities because where they lead remains a mystery; they offer only a dark, undifferentiated void on the other side of the room's doorways.

Equally mysterious is the absence of an image in the mirror. Why doesn't it reflect something from the other side of the room, that part of the house extending beyond the photograph's limited view and including the viewer's space?

Since Jan van Eyck's fifteenth-century Arnolfini Wedding Portrait, reflected images in pictures have come to symbolize either authorial presence or the concept of art as "the mirror of nature. Like the spatial ambiguities in Stairwell , this motif raises fundamental questions about the relationship of the photographic image to the depiction of actual space. It seems in fact to deny art's role as the mirror of nature. Although the doors suggest a thrillingly indeterminate sense of openness, the mirror hints at aesthetic self-enclosure.

Open Door is therefore a self-effacing investigation into the status of representation in the modern era. It is as if Sheeler uncovered, through modernist experimentation, a kind of absence at the core of twentieth-century experience. Several other photographs embody sophisticated reflections on the implications of artistic practice, especially the well-known Interior with Stove cat.

In it, a nineteenth-century iron stove occupies the center of the composition, with its long pipe extending to the ceiling. The stove's door hangs open to the right, and a surprisingly elegant urn-shaped finial surmounts its body. Beneath, a worn but ornately patterned metal tray protects the floor's wooden planks.

To the left, only a small portion of the classically molded mantelpiece and fieldstone hearth appears. A closet door spans the wall to the right of the hearth, and its wrought-iron latch protrudes from a soiled area on the whitewashed boards. Behind the stovepipe is yet another window with blackened panes -- the mirror image of the window on the southeast facade -- and to the right, a rough-hewn door leads to the outside.

A strange circle marks the wall between the window and door, just where the mirror hung on the other side of the room. Because of its central position and the light emanating from within it, the nineteenth-century stove commands our interest over any other feature of the room.

Not part of the original house, the stove nevertheless won Sheeler's favor, and consequently the photograph diminishes the older colonial fireplace that a more conventional artist might have used to represent the metaphorical heart of the house. For example, Wallace Nutting, an important turn-of-the-century participant in the colonial revival, asserted that "since men discovered how to make a fire the hearth has been the center of their lives," and Nutting's "enormously popular photographs frequently showed figures in antiquated garb gathered around an old New England fireplace.

But in a daring negation, Sheeler situates the fireplace largely outside the picture. In this, he not only fragments his subject with unexpected framing but also removes the Doylestown house interior from sentimental associations of domestic life in colonial days and convivial family gatherings around a blazing hearth. The first thing I notice are plumes of smoke and steam roiling out of the multitude of smokestacks and chimneys. If the wind is blowing inland, the next thing is the smell. It is acrid, vaguely sulfurous, and I always make an effort to close the already rolled-up window.

Then you see the large rust-colored buildings and the blast furnaces that resemble strange rockets held to earth by pipes and tubes, which are surrounded by smaller structures that seem half-built to the untrained eye. The colors at the actual mill are nothing but earth tones, the kind you find in a desert or in a snowless winter landscape.

Sure, there is a kind of beauty to it, though it is a rare person who would cite it as an object of beauty. Sheeler, however, seems to be one of those people. His colors are rich but subdued, creating a visual harmony that both draws in your gaze and relaxes you. Your eye is pulled to follow the shapes and lines and edges, forcing you to travel along the walkways and stairs, wondering where they go.

Sheeler, an American painter who studied with William Merritt Chase, was known as a Precisionist for his careful use of line. The longer I look at Western Industrial , the more I realize precisely just how active this canvas actually is. While I will continue to be awestruck by the power and rawness of steel mills, and continue to roll up the windows against the smoke, Sheeler offers another perspective, turning the very backbone of industry into geometric abstractions, into works of art.

See Western Industrial in the galleries with other modern American works of art. Western Industrial, View of Inland Steel and Indiana Harbor.

Detail of Western Industrial.