Curator Karen Haas’s statement regarding the exhibition.
The Photography of Charles Sheeler @ Torf Gallery, MFA Boston
by NY Arts
Charles Sheeler (1883-1965) is recognized as one of the founders of American modernism and one of the master photographers of the 20th century, yet his photographs have been exhibited far less often than those of his contemporaries Alfred Stieglitz and Paul Strand. The MFA’s upcoming show–The Photography of Charles Sheeler: American Modernist–will be the first major exhibition to feature the whole range of his photographic oeuvre and will have venues at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Detroit Institute of Arts.
The exhibition will consist entirely of rare, in some instances unique, vintage prints all drawn from The Lane Collection. It will feature approximately 120 photographs from each of the major series undertaken by the artist between 1915 and 1940, most notably, Sheeler’s photographs of 1916-18 of African sculpture; his Cubist-inspired images of the house and barns at Doylestown, Pennsylvania (1915-17); the dramatic views of skyscrapers in lower Manhattan made in the 1920; the complete series of views of the Ford Motor Company’s River Rouge plant dating from 1927; the entire group of photographs of Chartres Cathedral created in 1929; and the famous Wheels and other images of American industry made for Fortune magazine in the late 1930s. The exhibition will also feature Manhatta, the groundbreaking short film made by Sheeler and Paul Strand in 1920.
Charles Sheeler Wheels, 1939 Photograph, gelatin-silver print 6 1/2 x 91/2 in. The Lane Collection
This exhibition has been selected and organized by Theodore E. Stebbins, Jr., Distinguished Fellow and Consultative Curator of American Art, Harvard University Art Museums, and author of numerous books on painting and photography including Sheeler: The Photographs (1987); and Gilles Mora, an independent French curator who has produced a series of important photography catalogues including Edward Weston: Forms of Passion (1995) and Walker Evans: The Hungry Eye (1993). The exhibition will be accompanied by a fully illustrated catalogue to be published by Editions du Seuil in French, and Bulfinch Press in English, with essays by Stebbins, Mora, and Karen Haas, curator of The Lane Collection.
