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Ambivalence, Irony, and AmericanaCharles Sheeler’s “American Interiors”

Kristina Wilson

This article examines the canvases and photographs made by Charles Sheeler between 1926 and 1939 of his own collection ofShaker furniture, hooked rugs, and nineteenth-century ceramics. It argues that the paintings possess modernist self-consciousness, ambivalence, and irony toward their historical subject matter and that they critique the contemporarycollecting fad for all things Americana. The article sets Sheeler’s paintings in the context of the Metropolitan Museum’sAmerican Wing and the writings of Holger Cahill and Edward and Faith Andrews and argues that an ambivalent,ironical attitude pervaded much of the early scholarship on these artifacts.

THROUGHOUT THE 1920s and 1930s,Charles Sheeler participated in the popu-lar trend of collecting American material

artifacts by photographing and painting his per-sonal collection of Shaker furniture, hooked rugs,and nineteenth-century ceramics. While some ofhis images are essentially still-life studies of assortedobjects, a series of four paintings, probably inspiredby a group of photographs, captures his collectionas he arranged it and lived with it in his own home:Interior (1926), Americana (1931),Home, Sweet Home(1931), and American Interior (1934; see below). Al-though Sheeler moved from South Salem, NewYork, to Ridgefield, Connecticut, in 1932, all fourof these paintings are based on the interiors of hisSouth Salem residence. The series, sometimes re-ferred to as the “American Interiors,” is well knownto historians of American art.1 The paintings are

ociate professor of art history in the Depart-orming Arts at Clark University, Worcester,

ents on earlier drafts of this project, theank Karen Lucic, Carol Troyen, Jonathand the anonymous reviewers for Winterthurlike to thank the staff at the Worcester Artir substantial research assistance.erit discussion as a group not only becausece, but also because they focus on antiquesion of architecture; they are best classifiedinterior. In her catalog of Sheeler’s paint-ested that Newhaven (1932, private collec-927, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston), and

nry Francis du Pont Winterthur Musuem,0084-0416/2011/4504-0001$10.00

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more than an expression of Sheeler’s love for theseobjects—although they are certainly that. They area profound meditation on the culture of collectingAmericana and of buying reproduction Americanantiques that had arisen over the previous few de-cades. Sheeler’s paintings interrogate, withmodern-ist self-consciousness, ambivalence, and irony, thecultural phenomenon that elevatedhumble artifactsmade in an earlier century to cherished possessionsand canonicalmasterpieces of the present day. Theycelebrate and at the same timequestionwhether theAmerican past is substantial enough to serve as afoundation for its commercially driven present.

In her 1938 biography of Charles Sheeler,Constance Rourke quoted the artist discussing hisinterest in nineteenth-century American artifacts.“I don’t like these things because they are old butin spite of it,” he said somewhat cryptically. “I’d likethem still better if they were made yesterday be-cause then they would afford proof that the samekind of creative power is continuing.”2 Critics have

Gladioli (1927, private collection) be considered part of the groupof paintings of interiors; another possible candidate is Interior(1940, National Gallery of Art). Newhaven is, in my opinion, an ex-plicitly different project: it depicts the interior of the Ridgefieldhouse and interrogates historic architecture as much as, or morethan, antique furnishings. Spring Interior, Gladioli, and the 1940 Inte-rior are better understood as still lifes, rather than domestic interiors,because they focus on single arrangements of objects and plant lifeon a table top. Carol Troyen and Erica E. Hirshler, Charles Sheeler:Paintings and Drawings (Boston: Little, Brown, 1987), 112.

2 Constance Rourke, Charles Sheeler: Artist in the American Tradi-tion (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1938), 136.

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long celebrated Sheeler’s ability to extract his sub-jects from the context of time and to present themas transcendent truths, and this statement wouldappear to support that: after all, he claims that whatinterests him is how well the objects work, in what-ever time period.3 Yet the heart of this passage is theirreducible identity of these artifacts as “old”: theyare from a time when things were better than theyare now. Despite his laconic reserve, Sheeler’s wordsreveal a deep-seated ambivalence: he admits thathe cherishes these old objects and, simultaneously,claims he would discard them for new ones—butonly if the new had the same “creative power” asthe old. The statement has a curious, insistent circu-larity, where the reader continually arrives back at“these old things,” even as Sheeler attempts to pullthe narrative into the present day. If Sheeler’s state-ment can be read as an index to his thoughts on theAmerican artifactual past, it is representative not inits surface content—which professes to celebratethe past in the present—but rather in its convolutedlogic and ambivalence, where the past always threat-ens to overshadow the present.

Various scholars have argued, quite compel-lingly, that Sheeler’s American Interiors embracevernacular objects from the American past in aneffort to build a modernist idiom unique to theUnited States. The American Interiors have beenplaced in the context of a broader intellectualmovement in the interwar decades that aimed to es-tablish a genealogy of American artistic and literarysources, or to find, in the famous words of VanWyckBrooks, a “usable past.”4 Sheeler shared his interestin the American artifactual past—in particularShaker objects and nineteenth-century folk art—withmany compatriots in the interwar art world, in-cluding fellow artists Elie Nadelman and Henry

3 Both Michael Kammen and Wanda Corn interpret this state-ment as a preference for form over any specific time period, butboth alsomention (without discussing it further) the possibility thatconflicting sentiments might be found in Sheeler’s words. SeeMichael Kammen,Mystic Chords of Memory: The Transformation of Tra-dition in American Culture (New York: Vintage Books, 1993), 328;Wanda M. Corn, The Great American Thing: Modern Art and NationalIdentity, 1915–1939 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999),314.

4 The two significant pieces of scholarship about the AmericanInteriors emphasize Sheeler’s positive celebration of the past: Corn,Great American Thing, chap. 6; Susan Fillin-Yeh, Charles Sheeler: Amer-ican Interiors (New Haven, CT: Yale University Art Gallery, 1987).Karen Lucic has explored many facets of Sheeler’s revival interests,especially his Doylestown work, and has examined the ambivalenceand complexity in his attitude toward the past. See “Charles Sheelerand Henry Ford: A Craft Heritage for the Museum Age,” Bulletin ofthe Detroit Institute of Arts 65 (1989): 37–47; and Charles Sheeler inDoylestown: American Modernism and the Pennsylvania Tradition(Allentown, PA: Allentown Art Museum, 1997).

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Schnakenberg, collectors Walter and LouiseArensberg, historian Henry Chapman Mercer,curators Holger Cahill and Juliana Force, the critic(and Sheeler’s biographer) Rourke, and his in-fluential dealer, Edith Halpert. These intellectuals’interest in objects from the American past must beseen, in turn, as part of a broader public fascinationwith the nation’s material history, as evidenced bythe popularity of “colonial revival” as a decoratingstyle in the 1920s and 1930s and the founding ofpublic collections such as the American Wing, withits parade of fully furnished period rooms, at theMetropolitan Museum of Art in 1924.5 While thecolonial revival focused on higher-style objects thanthe Shaker and folk objects of Sheeler’s circle, all ofthese collecting practices contained contradictoryimpulses that, on the one hand, celebrated theAmerican past as a model for the present and, onthe other, reworked history to better fit presentconcerns.6

Although the American Interiors series is clearlya part of this interwar culture of collecting, consum-ing, and displaying American artifacts, these paint-ings should not be seen as simple, unapologeticcelebrations of the American past. Rather, theyare complex expressions of the commercializedsociety that exhumed such objects. Carol Troyenobserved that the Interiors, with their dramaticcropping, vertiginous sight lines, and collage-likearrangement of forms, were “disquieting” depic-tions of “unwelcoming spaces.” She too argued thatthe paintings were more than mere celebrations,and that they seemed to have an “ironic under-tone”: “It is hard to say whether Sheeler was speak-ing only personally or for his whole generation inintimating a kind of hollowness in the embracingof America’s past.”7 In the pages that follow, this

5 For a good study of political undertones of the colonial revivalas manifested in the American Wing, see Wendy Kaplan, “R. T. H.Halsey: An Ideology of Collecting American Decorative Arts,”Winterthur Portfolio 17, no. 1 (Spring 1982): 43–53.

6 For a variety of views on the complex phenomenon known asthe colonial revival, see, among others, Richard Guy Wilson, ShaunEyring, andKennyMarotta, eds.,Re-creating theAmerican Past: Essays onthe Colonial Revival (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press,2006); Thomas Denenberg, Wallace Nutting and the Invention of OldAmerica (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press and WadsworthAthenaeum of Art, 2003); Karal AnnMarling, George Washington SleptHere: Colonial Revivals and American Culture, 1876–1986 (Cambridge,MA: Harvard University Press, 1988); Abigail Carroll, “Of Kettles andCranes: Colonial Revival Kitchens and the Performance of NationalIdentity,” Winterthur Portfolio 43, no. 4 (Winter 2009): 335–64.

7 Carol Troyen, “‘From theEyes Inward’: Paintings andDrawingsby Charles Sheeler,” in Troyen and Hirshler, Charles Sheeler, 24–25.Karen Lucic also suggests that Sheeler’s attitude toward history inthese canvases is complex and perhaps contradictory in “CharlesSheeler: American Interiors,” Arts Magazine 61 (May 1987): 44.

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Charles Sheeler’s “American Interiors” 3

essay will refine and expand Troyen’s tantalizingobservation. Through a deep visual analysis of thepaintings, it will argue that Sheeler’s Interiors arelaced with ambivalence and that the anxious atmo-sphere pervading them is only relieved by cleverpassages of visual punning and irony. In addition,an examination of Sheeler’s intellectual and aes-thetic milieu will suggest that his peers were not im-mune to bouts of ambivalence about the objectsthey uncovered, nor were they so straitlaced thatthey did not occasionally find humor in their proj-ect: in his paintings, Sheeler was speaking for awhole generation. When Sheeler depicted his cher-ished possessions in a state of perpetual fragmenta-tion, pushed to and beyond the edges of the canvas,he questioned their solidity and strength as a poten-tial foundation for an “American school” of art; andwhen he depicted a skeletal ladder-back chairstanding next to a streamlined furnace, he skeweredthe nostalgic image of the healthy family gatheredaround the hearth. Indeed, Sheeler’s Interiors canbe read as period rooms like the ones so popularin museums, albeit of an ironic variety: they cele-brate historical artifacts even as they remind viewersthat such objects aremere lifestyle products cateringto a contemporary fad for all things American.

The American Interiors

Several pieces in Sheeler’s collection appear inmore than one canvas of the American Interiors se-ries (figs. 1–4). A carved slat-back chair with turnedfront legs figures prominently in American Interiorand edges into the lower left corner of Americana.The broad, rectangular plane of a large, refectory-style table can be seen in all four canvases (al-though details such as the trestle base in Interiorand the delicate strip of end wood in American Inte-riormake one wonder if it is the same table in each).The floor in each painting is covered by at least onecolorfully striped rag rug.

The four paintings share not only objects, butalso compositional strategies. In each, Sheeler usesthe formal language of cubism to create a roomwhere space is confusingly flattened and objectsexist in a state of perpetual fragmentation. Eachpainting is organized like a pinwheel, with objectspropelled out from an illusionistically deep centerand pushed toward both the picture plane and theedges of the canvas. The last of the group, AmericanInterior, best exemplifies the pinwheel composition:at the true center of the painting (the canvas is al-most a perfect square) there is no object, but rather


only a shadow cast over a hooked rug; from this voidat the center, objects spiral out as if driven by a cen-tripetal force. One looks from the slat-back chaircut off by the canvas edge to the table in the upperright, whose corner seems to puncture the pictureplane; from there, along the canvas’s top edge, thelower portion of a storage cupboard lies flat, fullyabstract against the canvas surface; and finally thecheckered bedspread hovers at an illusionistic dis-tance along the canvas’s left edge. Each of these ob-jects is on the verge of being pushed out of theviewer’s limited range of vision; only when onealights on the table in the lower left, itself confus-ingly close to the picture plane, does one’s eye be-gin to travel back into the heart of the canvas.Finally, the rag rug along the lower edge of the can-vas falls out beneath one’s feet as Sheeler distortsperspective to vertiginous effect.

The three earlier canvases in the group have ele-ments of this pinwheel. In the earliest, Interior, thedramatically attenuated legs of the side table in theforeground extend beyond the edge of the canvas;the refectory table, which pushes the checkeredbed out of the picture in the upper left, is itself fall-ing out of the right side of the canvas. In Americana,both the slat-back chair and settee barely fit into thepicture at either end of the great fulcrum of the re-fectory table. Home, Sweet Home contains the singlepiece of furniture rendered whole in the entireseries—the ladder-back chair—but it too seemspropelled out of the picture as its shadow fallsacross the floor to the stairs and off the left edgeof the canvas. The chair itself leaves little roomfor the furnace and the refectory table, which standat the periphery of sight. Finally, these first threecanvases share with American Interior its vertigo-inducing drop along the bottom edge and its cubistcompression of space. In none of these paintingsdoes the viewer find a floor to stand on. Indeed,Sheeler’s painterly attention to every surface—beit complex modulations of beige to brown to greenon floors and table tops, the carefully painted fluidlines of the rug patterns, or the countless strands ofrush on the chair seats—has the effect, like thefeathery brushwork of Picasso or Braque’s analyticcubism, of pushing every part of the painting to thepicture plane. In none of these paintings does onefind much space to stand at all: chair seats, tabletops, floorboards, and flamboyantly patterned rugsare choreographed in such tight arrangements thatthe intrusion of a human being threatens to sendthe pinwheel spinning out of control.

The mostly cheery palette of the American Inte-riors canvases would seem to contradict the anxiety



Fig. 1. Charles Sheeler, Interior, 1926. Oil on canvas; H. 3300, W. 2200. (Whitney Museum ofAmerican Art, New York, gift of Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney; photo, Geoffrey Clements.)

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bred by their tightly wound compositions. In eachpainting there are passages where vibrant reds,greens, and blues collide in animated energy. Yetin each painting there is also a counterpoint to thisriot of color: the broad expanses of wood floor-boards andwooden tabletops, renderedwith gentle


tonal gradations of brown, beige, blue, and green.These passages are by no means inactive, for theyare carefully painted with deep, if subtle, color com-plexity. In fact, if these canvases can be read as afugue-like arrangement of textile and bare wood,the wood is occasionally the stronger voice.Americana

Fig. 2. Charles Sheeler, Americana, 1931. Oil on canvas; H. 4800, W. 3600. (Edith and MiltonLowenthal Collection, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, bequest of Edith AbrahamsonLowenthal, 1991; photo © Metropolitan Museum of Art/Art Resource, NY.)


8 H. V. D., “Art: Charles Sheeler’s Exhibition,” New York Times,November 19, 1931, reel NSh-1, frame 309, Charles Sheeler Papers,Archives of AmericanArt,Washington,DC (hereafterCSP-AAA). Forthe status of the interior photographs, I am indebted to conversationswith Carol Troyen and Troyen, “From the Eyes Inward,” 24.


is pervaded by brown-orange-ish light, as if the table-top cast a reflective glow over the entire scene.In American Interior, the air has a pinkish tint thatseems to emanate from the cupboard, side table,and floorboards.

These canvases have been described as photo-graphic from their first public display: respondingtoHome, Sweet Home andAmericana in their 1931 de-but, a critic noted, “Mr. Sheeler has brought to hiscanvases the photographer’s eye for light and for


masses, together with an extraordinarily sensitivephotographic conception of line and shadow.”Sheeler made a series of photographs of his SouthSalem home (1929), which were apparently neverintended to be publicly exhibited (figs. 5–8).8 The

Fig. 3. Charles Sheeler, Home, Sweet Home, 1931. Oil on canvas; H. 3600, W. 2900. (Detroit Insti-tute of Arts, gift of Robert H. Tannahill; photo, Bridgeman Art Library.)



known, extant photographs were taken before thethree later paintings were created, and thus mighthave served as inspiration (for example, fig. 5 isclearly the template for fig. 4). They help to explaincertain aspects of the paintings: figure 5 makeslegible the New Yorker magazines in the upper leftcorner of figure 4, and the angle of the camera ex-plains the flattening of space along the painting’slower edge. The photographs are notable for theircarefully constructed quality. Rather than captur-ing his home casually, with belongings depictedin their everyday use, these photographs depictan assortment of objects arranged in very particularways. In figure 6, theWindsor chair has been pulledaway from the end of the table and turned, as if


Sheeler were searching for a pattern of oval shapesamong tabletops and chair seats, or perhaps a pat-tern of verticals among the chair spindles and tablelegs. In figure 7, the chairs and bed frame hint at alarger grid of horizontals (slats) and verticals (spin-dles) that recedes from the foreground to far distance;and in figure 8, Sheeler has found a surprising res-onance between his paintingUpper Deck (1929) andthe rectilinear cupboard holding a variety of bul-bous glass forms. In each photograph, Sheelerseems to be exploring the potential of distortedspace and the geometries that are revealed whenfamiliar objects are fragmented or viewed fromunusual angles. Although his famous distinctionwas that “photography is nature seen from the eyes

Fig. 4. Charles Sheeler, American Interior, 1934. Oil on canvas; H. 321/200, W. 3000. (Yale University

Art Gallery, gift of Mrs. Paul Moore.)



outward, painting from the eyes inward,” in thesephotographs it is evident that the artist was attempt-ing to shape his outer world to match an innervision.9 In the photographs, however, the clutterof objects ultimately looks agreeably busy and evencozy; the abstract patterns never overwhelm thescene, and instead the eye lingers over the endlessnumbers of varied objects. In the paintings, in con-trast, Sheeler has transformed the clutter into over-crowded, tense arrangements, where the piecesseem to struggle to stay in the picture. If, in thephotographs, Sheeler was intrigued by the confu-sion of three-dimensional objects flattened againstthe plane of his camera’s viewfinder, then in thepaintings he explored the ramifications of that con-fusion. The American Interiors paintings are muchmore than transcriptions of these photographs, butthe photographs seem to have pointed the way to-

9 Rourke, Charles Sheeler, 119.


ward the more radical, cubist-like compressions ofspace and fragmentation of objects in the paintings.

A critical discourse linking Sheeler’s art with anewly discovered (or newly appreciated) Americanaesthetic tradition can be traced as early as 1923, inan essay by critic Forbes Watson in The Arts. Watsonknew Sheeler through the Whitney Studio Club,where director Juliana Force organized special ex-hibitions, group shows, and studio classes for youngartists in New York City. In his essay on Sheeler,Watson put forth several interpretations of the art-ist’s oeuvre that would be echoed by other criticsin succeeding years and generations. His central ar-gument, clearly inspired by Sheeler’s drawings ofBucks County barns (one of which was illustratedin the article), was that the artist’s sensibility couldbe linked to anAmerican aesthetic tradition of struc-tural efficiency, clarity, and a lack of ostentation(fig. 9). Using terms such as “strength,” “taste,”and “refinement,” he then begged readers to “let

Fig. 5. Charles Sheeler, South Salem, Living Room, 1929. Photograph, gelatin silver print; H. 71/400, W. 95/85/800. (© Lane

Collection; photo, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.)



me … refer once more to early American furniturebecause, in its best examples, we find a pure abstractof taste and because early American furniture is oneof Charles Sheeler’s admirations, and an artist’s ad-mirations are as good a key to his outlook as any-thing except his own work. Moreover, in the clean-cut fineness, the cool austerity, the complete distrustof superfluities which we find in some pieces of earlyAmerican furniture, I seem to see theAmerican rootof Sheeler’s art.”10

In 1931, when Edith Halpert staged Sheeler’sfirst one-person show at the Downtown Gallery,she too linked Sheeler to this idea of an Americanaesthetic tradition: “Mr. Sheeler’s paintings anddrawings show a distinct connection with the work

10 Forbes Watson, “Charles Sheeler,” The Arts 3 (May 1923):337, 338. Watson and Force were also lovers during the 1920s. AvisBerman,Rebels on Eighth Street: Juliana Force and theWhitneyMuseum ofAmerican Art (New York: Athenaeum, 1990), 164, 185–87.


of the Colonial and early American painters, andthe Folk Artists of the early 19th century.”11 In thisshow, which included only six oil paintings, Sheelerdisplayed his two newest additions to the Interiorsgroup:Americana andHome, SweetHome, the latter ofwhich was reproduced on the cover of the exhibitionbrochure. By the time Rourke argued in her 1938 bi-ography that Sheeler had “discovered forms thatwere basic in American creative experience, Urfor-men—forms which for us are source forms,” she wasbuilding on a well-established critical scaffold.12

Ambivalence

Despite its numerous proponents, the critical dis-course linking Sheeler to a tradition of unadorned

11 Halpert, quoted in Corn, Great American Thing, 324.12

Fig. 6. Charles Sheeler, South Salem, Living Room, with Easel, 1929. Photograph, gelatin silver print; H. 711/1600, W. 95/8

00.(© Lane Collection; photo, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.)

Rourke, Charles Sheeler, 69.


14 H. V.D., “Art: Charles Sheeler’s Exhibition”;W. B.McCormick,“Machine Age Debunked,” New York American, November 26, 1931,reel NSh-1, frame 432, CSP-AAA. In the fall of 1932 and in the sum-mer of 1934, Americana was included in group shows and wassingled out by critics. In neither case, however, was the painting dis-


American furniture and early folk-like painting didnot entirely define the terms by which he was un-derstood in the interwar decades. In the early1930s, when Sheeler effectively relaunched his ca-reer as a painter with the solo exhibit at the Down-town Gallery,Home, Sweet Home and Americana wereshown in a variety of venues.13 The diversity of crit-ical responses to the paintings in these years shouldencourage a reconsideration of the centrality ofthis celebratory ideology in his work. Indeed, mostreviews were surprisingly reticent about his allegednationalist artistic heritage. The New York Times re-view of theDowntownGallery exhibitionwas typicalin referring to the “old rugs and furniture” and “old

13 For the importance of the 1931 Downtown Gallery show inSheeler’s career, see Carol Troyen, “Photography, Painting, andCharles Sheeler’s View of New York,” Art Bulletin 86 (December2004): 731–49.


table” inHome, Sweet Home andAmericana: the adjec-tive described the objects in a generic way, but didlittle to tie Sheeler to a particular historical tradi-tion. William McCormick in the New York Americandescribed the chair inHome, Sweet Home with greaterspecificity, calling it “an early American rush-bottomed chair,” but neither his nor any other exhi-bition review dwelled on aesthetic affinities betweenSheeler and the content of his interiors.14

Fig. 7. Charles Sheeler, South Salem, Interior, 1929. Photograph, gelatin silver print; H. 75/1600 W. 99/16

00. (© Lane Col-lection; photo, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.)

cussed as an emblem of the American past. E. C. Sherburne notedthe “machine age patternings of the floor coverings,” in “A NewAmerican Biennial,” Christian Science Monitor, November 26, 1932, 8;and Edward Alden Jewell called the painting “cleverly patterned” in“New Exhibit Opens at Grand Central,” New York Times, June 20,1934, 19.



Instead, critics were tellingly divided aboutSheeler’s treatment of the objects in his paintings—what William Carlos Williams later called Sheeler’s“eye for the thing.”15 Some critics felt that his mi-nutely observed interiors indicated a love for thesubject, while others argued that his portrayalsverged on the clinical. The Art News praised Ameri-cana as “another triumph of Mr. Sheeler’s slow butsustained investigations,” an approach that im-parted a “super-sensuous quality” and “special vital-ity and charm,” while McCormick described thepaintings as possessing “themost affectionate preci-sion.”16 However, the critic for the Chicago Daily Tri-bune, Eleanor Jewett, writing about Home, SweetHome in a group exhibit in January 1932, argued

15 William Carlos Williams, “Introduction,” in Charles Sheeler(New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1939), 8.

16 “Charles Sheeler,” Art News 30, November 21, 1931, 8;McCormick, “Machine Age.”


the opposite: “It is objective painting, austerely im-personal. The drawing is perfect; the coloring pure,clear and cold, although repeatedly very lovely.One gets from these pictures something of the feelof a near approach to the person of a terrifying sur-geon, immaculate in white, with instruments of glit-tering edge in hands eager to probe.”17 ThroughJewett’s metaphors, Sheeler’s tightly calibratedcomposition and all-but-invisible brushwork weresigns not of lovingly attentive observation, but ratherof clinical obsession veering on the violent.

Competing interpretations of sensuousness andclinical sterility indicate divided opinions amongcritics, but, more importantly, they point to a centralambivalence in the American Interiors canvases. Ifambivalence is the state of possessing “simultaneousand contradictory attitudes and feelings toward an

Fig. 8. Charles Sheeler, South Salem, Living Room, 1929. Photograph, gelatin silver print; H. 71/1600, W. 97/16

00. (© LaneCollection; photo, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.)

17 Eleanor Jewett, “Modern Paintings Shown at Arts Club,”Chicago Daily Tribune, January 24, 1932, D6.



object,” then in each of the four paintings, Sheelerexpresses ambivalence by simultaneously construct-ing and deconstructing his historical objects.18 Heoffers up carefully—even tenderly—rendered ob-jects, only to fracture them and cause viewers toquestion what they are seeing. Objects literallyfall apart in these canvases as they pass throughSheeler’s cubist lens. The massive trestle table inInterior loses a foot as it passes behind the side table,and the side table itself, with its spidery legs, threat-ens to topple over. In Americana, the table topcrowds out everything in the room, but it is curiouslydisembodied: it hovers in the air with no legs visible,and the carved slat-back chair obtrudes on its rectan-gular perfection in the lower left. The ladder-backchair in Home, Sweet Home, perhaps anxiously await-ing dissection at the hands of Jewett’s “terrifying sur-geon,” begins to come undone—its left arm is, uponcloser examination, lengthened and attenuated al-most to the point of breaking, and its woven seat fallsslightly out of perspective—and its shadow strains toescape the surgeon’s approach by reaching towardthe staircase. The chair in American Interior experi-ences what the previous one feared: it is pulled awk-

18 Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary, 11th ed.


wardly off the top of the canvas, its top slat wrenchedout of alignment.

Sheeler’s ambivalence is evident at the level ofpainterly application as well, where painstakingbrushwork yields surprising passages of abstraction,as if the artist had looked so intently that he realizedhe could not truly see the object. The viewer ofthese canvases has the recurring sensation of simul-taneously perceiving minutely rendered detail andwitnessing its complete dissolution. The pewterplate in Interior has a gleaming reflective surfacethat dissolves into a wash of gray. The oval box onthe table in Americana seems to be Shaker, but with-out the telltale swallowtail tabs one cannot be sure;and in fact the brown brushwork is so abstract thatone is not even confident the box is made of wood.In the rag rugs in Home, Sweet Home, the slightly ir-regular path traced by the brush is evident for eachsingle stripe of color, and the rug thus loses its wo-ven structure and its integrity as an object. Finally,the floral-rimmed plate in American Interior is in aperpetual state of just-coming-into-focus; its designis rendered with loose touches of the tip of thebrush that refuse, ultimately, to cohere in a tight,illusionistic representation. Sheeler’s paintings em-body that kind of deep absorption that constantly

Fig. 9. Charles Sheeler, “Barn Abstraction,” 1917. Fabricated black chalk on off-white wovepaper; H. 14⅛00, W. 191/2

00. (Louise and Walter Arensberg Collection, 1950, PhiladelphiaMuseum of Art.)


21 The exhibition consisted almost entirely of Abby AldrichRockefeller’s collection, although this was unstated in the catalogand the press. Rockefeller had purchased a significant portion ofher collection throughEdithHalpertwithCahill’s advice;Rockefeller


veers into utter distraction, that kind of deep ab-sorption that ultimately dismantles absorption.His ambivalence about what he is able to see in-duces similar ambivalence in the viewer: the longerone stares at the canvases, the more things fallapart.

In Sheeler’s paintings, a visual and cognitiveaporia occurs: the more we (and he) try to graspthe identity of the objects in the paintings, themorethey resist definition. As he simultaneously delin-eates and dissolves his subjects, he seems to be trac-ing a deeply ambivalent philosophical path inwhich he both cherishes and destroys them, bothclaims to know them and insists that objective com-prehension is impossible. Indeed, in pointing tothe limitations of illusionism, he reveals his owndeeper engagement with the theoretical founda-tions of cubism, which proposed that a “fuller com-prehension” of the world cannot be made through“the more or less verisimilar optic image whichdescribes the object from a single viewpoint.”19 In-stead, cubism’s radical proposition was that objectsmight be best understood as existing in space andthrough time, from multiple perspectives andacross anecdotal change—an understanding thatcannot, ultimately, be condensed to a single, illu-sionistic image. Sheeler’s use of cubism in thesecanvases—flattening the spaces, fragmenting anddissolving the objects—is thus not merely a lan-guage of form, but a language through which toquestion the known world. After seeing cubistpainting in the Armory Show in 1913, Sheeler de-scribed his own explorations in abstraction alongthese same lines: “The identification of familiar ob-jects comprising a picture is too often mistaken foran appreciation of the work itself and a welcomeopportunity for a cessation of investigation. For thisreason it was the intention of the abstractionists todivorce the object from the dictionary and disinte-grate its identity.”20 Although he had clearly re-turned to a level of figurative representation inthe American Interiors, Sheeler preserved an irre-ducible level of abstraction and thus pointed to thedifficulty of objectively perceiving and knowingthese objects. Through his application of paint tothese canvases, Sheeler questions how clearly suchobjects can be seen and, more fundamentally, howthoroughly they can be known. And, as these objectsphysically fall apart, he asks howmuchmetaphorical

19 Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler, from The Rise of Cubism (1915),excerpted in Art in Theory, 1900–1990, ed. Charles Harrison andPaul Wood (Oxford: Blackwell, 1992), 206, 207.

20 Reel Nsh-1, frame 75, CSP-AAA.


weight can be put on them. Perhaps the corner-stones of an American artistic foundation are notso readily grasped, and America, like Americanma-terial things, is not so easily understood.

P a r a l l e l i n s t an c e s o f de f i n i t i on anddisintegration—of ambivalent embrace anddismissal—occur in some of the key texts on folkart and furniture published in the 1920s and1930s. These texts were written by curators, collec-tors, and critics who shared with Sheeler an interestin early American vernacular artifacts, and who, to-gether with Sheeler, constituted an active intellec-tual community where the meaning of such objectswas debated. The difficulty that these authors hadin defining a folk tradition, and the critical judg-ments they offered on the quality of this art, dem-onstrate a pervasive ambivalence: they all agreedthis material was important, but as their focus tight-ened and their examination of the material deep-ened, they grew progressively more uncertain asto its level of importance.

Curator Holger Cahill wrote numerous articlesand essays in which he introduced American folkart to a general public. Cahill worked with EdithHalpert to establish folk art as significant (and col-lectible) American art; in addition to the pioneer-ing exhibitions that he organized at the NewarkMuseum in 1930 and 1931, he staged the high-profile 1932 exhibition at the Museum of ModernArt, American Folk Art: The Art of the Common Man inAmerica, 1750–1900.21 In his essay for the AmericanFolk Art catalog, Cahill used his preferred techniquefor defining folk art: he compared it negativelyagainst other art forms. This strategy in itself revealscertain ambivalences. Cahill wanted his readers tosee the art, but his inability to positively describe itsuggested, however subconsciously, that perhaps itwas not worth seeing. Repeated negative definitionsthroughout the essay bred confusion and unease forthe reader, and ultimately the text conveyed a hesi-tancy about the core identity—and thus value—offolk art. Cahill began by contrasting folk art with“professional” art. “The work of these men is folkart because it is the expression of the common

was also an important patron of Sheeler at this time. The catalog forthe exhibition is: Holger Cahill, American Folk Art: The Art of theCommon Man in America, 1750–1900 (New York: Museum of Mod-ern Art, 1932). For an assessment of Cahill’s training and its ambiv-alent influence on his approach to folk art, see JohnMichael Vlach,“Holger Cahill as Folklorist,” Journal of American Folklore 98, no. 388(April–June 1985): 148–62.


Q1

Q3

25 Homer Eaton Keyes, “Some American Primitives,” Antiques12 (August 1927): 120.

26 Edward Alden Jewell, “Contemporary and ‘Folk,’” New YorkTimes,October 25, 1931, X12. In her perceptive study of ConstanceRourke, Joan Shelley Rubin also notes passages in her writings thatindicate “doubts” or “ambivalence” about the value of Americanfolk literature: Joan Shelley Rubin, “A Convergence of Vision:Constance Rourke, Charles Sheeler, and American Art,” AmericanQuarterly 42, no. 2 (June 1990): 202, 212.

27 A recent study of the Index of American Design emphasizesthe place of folk art collecting in that project. The authors discuss atleast two competing ways that folk art was valued—aesthetically and


people, made by them and intended for their useand enjoyment. It is not the expression of profes-sional artists made for a small cultured class, andit has little to dowith the fashionable art of its period.”If the distinction between “professional” and “folk”was (for the moment) clear, Cahill’s next distinc-tion, between “folk” and “craft,” was less so. Hewrote, “It [folk art] does not come out of an aca-demic tradition passed on by school, but out of acraft tradition plus the personal quality of the rarecraftsman who is an artist.… It does not include thework of the craftsmen who made American silver,glass, or furniture, except when their work carriedover into the fine arts.”22 Folk art was thus a productof the craft community, but wasmore art than craft;it was not so much art, however, as to be “profes-sional art.” It occupied a profoundly liminal space:neither professional art nor craft yet constitutedby both, relying on the skills of the latter and theforms and standards of the former. As he tried toforge a concrete definition, the object of his inquirybecame ever more elusive. The reader, in turn,was left with a growing uncertainty about whichactivities (and products) could be considered folkart.

Although the elusive materiality of Sheeler’spainted objects was a conscious effect, Cahill’s rhe-torical struggles to define folk art were perhaps lessintentional. The curator did, however, display self-conscious ambivalence about the qualitative valueof folk art. He offered a blunt assessment of folkportraiture, observing that “the painters’ methodof working and their limited training made for acertainmonotony, and for a tendency to use formu-lae in the painting of stock figures.”23 He then con-cluded his essay with a fundamentally cautiousstatement about the value of folk art, insisting that“any judgment upon American folk art at this timecan represent little more than a personal opinion.”“Folk art cannot be valued as highly as the work ofour greatest painters and sculptors,” he remindedhis readers, “but it is certainly entitled to a placein the history of American art. When comparedwith the work of our secondary masters it holds itsown quite well.”24 Cahill was not alone in issuinghalf-apologetic, half-defensive analyses of the qual-ity of folk art; a reluctant and often skeptical tonepervaded several early discussions of this categoryof art. Homer Eaton Keyes, founder of Antiques,offered a typical assessment of nineteenth-century

22 Cahill, American Folk Art, 6.23 Ibid., 14.24 Ibid., 27.


folk art in an early article, admitting that suchworkshad formal deficiencies but insisting nonethelesson a cautious appreciation: “The discerning eye willrecognize in many [paintings]—despite curious in-adequacies of draftsmanship, and, at times, an al-most perverse distortion of bodily proportions—theevidence of artistic sensibility, and—within limits—of considerable technical precision.”25 EdwardAldenJewell, reviewing one of Cahill’s Newark Museumshows in 1931, was more reticent about the artisticvalue of the objects on display, preferring instead toassert their historic significance: “Not every primi-tive weathervane and parlor gimcrack is to be ac-cepted as a transcendent work of art. There arenaively beautiful, even upon occasion subtly beauti-ful, examples among the objects now being broughtto light. But it would seem that the supreme virtue ofall this folk art is its significance as background,solidifying and enriching a nation’s fund of tradi-tion.”26 In pronouncements such as these, criticswere posing questions that resonate with the decon-structing, dissolving objects in Sheeler’s paintings.All seem to agree that vernacular art has value, butthey equivocate on what kind. As they ponder—abstract aesthetic sensibility? historical significance?something else?—the very terms by which the artshall be known hang in the balance. And as thedefinition of folk art comes in and out of focus, itsdurability as a national aesthetic cornerstone isinterrogated.27

A final example of the curious ambivalence thatpermeated the Americana discourse can be foundin the publications of Edward and Faith Andrews,the famous early collectors of Shaker furniture.They published their first article on Shaker furni-ture in Antiques in 1928 and their foundationalbook, Shaker Furniture: The Craftsmanship of an Amer-ican Communal Sect, in 1937. A notable feature oftheir early writings was their tendency to present

ethnographically—which underscores the complex intellectual cli-mate traced here. See Virginia Tuttle Clayton, Elizabeth Stillinger,and ErikaDoss,Drawing on America’s Past: Folk Art,Modernism, and theIndex of American Design (Washington, DC: National Gallery of Artand University of North Carolina Press, 2002).



Shaker furniture in terms that resonated withcontemporary definitions of modernist design. Intheir 1928 article, they argued that the communalfurniture-making process “helped to standardizethe original type-forms” of Shaker objects; theirchoice of words cast Shaker production as a proto-assembly-linemodel of efficiency, and Shaker piecesthemselves as paragons of “type-form” functional-ism. They also described the Shaker design processas one that adhered to the modernist decree toabolish ornament: “In discarding all unnecessaryembellishment and artifice, they reduced these ear-lier designs [eighteenth-century models] to theiressentials of form and proportion, and, in so doing,achieved distinctly beautiful results.”28 Their deci-sion to frame Shaker furniture as protomodernisthad two undoubtedly intended effects: it made theobjects seem familiar, and it justified their plainness.Yet the modernist frame also points to a deeper am-bivalence, since it insists on the presentness of theobjects even as they are being resurrected as em-blems of the past. They made Shaker furnitureknowable as modern objects, but ultimately un-knowable as historical artifacts.

A more extreme form of present-day vision dis-placing knowledge of the past occurred in the 1937Shaker Furniture, which was illustrated by the photo-grapher William F. Winter. Winter’s photographsof Shaker interiors appeared to be documentarystudies of rooms furnished as they were used: infig. 10, for example, he captured a dormitory roomwith a single bed, clothing rack, and stray hanger,and through the doorway, a communal washstandand mirror. However, as the Andrewses explained,the photographs were, in fact, entirely staged, andconsisted largely of their own collection, arrangedin a few rooms at the communities in Mount Leba-non, New York, and Hancock, Massachusetts. Theyadmitted that they adhered to “formalities of ar-rangement” and that “the placement of objects fol-lowed the ordinary rules of pictorial technique.”They also hypothesized about the “somewhat stark,austere effect which the early interiors must havepresented,” and assured their readers that the anti-septic light and rigid lines of the photographs didnot constitute “historic incorrectness.” Ultimately,they stated, “every effort wasmade to evoke the spirit

28 Edward Deming Andrews and Faith Andrews, “Craftsman-ship of an American Religious Sect,” Antiques 14 (August 1928):134, 135. For critical assessments of the Andrewses’ role in popular-izing Shaker furniture, see John T. Kirk, The Shaker World: Art, Life,Belief (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1997), 239–40; Stephen J. Stein,The Shaker Experience in America: A History of the United Society of Believ-ers (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1992), 38–81.


of the original scene, as we imagined it to be.”29 Al-though one might examine these images for infor-mation about the Shaker past, they were purelymodern constructs. No amount of in-depth lookingwould reveal historical truth—it would only lead theviewer back to history as the Andrewses imagined it.

Winter’s dormitory photograph merits furtherinterpretation. Although it depicts a room and ahallway beyond, the even play of light against theuniform white walls and dark woodwork createsan optical illusion: the viewer momentarily losesher sense of depth, and the doorway seems to bea large mirror or picture frame, holding its imagewithin the plane of the wall just as the row of storagepegs adhere to the wall. As one experiences this spa-tial confusion, the dormitory roommomentarily be-comes a hermetically sealed space. There is no exit,only the constant reflection into the room. Indeed,even after the viewer has resolved the pictorialspace, the mirror hanging in the hallway, reflectingthe threshold of the room, reenacts the sense of anenclosed space that reflects only upon itself. If thisphotograph is a metaphor for knowledge aboutShaker furniture, it proposes that one might neverknow this subject at all. Never able to cross thethreshold of the room and travel down the hall toexamine the rest of the dorm, one may be forevertrapped, staring at a space and a story of one’s ownconstruction.

Although the Andrewses expressed their “in-debtedness” to Winter’s photographic aesthetic,the historical evidence suggests that the authors, infact, influencedWinter’s images.30 Winter had beenphotographing Shaker communities in Hancockand Mount Lebanon since the early 1920s. Hisphotographs prior to his collaboration with theAndrewses portray irregularities of life, and havesofter lines, warmer blacks and grays, and an in-tense if quiet emotionality (fig. 11). TheAndrewses’modernist aesthetic sensibility undoubtedly con-tributed to themore rigorous austerity of his imagesfor Shaker Furniture, but another possible source wasSheeler’s own photographs of Mount LebanonShaker Village, taken circa 1934, and possiblyhis American Interiors canvases or photographs(fig. 12). The Andrewses had met Juliana Force,Sheeler’s early supporter and fellow collector of

29 Edward Deming Andrews and Faith Andrews, Shaker Furni-ture: The Craftsmanship of an American Communal Sect (1937; reprint,New York: Dover, 1964), 65.

30 Ibid.On the place ofWinter’s photographs in theAndrewses’scholarship, see Stephen Bowe and Peter Richmond, Selling Shaker:The Commodification of Shaker Design in the Twentieth Century (Liverpool:Liverpool University Press, 2007), esp. chap. 1.



Shaker objects, in 1932, and through her it is likelythey learned of Sheeler’s art.31 Winter’s dormitoryimage specifically shares the doorframe device withSheeler’s own photograph in figure 7, and in gen-eral Winter’s later photographs share with theAmerican Interiors a tendency toward claustropho-bia. In Sheeler’s canvases, not only do the architec-tural spaces slide out from under the viewer’s feet,but the objects crowd her out of the space and thereare no doors or windows through which to escape;even the staircase inHome, Sweet Home is flattened asit approaches the top of the canvas, losing the nec-essary structural integrity to carry someone out of

31 For Winter’s work before Shaker Furniture, see Kirk, ShakerWorld,240–42; David A. Schorsch,The Photographs ofWilliam F.Winter,Jr., 1899–1939 (New York: David A. Schorsch, 1989), pl. 3–25.Berman notes that Force provided the Andrewses “with the servicesof a photographer” after their meeting in 1932. It is possible thatthis photographer was Winter, since the Andrewses knew Winterby 1932, and Winter took photographs of the interior of the newWhitney Museum ca. 1933. Berman, Rebels on Eighth Street, 317;Schorsch, Winter, pl. 78–82.


the room. In these jewel-like spaces, the artifactsmake no room for a human user, and Sheelerseems to be questioning how well these antiquescan engage with the needs of contemporary society.That Winter’s photographs for Shaker Furniture de-ploy some of the same formal strategies as Sheeler’spaintings—and seem to express some of the samephilosophical ambivalence about the substance ofan American artistic tradition—should not be takenas a sign of specific influence. Rather, it is evidenceof the deep-rooted ambivalence that permeatedthe discourse of discovering America’s aestheticheritage.

Irony

In the1931–32 season, as critics reflected on Sheeler’snew group of paintings, several commented on thehumor that they found. McCormick of theNew YorkAmerican said that the chair inHome, Sweet Home was

Fig. 10. William F. Winter, Room with Bed and Towel Rack, ca. 1936. (Edward Deming Andrews Memorial ShakerCollection, Winterthur Library.)



“amusingly combined with domestic architectureand modern rugs.” In his assessment, Sheeler’s artmade ironic commentary on a range of popularfads, from nostalgic views of the American past inHome, Sweet Home and Americana to the new crazefor tanning (occasionally under artificial lights) inCactus: “These last three pictures are indicative ofhis sense of humor, for he calls the chair subject‘Home, SweetHome’; the game’s table ‘Americana,’and his cactus appears to be enjoying a sunbathjudging by the electric light on its standard whichthe light bath craze has developed. Mr. Sheelerwins my enduring gratitude, since he always stripsart of its artiness” (fig. 13).32

32 McCormick, “MachineAgeDebunked.”The fad for sunbath-ing in the 1920s and early 1930s can be traced in newspaper andmagazine advertisements for bathing suits. The New York Timesnoted in 1927 that the “latest fad of fashionable” British societywas to host a tea party in which guests “are shown into a room lightedby sun-ray lamps. Low divans and cushions enable them to lie full


Henry McBride tossed a bit of his own sardonicwit into his review of Sheeler’s Downtown Galleryshow. LikeMcCormick, he sawCactus as a referenceto sunbathing: “The cactus is taking a hygienic bathin some kind of electric rays.”He framed his discus-sion of the two Interiors paintings as exercises inclever visual puns, in which antique rugs and thedistinctly modern shadows cast by hard electriclights rhyme with the patterns of cubist composi-tions. Conflating Americana and Home, Sweet Home,he wrote: “Still another picture is called ‘Americana’and shows how a cute Yankee painter can get awaywith cubism in a country that says cubism is againstthe law.Old-fashioned hooked rugs are on the floorin the picture he has painted and they have thekind of patterns you see in early cubist pictures,

Fig. 11. William F. Winter, Cobbler’s Shop Interior, Mt. Lebanon, New York, ca. 1923–30. Photograph, gelatin silver print;H. 10¾00, W. 131/2

00. (David A. Schorsch and Eileen M. Smiles, Woodbury, CT.)

length while enjoying the beneficial rays from the lamps as theydrink tea, gossip, or listen to the radio.” “Sun-Lamp Parties LondonFad; Guests Wear Bathing Suits,” New York Times,March 6, 1927, 2.



accentuated by the lights and shadows that filterthrough a ladder-backed chair that stands againstthe light.”33 Chicago’s critic Jewett, assessing Sheeler’swork in another column from January 1932, pro-posed that midst the coolness, austerity, and per-haps violence of his canvases, viewers would “findhumor.”34

Where might the humor in these complicatedpaintings lie?While theymay not be explicitly funny,they are laced with an ironic tone that often servesto critique the status of the objects depicted. It isthis irony that critics seem to have interpreted asdry wit (Sheeler himself was described in Rourke’sbiography as possessing a “dry” sense of humor).35

33 Henry McBride, “Far-Reaching Effect: Paintings by CharlesSheeler,” New York Sun,November 21, 1931, sporting section p. 12,Reel NSh-1, frame 432, CSP-AAA.

34 Eleanor Jewett, “New Mexico and France Aid at Art Show,”Chicago Daily Tribune, January 20, 1932, 15.

35 Rourke, Charles Sheeler, 37.


There are two lenses through which Sheeler’s useof irony can be interpreted. The first is the traditionof satire, often self-deprecating and subtle, de-scribed by Rourke in American Humor (1931). Inher analysis, this distinctly American form of humorarose in early nineteenth-century traveling theatri-cal performances and eventually informed thevoices of such literary figures as Mark Twain andevenHenry James. It included an eye for “low-keyedsatire,” “understatement,” “irony,” and “faint mas-querade.”36 Twain himself may have provided thebest description of this dry, satirical tradition whenhe wrote: “The [American] humorous story is toldgravely; the teller does his best to conceal the factthat he even dimly suspects that there is anything

Fig. 12. Charles Sheeler, Doors to Meeting Hall, Mt. Lebanon Shaker Village, ca. 1934. Photograph, gelatin silver print;H. 67/16

00, W. 89/1600. (© Lane Collection; photo, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.)

36 Constance Rourke, American Humor: A Study of the NationalCharacter (1931; reprint, Tallahassee: Florida State University Press,1986), 25. Rubin also connects Sheeler’s paintings to Rourke’s studyof humor, although she focuses on the question of myth-making inhumor and its role in Sheeler’s paintings. Rubin, “Convergence ofVision,” 209.



funny about it.”37 The second reference for irony inSheeler’s works is the absurdist wit of Dada. Sheelerspent his early years in New York City as part ofthe rambunctious crowd at Walter and LouiseArensberg’s apartment, where Marcel Duchampwas the central figure. Although Sheeler neveradopted the radical Dadaist gestures of the Frenchartist, he evidently appreciated Duchamp’s work. In1924, he staged an exhibition at theWhitney StudioClub that featured five Duchamp canvases; in 1938,Sheeler described Duchamp’s ready-mades in his bi-ography: “a tin cup, a can-opener, an egg-beater, astrainer, arranging these in irrelevant combinationsto which he gave strange titles. His humor nevertook the form of jokes but twists of expression.”38

37 Mark Twain, “How to Tell a Story [1895],” in Mark Twain:Collected Tales, Sketches, Speeches, and Essays, 1891–1910, vol. 2, ed.Louis J. Budd (New York: Library of America, 1992), 201.

38 Rourke, Charles Sheeler, 48. On Sheeler’s Duchamp show, seeBerman, Rebels on Eighth Street, 202.


Dadaist humor had an anarchic agenda, interrogat-ing the politeness of bourgeois society and invertingit into bawdy chaos. William Carlos Williams furtherexplained the appeal of this circle of artists: “Therewas a lot of humor in French painting, and a kind ofloose carelessness. Morals were down and so were alot of other things. For which everybody was veryhappy, relieved.”39

If irony is the use of a form to express the oppo-site of what it usually means, often to humorouseffect, then irony can be found throughout theAmerican Interiors, inflected with both a Twain-like dry satire and an absurdist Dada wit. Sheeler’sirony takes shots at multiple targets: it laughs at theobjects, at antiquarian collectors who romanticizeand idealize the past, and at this collector himself,who is not always immune to covetous or sentimen-tal imaginings. In the earliest painting, Interior, theattenuation of the side table’s legs can be seen as anironic distortion of an essential Shaker trait. Shakerobjects were usually praised for their lightness, butin Sheeler’s painting, the slenderly proportionedlegs are overly extended.40 As if caught in a fun-house mirror, where the proper world is distortedinto Dadaist absurdity, the table’s legs appear to beelastic, stretched thin beyond reason. Sheeler iro-nizes the supposed gracefulness of such objectsand also, by creating a table that cannot stay uprighton its four thin legs, satirizes their cherished func-tionality. Moreover, its alternate title, Interior, SouthSalem, introduces autobiography and low-keyedself-deprecation to the work: I too, Sheeler seemsto say, make an extreme fetish of the Shaker econ-omy of form.41

In Home, Sweet Home, the ladder-back chair sitsnext to a modern furnace rather than an openhearth. The replacement of the fire by the furnaceis a classic Dada gesture—substituting the mechan-ical for the organic—which thumbs its nose simul-taneously at an antiquarian’s nostalgia for thepremodern world and a modernist’s obsession withthe mechanical present. The title of the painting it-self is an example of a Dada-like “twist of expres-sion.” “Home, Sweet Home” is taken, asWanda Corndocumented, from the title of the sentimental,nineteenth-century folk song that celebrates thesanctuary of a pastoral “thatched cottage” home:“To thee, I’ll return, overburdened with care /The heart’s dearest solace will smile on me there.”

Fig. 13. Charles Sheeler, Cactus, 1931. Oil on canvas;H. 45⅛00, W. 301/16

00. (Louise and Walter Arensberg Col-lection, 1950, Philadelphia Museum of Art.)

39 Quoted in Rourke, Charles Sheeler, 49.40 For the lightness of Shaker objects, see Walter A. Dyer, “The

Furniture of the Shakers,” House Beautiful 65 (May 1929): 672.41 For the painting’s alternate title, see Troyen and Hirshler,

Charles Sheeler, 110.


44 Corn, Great American Thing, 322, 326. For more on the rela-tionship between Duchamp and folk art collecting, see Berman,Rebels on Eighth Street, 202.

45 “Art Exhibitions of the Week,” New York Times, February 17,1924, sect. 10, p. 11.


Sheeler’s home is hardly pastoral, with its gleamingmodern furnace; and if the hearth traditionallysymbolizes “the heart’s dearest solace,” here thesolace has turned, ironically, cool and metallic. Inthis home, warmth does not come from layers ofemotional and physical connection, but rather isefficiently manufactured. The chair, moreover,seems ambivalent about the modern home towhich it has “returned”: one foot is placed on thefurnace’s foundation almost as if by accident, whileits shadow leans away.42

In Americana, Sheeler’s ironic eye informs thelarge refectory table (referred to by McCormickas a “game’s table”), which hovers above the floor.Such a table would have been used to gather a largegroup together for communal dining. In Sheeler’sroom, however, the table takes on an exaggerated,even grandiose sense of its own importance. Itlooms far too large in the space, and instead ofdrawing people to it, seems to crowd everything elseout. The random objects on the table are isolatedfrom one another, as if the surface was simply toovast to allow for social interaction. In its vain at-tempt to facilitate human community, Sheeler’stable subtly satirizes the romantic imagination thatwould placemerry diners hip-to-hip on the benchesand at either end. Instead, all one sees is a disjointedcollection of inanimate artifacts, or “Americana” asin the painting’s title. The term “Americana” re-ferred, in 1931, to both historical American artifactsand to the popular fad for all things supposedly his-toric and American.43 Sheeler’s title thus proposes akind of double entendre. It describes the historicalcharacter of the objects in the painting, but it alsopoints to the sheer materiality of the objects onview—a cacophony of collector’s goods jammed to-gether within the confines of the canvas.

Irony—in the form of satire and Dadaistabsurdity—appeared in the contemporaneous lit-erature on folk art as well, where it often was usedto express doubt about the value of the artifacts.According to Corn, Dadaist wit coursed throughthe 1924 folk art show staged at theWhitney StudioClub, organized by Henry Schnakenberg. At thisearly date, many artists who collected folk art

42 Corn also discusses the possibility of irony in Sheeler’s title:“As a title it both mocked the Victorian sentimentality of the origi-nal song and indulged a little in it.”Corn,Great American Thing, 295,313.

43 A typical instance of the latter use of the term can be seen inan art review, where Edward Alden Jewell commented that N. C.Wyeth’s canvas In a Dream IMet General Washington was “an addition,it should probably be esteemed, to the ever-increasing fund ofAmericana.” Jewell, “Corcoran Art Show at Capital Opens,” NewYork Times, December 4, 1932, 33.


enjoyed it partly for its subversiveness: much likeDuchamp’s ready-mades, they considered folk art’suncommonly rough forms to be a challenge to thepoliteness of good taste embodied in high-style an-tiquarian collections like that of the Metropolitan’sAmerican Wing, under construction that veryyear.44 Indeed, the formal awkwardness of somefolk art pieces made them unintentionally funnyto modern eyes. The New York Times noted that“there ismuch, of course, that is funny” in theWhitneyshow, singling out “‘Solomon’s Wise Decree’ withthe baby being held upside down by one leg.”45

Yet several reviewers suspected that the entire showwas staged as a joke on the audience, and respondedwithmild scolding. One warned the “younger paint-ers” of the Studio Club not to be too enamored of “ajoke in paint”: “to be perpetually joking is to kill allthe fun; we must be serious if only to be relieved ofthe necessity of laughing.”46

A year later, a critic in International Studio pub-lished a reproduction of a folk painting, which hetitled Dover Baby, and proposed that his workingdate of “possibly seventeenth century” could be cor-roborated by a scholar who could date the style ofthe bottle held by the baby (fig. 14).47 The followingmonth, his colleague wrote this tongue-in-cheek re-sponse to the vexing question of dating: “I wasseized by the antiquarian urge. And, allowing forthe isometric drawing of the bottle in the portrait,the duplicate was found. Not, as one might sup-pose, in a museum or collector’s case, but in thatof a druggist on Sixth Avenue. Moreover, the bottlecontained a mixture guaranteed to promote thegrowth of hair. I looked again at the portrait, notedthe astonishing hirsute accomplishments of thechild. Here, I said, is a great discovery—the firstEarly American advertisement.”48 In his satire ofthe scholarly connoisseur, he managed to pokefun at both the collector and the collected objectwithout cracking a smile.

46 Virgil Barker, “Notes on the Exhibitions,” The Arts 5 (March1924): 161. The New York Times similarly lectured the Studio groupby celebrating “the type of humor that prevailed well into thenineteenth century … [which] was bold and brave. Not a trace ofinnuendo, and that is the unfortunate taint inmuch of themodern-ist art that has plenty of wit but less than enough good taste.” “TheWorld of Art,” New York Times Magazine, February 17, 1924, 12.

47 Guy Eglington, “Art andOther Things,” International Studio 80(February 1925): 417.

48 Deogh Fulton, “Cabbages and Kings,” International Studio 80(March 1925): 489.



Even the self-consciously serious photographsby Winter for Shaker Furniture occasionally have ahint of irony. In another plate from the book (as-sembled in the same space as fig. 10), Winter andthe Andrewses arranged eight examples of Shakerchairs to either side of a doorway (fig. 15). Thechairs face each other, leaning slightly back and oc-casionally to the side as anthropomorphized substi-tutes for the people who might sit in them. Ratherthan a meeting of elders, Winter has stumbledupon a meeting of chairs. He not only satirizesthe revered elders, however. As the chairs confer,one is forced to consider whether their status as col-lector’s objects—as pure material value—is whatgives them this human identity. By using irony toreveal the seduction and allure of the marketplace,Winter speaks truth to power and edges towardDadaist subversion.

49 I would like to acknowledge Robin Jaffee Frank, who sug-gested to me the symbolic interpretation of the woman on the ce-ramic plate. See also Troyen and Hirshler, Charles Sheeler, 154.

50 Watson, “Charles Sheeler,” 341.51 Parker, “The Classical Vision of Charles Sheeler,” 68.52 Ernest Brace, “Charles Sheeler,” Creative Art 11 (October

1932): 104. Troyen notes at least one description of Home, SweetHome as a basement room. Troyen andHirshler, Charles Sheeler, 136.

Americana

There is one painting in the American Interiorsgroup that does not lend itself to humorous reflec-tion: the 1934 American Interior. This canvas was


painted the year after Sheeler’s wife, Katherine,died, and it depicts the home in South Salem,New York, that they had left in 1932. The paintingis frequently understood as a personal statement ofmourning: it refers back to the home where he andKatherine lived happily and healthily; the womanpainted on the plate, trapped under glass, couldrepresent her as a frozen memory; and the centerof the canvas is a shadowy void.49Although thepaint-ing engages in an act of chronological subterfuge—it depicts a house in which the painter no longerresides—it is very deeply rooted in the specifics ofthe painter’s biography. Sheeler adds another ele-ment of the contemporary world in the form ofNewYorker magazines stacked at the end of the bed inthe painting’s upper left corner.Without the knowl-edge of the painter’s life, this detail alone sufficesto place the scene in the cultural moment of theUnited States in the 1920s or 1930s.

In his 1923 article on Sheeler, Forbes Watsonproposed that as an artist, Sheeler was uninterestedin conveying temporal specificity: “the temporaryaspect of the barn does not interest him in theleast—how it looks in the morning mist or thenoonday sun, or under any other transitory effectsof light.”50 Sheeler’s allegiance to the “essential” asopposed to the “accidental” became a commontheme in critical accounts of his work in the ensu-ing decades.51 Timelessness may not, however, bean entirely appropriate framework for interpretingthe American Interiors canvases. Just as Sheeler’scomment about antique objects, which opened thisessay, indicated a preoccupation with the past as aprecise entity, so too each of these four canvases in-cludes elements from the interwar years, elementsthatmark the scenes as temporally specific. The fur-nace in Home, Sweet Home is the most obvious: itsstreamlined form was a clear reference to “the sortso often admired, according to the advertisements,by immaculate ladies and gentlemen in eveningclothes.”52 Sheeler’s decision to compose the can-vas with a flight of stairs in the corner recalls a com-mon visual trope in furnace advertising and seemsintended to confuse: is this a basement or a livingroom (fig. 16)? In Americana, the backgammonboard is an emblem of the game’s raging popularity

Fig. 14. Unidentified Baby, possibly Dover, NJ, probablyca. 1840. Oil on canvas; H. 2600, W. 2100. (Abby AldrichRockefeller Folk Art Museum, Colonial WilliamsburgFoundation, Williamsburg, VA.)



in late-1920s society; and Ernest Brace, writing in1932, noted that the painting combined “in onecomposition the eighteenth and twentieth centu-ries… an early American blanket … hooked rugs…[and] a piece of very up-to-date linoleum.”53 Theearliest canvas in the series, Interior, has no obviousreference to the present day of the 1920s. Yet itsagitated, visible brushwork, so different from theother canvases, can be interpreted as a signifier ofthe irreducible moment of its creation. From an

53 Brace, “Sheeler,” 104. Brace’s “up-to-date linoleum” mayhave been in reference to the geometric pattern in the painting’supper left; however, the photograph in figure 6 reveals that the itemis a rug, not linoleum. Backgammon’s popularity in the late 1920sand early 1930s was aptly described by Clare Boothe Luce in VanityFair’s Backgammon to Win (1930; reprint, New York: Simon andSchuster in association with Condé Nast, 1974), in which she ex-plained that new strategies for gambling had “lifted Backgammonfrom the dry plains of strategy and science to the adventurous andromantic heights of an exciting gambling game, a game which ispeculiarly suited to the modern scene and temperament” (n.p.).


iconographic perspective, the broad hooked rugin the lower portion of the canvas can be under-stood not merely as an antique product, but morespecifically as a collectible item that reached theheight of its popularity in the 1920s. Advertise-ments abounded for hooked rugs offered by deal-ers, auction houses, and retail establishmentsduring this decade, and historian Russell Lynesnoted that “in the twenties … there was a boom inhand-hooked rugs, and you could buy them atNew England filling stations when you paused forgas.”54

The dual identity of the hooked rug—as histor-ical artifact and contemporary collectible—actuallyapplies to all of the objects in Sheeler’s paintings,and raises a fundamental question about their con-tent. These paintings are less about American

Fig. 15. William F. Winter, Room with Eight Chairs, ca. 1936. (Edward Deming Andrews Memorial Shaker Collection,Winterthur Library.)

54 Russell Lynes,The Tastemakers (NewYork:Grosset andDunlap,1954), 238–39.


55 Henry W. Kent, “The American Wing in Its Relation tothe History of Museum Development,” An American Wing for the


objects and their history than they are about theculture of twentieth-century Americana collecting.They provide nohistorical context in which to learnabout the pieces’ origins; rather, their only contextis other collectible goods. As rooms filled with his-torical artifacts that are also desirable commodi-ties, Sheeler’s canvases beg comparison with themuseum installation technique made popular bytheMetropolitan’s AmericanWing, the period room.


As a cultural phenomenon, the American Wingrooms were significant in part for the historical les-sons they imparted; as one official at the Metropoli-tan noted, period rooms gave the public a sense ofdaily life in the historical past and thus “presentedthe arts humanly.”55 But perhaps more importantly,

Fig. 16. George Shepherd, “Here Is a great Fireman,” 1930. FromHouse Beautiful 68 (September1930): 277. (Iron Fireman.)



period rooms provided a veneer of respectability tothe fad for all things colonial. After the AmericanWing opened, it was quickly hailed by commercialoutfits as a reputable model for consumers in termsof both the objects shown and the values embodiedtherein; the museum’s own publicity images, show-ing models “living” in the rooms, encouraged suchreadings (fig. 17). The Erskine-Danforth Corpora-tion explained, in an advertisement in House Beauti-ful from March 1925, that its line of colonial revivalfurniture could be readily understood in relation tothe “three great periods of American design,” as rep-resented in “the new American Wing at the Metro-politan Museum.” The company explained that itsproductswere “sodirect and genuine that they bring

Metropolitan Museum of Art, Metropolitan Museum of Art Bulletin 17,pt. 2 (November 1922): 14.


the truth of traditions … to all homes where goodtaste, quaint interest, and comfortable dignity arevalued” (fig. 18). Ladies’ Home Journal reported toits readers inMay1925 that “it is notmerelymaterialfor club papers that [the housewife] finds in theAmerican Wing, but something more vital—a prac-tical inspiration toward the furnishing of her ownhome.”56

If Sheeler’s Interiors are related to period rooms,it is not because of their historical subject; indeed,they have no history. Instead, they may relate to pe-riod rooms because they, like the American Wing,could serve as models for a particular kind of life-style. Indeed, Sheeler’s decision to include a photo-graph of his Ridgefield, Connecticut, home as a

Fig. 17. Parlor, Powel House, Philadelphia, 1765–66, remodeled 1769–71; view as installed October 1924. (Metro-politan Museum of Art, Rogers Fund, 1918; photo © Metropolitan Museum of Art/ Art Resource, NY.)

56 Ethel Davis Seal, “The American Wing of the MetropolitanMuseum of Art,” Ladies’ Home Journal 42 (May 1925): 20.



frontispiece to his 1939 retrospective atMoMA indi-cates his own participation in the rhetoric of periodrooms as designs for living: the photograph is posi-tioned in the catalog not as a work of art but as a doc-


umentation of the artist’s life, accompanied by thecaption, “Photograph by Sheeler of his house atRidgefield, showing several examples of Shaker fur-niture” (fig. 19). Placed on the page facing the

Fig. 18. “Danersk Furniture as related to the three great periods of American design,” 1925. FromHouse Beautiful 57 (March 1925): 265.



artist’s chronology, it is parallel to the frontispiecefor the entire catalog, which is a portrait of Sheelerby Edward Steichen; the interior is thus parallel tothe man, and the room becomes a stand-in for thelife of the artist. What kind of living might Sheeler’srooms represent? His paintings (and photographs)


depict rooms that are much more crowded, andconsiderably less formal, than those in theAmericanWing. Perhaps they convey an idea of community, ofrelaxed, casual living, embodied in the form ofthe always-present refectory table, the daybeds,and the prominent chairs. In Sheeler’s own account,

Fig. 19. Charles Sheeler, Interior, Ridgefield [“Photograph by Sheeler of his house at Ridgefield,showing several examples of Shaker furniture”], 1939. From Charles Sheeler (New York:Museum of Modern Art, 1939), 12. (photo © Museum of Modern Art/ licensed by SCALA/Art Resource, NY.)



the formal simplicity of Shaker objects and build-ings fostered an openness and sense of exhilaratingfreedom: “No embellishment meets the eye, beautyof line and proportion through excellence of crafts-manship make its absence in no way an omission.The sense of light and spaciousness received upon


entering the auditorium [the Meetinghouse atMount Lebanon] is indicative of the similar spiri-tual qualities of the Shakers. Instinctively one takes adeep inhalation, to capacity, as in themidst of somesimilarly moving and exalted association with na-ture. There were no dark corners in their lives

Fig. 20. Cover, House and Garden, 1941, showing Sheeler’s American Interior. From House andGarden 83 (February 1941). (Charles Sheeler/House & Garden Magazine, 1941 © Condé NastPublications.)



and their religion thrived on light rather than theenvelopment of a dark mystery.”57 In much thesame way that his vernacular pieces challengedthe high styles of the Metropolitan’s “three greatperiods,” Sheeler’s “period rooms” might be a de-cidedly spiritual, and perhaps bohemian, challengeto the pretentious “good taste” and “dignity” of liv-ing in the American Wing.

But Sheeler’s interiors have no people in them,demonstrating how they might be used—they lackhuman context as well as historical context. Farfrom providing open space for deep breathing,they seem to have no room for people with theirflattened spaces and lack of doors. In contrast, evenin the American Wing, visitors could walk into therooms as far as the stanchions would allow.58 InAmericana, the casual detritus of human habitationon the tabletop—the backgammon game arrested,a note hanging off the edge of the table—is a hintthat people may have been there recently, but foran unknown reason had to flee quickly. If thesepaintings engage a society’s penchant for fantasy in-teriors and model lifestyles, they do so only withdeep ambivalence. The American Interiors satirizethe public’s interest in prescriptive furnishing bydepicting spaces that have social scripts ready to fol-low, but then ultimately providing no easy way tofollow them. As they inject irony into the objectsof collecting, so too these paintings ironize the dis-play of those collections.

Finally, by inserting markers of the twentiethcentury in the latter three canvases, Sheeler couldbe satirizing the uniformity of each AmericanWing

57 Reel N-Sh1, frame 119, CSP-AAA.58 Seal even reported that some women visiting the American

Wing were known to “surreptitiously measure a table with a lengthof string,” indicating that the public could get fairly close to the ob-jects on view. Seal, “The American Wing,” 20.


period room, which was furnished with objectsfrom a strictly defined historical moment and ap-parently hermetically sealed against the pollutantsof the modern era. Sheeler’s rooms, too, of course,seem to be hermetically sealed—but not against thetwentieth century, rather against human inhabi-tants. It is revealing that when American Interiorwas reproduced as the cover of House and Gardenin 1941, the image was compromised in only oneway: the New Yorkers in the upper left were hiddenby an inserted block of text advertising the “DoubleNumber” (fig. 20). This bit of editing removed thereminder that the past is merely a modern-day fic-tion, and, it would seem, profoundly changed thework. Sheeler’s canvas was no longer an awkward,self-critical meditation on the appeal of Americanantiques; it served, instead, as fantasy lifestyle guidefor “American Trends in Decoration.”

Sheeler’s American Interiors ultimately expressthe difficulty of constructing a “usable past.” Intheir absorbing, attentive rendering of furniture,ceramics, and rugs, these paintings celebrate a ver-nacular canon; and as they deconstruct and dissolvethose very objects, they also voice a hesitation aboutthe cultural substance of such artifacts. The playfuldistortions satirize the collector’s fetish and, in theirironical wit, assert Sheeler’s self-conscious differencefrom the antiquarians who put together collectionssuch as the American Wing. Finally, as they stage acollection of antiques interspersed with modernelements in spaces that cannot be inhabited, thesecanvases play with the conventions of the museumperiod room. In dissecting both the American pastand the prejudices of contemporary consumerculture, these canvases remind their viewers that ausable past is a product of the present and that it is,perhapsmore importantly, a product tobe consumedby the present.


AUTHOR QUERIESQ1 Au: Per WP style, the beginning letter of a quotation may be made either cap or lowercase to fit the

context of the sentence. That is, you can lowercase it even if it was cap in the original.Q2 Au: The Chicago Manual of Style recommends rewriting to avoid awkward plurals like “Andrewses.”

I’ve substituted “they” in some instances (not all), and I think it’s still clear who you’re talking about.

# xxxxx UCP: Winterthur Portfolio article # 450401

Ambivalence, Irony, and Americanaby a group of photographs, captures his collection as he arranged...

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