A New England lament: Charles Sheeler and Paul Strand in the 1940s

  Well, there was a place just on the edge of Andover which is old, it
  goes back to when New England was the great textile center, you've
  probably (seen) many places where all those places are just, I mean
  those textile mills are just carcasses now, the windows are out and
  all that sort of thing. Well, there was Ballardsdale [sic], which was
  adjacent to Andover, it was a place like that, and was certainly of
  enough interest to me to devise a picture of it, and that was the
  subject for one.... They're pretty gruesome, those places, aren't
  they. The worst of all that I know, when I got to Manchester I walked
  down the main street and I was just flabbergasted. I wanted to turn
  right around and come home again. Oh, it was so ghastly, because they
  had vastly more than this, that I was describing at Ballardsdale
  [sic].--Charles Sheeler, interview by Bartlett Cowdrey, December 9,
  1958 (1)

In the fall of 1946 Charles Sheeler accepted an invitation to spend six weeks as an artist-in-residence at the Addison Gallery of American Art in Andover, Massachusetts. Two years later, in May 1948, the Currier Gallery of Art in Manchester, New Hampshire, (2) invited him to work in residence for a couple of weeks and paid him to produce two sketches, one of which Sheeler used as the basis for the oil painting Amoskeag Canal of 1948 (Fig. 1), subsequently purchased by the gallery. During both sojourns Sheeler developed a fascination with nearby textile mills, an obsession generated by the horror that overcame him when he first set eyes on the decaying redbrick buildings.

Until that point Sheeler had been drawn to the pristine geometries of both vernacular architecture and modern industry. Indeed, his images that had most recently received the greatest public attention had resulted from a commission from Fortune magazine to illustrate the theme of "Power." With one exception these six paintings, which were published in Fortune and simultaneously exhibited at the Downtown Gallery, New York, in 1940, depicted the gleaming surfaces of up-to-date industrial motifs, including an airplane propeller, a steam turbine, and a radio transmission tower. (3) In the mid-1940s, Sheeler turned his attention for the first time to the abandoned and decaying residues of nineteenth-century industry rather than to the newest forms of Fordist manufacturing. His photographs of the deserted Ballardvale textile mill along the Shawsheen River near Andover, Massachusetts (Fig. 2), and those of the Amoskeag Manufacturing Company, the largest textile mill in the world until it went bankrupt and was closed in December 1935, document boarded-up windows, rubble, and other evidence of deterioration. These photographs served as studies for the almost two dozen images of mills Sheeler depicted in different media over a seven-year period. (4)

Ever since his representations of mills were first exhibited in the late 1940s, critics have identified them as a turning point in the aging artist's career. (5) Not, however, because they demonstrate a new interest in decrepitude; in fact, there is virtually no evidence of decay in Sheeler's mill paintings. (6) Rather, critics have highlighted the experiments Sheeler undertook in these works with multiple perspective and abstract form. New England Irrelevancies of 1953 (Fig. 3), the final painting in the series, best exemplifies this new aesthetic direction: painted in pinks and lavenders, the textile mills flatten into transparent and opaque rectilinear shapes that soar skyward.

As it happens, the photographer Paul Strand, Sheeler's former friend and collaborator, also traveled through the New England countryside in 1946 and noted the derelict mills in the region. Strand embarked on his photographic odyssey at the suggestion of Nancy Newhall, who, inspired by Strand's photographs of stone walls and churches shot in Vermont during the winter of 1944, proposed that they work together on a book about New England. Agreeing to undertake the project, Strand set off to photograph vernacular architecture, local vegetation, and a handful of residents, while Newhall selected texts by New England luminaries such as Emily Dickinson, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Herman Melville. The final book combined photographs from Strand's journeys through New England between 1944 and 1946 with shots of nature he took along the Maine coast in the late 1920s, interspersed with excerpts from the prose, poems, letters, and journals chosen by Newhall. Strand embedded two photographs of abandoned textile mills and a third of a defunct mill dam at the heart of the book, in the section devoted to the nineteenth century. In retrospect, Time in New England similarly proved a watershed in Strand's career; it was the first of five photobooks on different regions of the world that Strand--who permanently left the United States to live abroad in 1949, the year before the book was published--would produce in collaboration with writers until the end of his life. (7)