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

Art Bulletin, The, Dec, 2007 by Cecile Whiting

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As abstractions, the mills do not reveal function or manifest evidence of age. In Manchester, the walls lack three-dimensional substance or materiality; their smooth, pink and maroon surfaces divulge no sign of use or deterioration. New England Irrelevancies even makes explicit the loss of the mills' materiality. Two frames situated at the bottom left of the picture contain the distinctive red bricks of textile mills, and another fragment of brick wall can be seen along the edge of the path at the lower right. But all of the bricks have been leveled into smooth vertical planes; none possesses any heft. Nor do they exhibit the crumbling mortar and roughened exterior of brick indicating neglect and decay over time. Moreover, these faux-brick walls buttress flat wedges tinted pink, mauve, and lavender ascending to the top of the canvas and fanning across its width while serving no descriptive function. The word "irrelevance" in Sheeler's title may, even if inadvertently, refer as much to the lack of relation between pictorial form and the materiality of the mills as to the uselessness of the factory in the present.

Sheeler's experiments with abstraction distance the mills from their historical referents and remake them into aesthetic objects marked by a recognizably mid-twentieth-century artistic style. In separating form from description, Sheeler contended with a central concern of modernism whose origins Rosalind Krauss located in Analytic Cubism.

  In its developing, Analytic years, the Cubism of Picasso and Braque
  pronounced the impenetrable frontality of the pictorial surface more
  obstinately and resolutely than had any style before it, so that the
  little areas of modeled form that heave into relief ... hit the shoals
  of the picture support with a finality that could only dissipate their
  energies into a lateral spread, ever implying a further plumbing of
  that support into a space behind. Modeling in this sense becomes the
  empty trappings of an illusionist system more and more divorced from
  the business of illusionism, a business we could describe as giving us
  access through the vehicle of sight to reality in all its carnal
  fullness. (30)

By adopting this modernist program, Sheeler ultimately dispensed with iconic representations of textile mills in favor of geometric abstractions, which do not describe three-dimensional buildings situated in illusionistic space. Sheeler reinvented the mills as something other than themselves, as abstractions that even verge on the decorative owing to his choice of pleasing pastel colors.

In some senses Sheeler joined forces with businessmen of the 1940s who sought new roles for the actual textile mills. To revamp the buildings in the present meant accepting the loss of their previous function while granting them a new purpose and lease on life. Yet whereas the businessman imagined novel uses for the interior and surrounding spaces of the mills, Sheeler overhauled their aging carcasses. By repudiating the material specificity of the actual mills, Sheeler's abstractions simply sidestepped the obsolescence of the buildings in the present.

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

Art Bulletin, The, Dec, 2007 by Cecile Whiting

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