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

23. Albert Wells, quoted in Rosen, Change Mummified, 67.

24. Hareven and Langenbach, Amoskeag, 361.

25. "Portrait of the Mills," Currier Gallery of Art Bulletin, April 1949, n.p. In 1942 John Coolidge published an architectural appreciation of the nineteenth-century mill buildings, especially of those in Lowell, pointing to their mass and simplicity. The article published in the Currier Gallery of Art Bulletin likewise highlights the grandeur and stark simplicity of the mills. It would seem that Sheeler's Amoskeag Canal, the most straightforward and panoramic of his mill canvases, spoke to an emerging architectural appreciation for these utilitarian buildings. Coolidge, Mill and Mansion: A Study of the Architecture and Society in Lowell, Massachussetts 1820-1865 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1942).

26. Troyen and Hirshler, Charles Sheeler, 188. Lucic, Sheeler and the Cult of the Machine, agrees and comments that "the buildings seem suspended in a timeless realm beyond the forces of transformation and decay."

27. "Portrait of the Mills," n.p. Another reviewer remarked at the same time about this same painting: "It is a distillation of all such scenes, composed with insight aided by disciplined pruning and judicious selection." Judith Kaye Reed, "The Disciplined Art of Charles Sheeler," Art Digest, February 1, 1949, 13.

28. Sheeler in Andover: The Ballardvale Series, 1946.

29. Troyen and Hirschler, Charles Sheeler, 190, 201. See also Brock, Sheeler: Across Media, 128-29.

30. Rosalind Krauss, "The Motivation of the Sign," in Picasso and Braque: A Symposium, ed. William Rubin, Kirk Varnedoe, and Lynn Zelevansky (New York: Museum of Modern Art; New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1992), 261-62.

31. Troyen and Hirshler, Charles Sheeler, 201, tie the shape down to the reality of the setting, claiming that it registers a change in the pattern of the cobblestones on the mill yard floor. Since no cobblestones exist in the painting, such a reading depends on having visited the site and transposed it into the painting. To be fair, even when they identify the shape, Troyen and Hirshler admit that it is the most disturbing aspect of the picture.

32. Eng and Kazanjian, "Introduction: Mourning Remains," 3-4. The authors propose in fact that melancholia's continuous struggle with the past can be a creative and productive process rather than simply a pathological one. Indeed, Sheeler's series on the textile mills exemplifies their point, for in returning over and again to the motif of an industrial ruin in the past, the artist experimented with new aesthetic forms in the present.

33. Constance Rourke, Charles Sheeler: Artist in the American Tradition (1938; New York: Da Capo Press, 1969), 146.

34. Troyen and Hirshler, Charles Sheeler, 201.

35. Robert L. McGrath, Paul Sample: Painter of the American Scene (Hanover, N.H.: University Press of New England with the Hood Museum of Art, Dartmouth College, 1988), 45.