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Charles Sheeler and film
Magazine Antiques, Nov, 2002 by Karen E. Haas
Less than a year after the end of the war, Sheeler decided to leave Philadelphia for New York City. There he apparently produced a second film, which again survives only as a series of stills. Found after his death, carefully matted and wrapped together among the other photographs in his studio, these twelve images of his first wife, Katharine Baird Shaffer (d. 1933), are some of the most unusual and original photographs that Sheeler ever produced. Two of the twelve portray Katharine seated and fully clothed, but the remaining ten are very closely cropped nudes, in which her head is not shown and her voluptuous figure is reduced to a kind of modernist landscape of softly rounded hills and valleys (see Pls. III, V). In this group of stills each of Katharine's subtle movements is frozen in mid-motion, resulting in a fascinating sequence of rising, bending, and rolling forms, some so abstract as to appear almost not human. Unlike Stieglitz's romantic and erotic series of nude portraits of Georgia O'Keeffe (1887- 1986), that he had begun during this period and which Sheeler is known to have seen, Sheeler's extreme close-ups of Katharine display an otherworldly quality that he often described as "the absolute beauty... [of] objects suspended in a vacuum." (7)
In fact, Sheeler's nudes owe more to avantgarde paintings, like Nude Descending a Staircase (No. 2) of 1912 by Marcel Duchamp, than they do to other contemporary photographs. Duchamp's painting had been the cause celebre of the 1913 Armony Show in New York City, and Sheeler singled it out for praise even before he photographed it for the Arensbergs (Pl. VI). Sheeler claimed that he particularly admired the fact that in Duchamp's canvas "the statement was all important and the means by which it was presented was skillfully concealed."8 In this case, as in much of Sheeler's own work, the underlying "means" were photographic. Sheeler would certainly have also been aware of the important influence that the photographic motion studies of Etienne Jules Marey (1830-1904) and Eadweard Muybridge (1830-1904) had on Duchamp, and that Man Ray (1890-1976) and Duchamp had begun making their own experimental films exploring optics and movement during this period as well. (9)
Fascination with the translucent overlapping forms in Nude Descending a Staircase may also have inspired Sheeler to create his first multiple-exposure photographs of Katharine (see Pl. V). He made them by printing a sandwich of two exposed negatives on a single sheet. These composite images, like the series itself, were only a brief interlude for Sheeler, and one that he would not repeat for more than a decade, and then only once. (10) He did, however, return to the technique later in his career, and multiple exposures were the source of many of his most successful paintings from the 1940s and 1950s.
The images of Katharine also became the basis for at least two delicate graphite drawings, which are identical in scale to the film stills and were Sheeler's first direct "borrowings" from his own photographs (see Pl. IV). (11) The correspondence of their overall dimensions, and the fact that the modeling within the drawings becomes markedly coarser in those areas that go beyond the borders of the stills, strongly suggests that they were traced directly under his darkroom enlarger. The silvery pencil outlines exactly replicate the rounded contours in the photographs, but the drawings are even more abstract than their sources, for Sheeler has omitted all unnecessary detail, simply rendering the volumetric forms in tiny feathery strokes. Also derived from this series is Sheeler's enigmatic painting Flower Forms (Pl. XII), which probably had its genesis in another now lost multiple exposure. (12) Its abstract, bulbous curves echo the repeated shapes of Katharine's raised knees and buttocks in several of the stil ls, and its warm tones, reminiscent of contemporary paintings by Duchamp and Francis Picabia (1879-1953), glow like film in a projector.
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