Charles Sheeler

GUARDING THE ART

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In the past few years two new books have come out specifically related to art museums and their guards. All the Beauty in the World was written by Patrick Bringley, a long time guard at the Metropolitan Museum of art. The second was the exhibition and its catalogue that had been written and curated by a group of guards at the Baltimore Museum of Art, literally titled Guarding the Art. Providing both insider and intimate views of these great collections, we are given a deeper understanding of these works, not always available to the average visitor.

In later years, Grace Hartigan, Raoul Middleman, and Clyfford Still all had migrated from New York to Baltimore. The first critical responses to these moves were not positive, like moving totally out of the ‘art world’ of New York and becoming anonymous. However, they each found a new home in Baltimore and its own community of artists. And the Baltimore Museum of Art has an especially good selection of Hartigan’s work.

Grace Hartigan
“Interior, ‘The Creeks’”
1957
Oil on canvas
90 7/16” x 96 1/4”
The Baltimore Museum of Art, Baltimore, Maryland

Describing Grace Hartigan’s work, Rob Kempton wrote: “As your eyes move around the canvas, something new and unknowable appears and pulls you in, never releasing its grip. . . .When Hartigan moved from New York City to Long Island in 1957, author Mary Gabriel noted Hartigan ‘returned to pure abstraction.’ In her new home, she sought to learn more from herself and nature, so this work feels personal and charged. As Hartigan built her canvas with paint, she juxtaposed bold opaque colors against thin translucent washes to create tension—a push-pull feeling. Here, instinct and energy merge through brilliant palette knife scraping and confident brushstrokes.”1

Hale Woodruff, who studied from 1920 to 1924 at the John Herron Art Institute in Indianapolis (later known as the Herron School of Art), established himself as a mature artist in both Washington, D.C., and New York City. We actually met when he received an honor for his work here in Indianapolis in the mid-seventies. And Mr. Woodruff’s work was especially featured at the opening of the National African American Museum in Washington, D.C.

Guard Kellen Johnson made this observation: “Following World War I (1914-1918), many Americans found it very difficult to find work at home and oftentimes had to relocate to Europe to find their fame and fortune.”

“Hale Woodruff captured this rustic scenery in a traditionally horizontal landscape format, though his modernist approach is still prevalent. The painting is mostly characterized by its vigorous brushstrokes, with green willow trees in the foreground distinctly orchestrated into their own strongly rhythmic pattern. In 1928, Woodruff won third place in the short-lived William E. Harrison Foundation Awards for Distinguished Achievement Among Negroes. He used the hundred-dollar prize to book a one-way ticket to finish his art studies in Paris; Normandy Landscape was painted during this trip.”2

Hale Woodruff
“Normandy Landscape”
1928
Oil on canvas
21 1/4” x 25 5/8”
The Baltimore Museum of Art, Baltimore, Maryland

I first became aware of Sam Gilliam’s work at one of the smaller galleries inside the Phillips Collection in Washington, D.C. The Phillips always reserved one small gallery up on the third floor for local artists, especially the Washington School of Color Painters. It was there that I first saw the work of Morris Louis, Kenneth Nolan, and the younger artist, Sam Gilliam.

Responding to Gilliam’s painting, Dominic Mallari wrote: “Bursts of color, rings of noise, and the sound of music emanate from Blue Edge. Sam Gilliam speaks highly of his jazz influences, and so do his works of art. Gilliam moved to Washington, D.C., during the 1960s Civil Rights Movement. It is there where he produced many of his paintings. While in D.C., he listened to celebrated jazz musicians such as saxophonist John Coltrane and pianist Thelonious Monk, which pushed his painting style higher and higher. Blue Edge is a premier example of such works. . . .When I look at this painting, I imagine a melodic mess, like hearing the instrumental ballets of musicians. Each stroke of color fights to take center stage. The painting is powerful yet somehow contained, waiting to be seen and heard; always a masterpiece. Hang in there, take it in, and mind the edge.”3

Sam Gilliam
“Blue Edge”
1971
Acrylic on canvas
71 7/8” x 71 3/4”
The Baltimore Museum of Art

Traveling north from Baltimore to New York City we are shown the daily life of another museum guard, Mr. Patrick Bringley, at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Bringley chronicles his experiences from his initial orientation and his first tours of duty to final reflections on his career. From local Americana selections to the great masterpieces of European art, his words strike true to this important collection and its mission.

“Looking at Bruegel’s masterpiece I sometimes think: here is a painting of literally the most commonplace thing on earth. Most people have been farmers. Most of these have been peasants. Most lives have been labor and hardship punctuated by rest and the enjoyment of others. It is a scene that must have been so familiar to Pieter Bruegel it took an effort to notice it. But he did notice it. And he situated this little, sacred, ragtag group at the fore of his vast, outspreading world.”

“I am sometimes not sure which is the more remarkable: that life lives up to great paintings, or that great paintings live up to life.”4

Pieter Breughel
“The Harvesters”
1565
Oil on wood
46 7/8” x 63 3/4”
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

On his daily rounds throughout the museum, Bringley takes us in and out of the many hidden nooks and crannies of the building.

“Just below the main painting galleries, there is a mezzanine that is one of the strangest, most eclectic places in the whole museum. The ‘visible storage’ area houses tens of thousands of objects that haven’t found a place in the galleries proper. Without much signage, visitors navigate long narrow channels flanked by tall glass cases presenting a jumble of Americana from the past four hundred years. If you like tables, here are dining tables, tea tables, worktables, card tables, and chamber tables. If you favor clocks, it offers tall clocks, shelf clocks, wall clocks, acorn clocks, lighthouse clocks, banjo clocks, and lyre clocks. The mezzanine is the one area of the Met where visitors declare objects to be ‘just like the one Aunt Barb has.’ It’s a place to take a break from hallowed masterpieces and enjoy the company of looking glasses, sugar nippers, and firemen’s leather helmets and shields.”5

United Society of Believers
“Dining Table”
1800-1825
Pine, maple, and basswood
28 1/2” x 31 1/4” x 96 1/2”
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

So, hidden away in all of this attic-like assembly is a beautifully simple Shaker Dining Table. Unadorned, spiritual. And, if we were to return to the painting galleries upstairs, especially the 20th Century American galleries, we might discover Charles Sheeler’s interior “Americana” from 1931, that contains this very table in use in his own home and the subject of this painting.

Charles Sheeler
“Americana”
1931
Oil on canvas
48” x 36”
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

1 Sims, Lowery Stokes, Hakim Bishara, et al; Guarding the Art; The Baltimore Museum; Baltimore, Maryland; 2022; p. 70.

2 Sims, Lowery Stokes, Hakim Bishara, et al; Guarding the Art; The Baltimore Museum; Baltimore, Maryland; 2022; p. 64.

3 Sims, Lowery Stokes, Hakim Bishara, et al; Guarding the Art; The Baltimore Museum; Baltimore, Maryland; 2022; p. 82.

4 Bringley, Patrick; All the Beauty in the World: The Metropolitan Museum of Art and Me; Simon & Schuster; New York, New York; 2023; p. 87-88.

5 Bringley, Patrick; All the Beauty in the World: The Metropolitan Museum of Art and Me; Simon & Schuster; New York, New York; 2023; p. 129.

CHARLES SHEELER AND THE SHAKERS

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“I know a good print when I see it.  I know when it is good and why it is good.  It is the neck of a man, the nose of a woman . . . . It is a photograph by Sheeler.  It is.  It is the thing where it is.  So.  That’s the mine out of which riches have always been drawn.”[i]

Charles Sheeler
“Shaker Window”
c. 1935
B&W photograph
The William H. Lane Collection,
Museum of Fine Arts,
Boston, Massachusetts

This is one of many observations made by William Carlos Williams regarding his long time friend Charles Sheeler.  Williams was constantly calling for an “intense vision of the facts”[ii] and considered a painting or a photograph or a poem as a thing to be shaped or carved out in the process. 

Williams noted this many times throughout his career:  from his early work, in several of his essays, and in his epic poem Patterson.  It even came up in his “Introduction” for Sheeler’s Retrospective Exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1939 where he observed:  “It is in things that for the artist the power lies. . . .”[iii]

Sheeler had a wide range of interests, not only through his professional work but also as an inquisitive and thoughtful human being.  He supported himself for many years as a documentary photographer both with Vogue and Fortune Magazines, as well as work for the Metropolitan Museum of Art.    

These projects often paralleled his aesthetic interests, complimenting his studio work.  Modern industrial subjects such as the factories in Ballardvale, Massachusetts and the Ford Motors plant in Detroit, Michigan became important sources of inspiration for this work.  Simultaneously, he was interested in, and paid visits to historic farmhouses in Pennsylvania and New England, as well as communitarian sites such as the Ephrata Community in Lancaster County, and the Shaker Villages in both Mount Lebanon, New York and Hancock, Massachusetts.  He even began collecting certain pieces of antique furniture with which he furnished his own home:  folk art, ceramics, curved wooden boxes, and of course many Shaker chairs, cabinets, and tables. 

Charles Sheeler
“Buildings at Lebanon”
1949
Tempera and graphite on pressed board faced with sized paper
14 5/16” x 20 1/4” 
Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, Minnesota 

William Carlos Williams even noted how his friend Charles Sheeler had taken certain objects and constructed an environment in which to live.  Williams writing in his autobiography stated: 

“The poem is our objective, the secret at the heart of the matter—as Sheeler’s small house, reorganized….”

“Charles Sheeler, artist, has taken the one rare object remaining more or less intact…and proceeded to live in it…and make a poem (a painting) of it….”[iv] 

“How shall we in this region of the mind which is all we can tactically, sensually know, organize our history other than as Shaker furniture is organized?  It is a past, totally uninfluenced by anything but the necessity, the total worth of the thing itself, the relationship of the parts to the whole.  The Shakers made furniture for their own simple ritualistic use, of white pine, applewood, birch—what they had.  Sheeler has a remarkable collection of this furniture.”[v]                

Charles Sheeler
“American Interior”
1934
Oil on canvas
32 1/2” x 30”
Gift of Mrs. Paul Moore,
Yale University Art Gallery,
New Haven, Connecticut

For several years Sheeler had been working on an autobiography, which he turned over to the writer Constance Rourke, who edited and organized it.  Rourke drew heavily upon Sheeler’s words, which became an important element in her monograph on this artist in 1939.  Later, the historians Faith and Edward Demming Andrews referred to this book in their article on Sheeler in “Art in America” that focused on his interest in the Shakers: 

“But as time went on he must have become more and more convinced that he wanted to do, through his medium, what the Shakers . . . had done in theirs:  to strip away all that was superficial, to find the essential, the absolute, the inner undisguised meaning, the final irreducible character in form.”[vi] 

Charles Sheeler
“Americana 31”
1931
Oil on canvas
36” x 48”
Collection of Mr. and Mrs. Milton Lowenthal,
Museum of Modern Art, New York

Sheeler himself had many things to say regarding his interests and this collection.  They were historic artifacts by that time, but they were also very contemporary in feeling and form.  He stated that:  “I don’t like these things because they are old but in spite of it.  I’d like them still better if they were made yesterday because then they would afford proof that the same kind of creative power is continuing.”[vii] 

Charles Sheeler
“Shaker Detail”
1941
Oil and tempera on Masonite
8.75” x 9.75”
Wallace M. Scudder Bequest
Newark Museum of Art, Newark, New Jersey

“No embellishment meets the eye.  Beauty of line and proportion through excellence of craftsmanship make the absence of ornament in no way an omission.  The sense of light and spaciousness received upon entering the hall is indicative of similar spiritual qualities of the Shakers.  Instinctively one takes a deep breath, as in the midst of some moving and exalted association of nature.  There were no dark corners in those lives.”[viii] 

Charles Sheeler
“On a Shaker Theme”
1956
Oil on canvas
30” x 36”
Stephen and Sybil Stone Foundation,
Wareham, Massachusetts

“—Say it, no ideas but in things— 
         nothing but the blank faces of the houses
         and cylindrical trees 
         bent, forked by preconception and accident—
         split, furrowed, creased, mottled, stained—
         secret—into the body of the light!”[ix]

[i] Williams, William Carlos; “The Descent of Winter” included in Imaginations; New Directions Publishing Corporations; New York, New York; 1971; p. 253.     

[ii] Williams, William Carlos; “The Descent of Winter” included in Imaginations; New Directions Publishing Corporation; New York, New York; 1971; p. 231.

[iii] Williams, William Carlos; Selected Essays; New Directions Publishing Corporations; New York, New York; 1992; p. 234.     

[iv] Williams, William Carlos; The Autobiography of William Carlos Williams; New Directions Publishing Corporation; New York, New York; 1967; pp. 332-333.

[v] Williams, William Carlos; The Autobiography of William Carlos Williams; New Directions Publishing Corporation; New York, New York; 1967; pp. 333-334.

[vi] Andrews, Faith and Edward D.; “Sheeler and the Shakers;” Art in America; New York, New York; Number One; 1965; p. 95.

[vii] Rourke, Constance; Charles Sheeler:  Artist in the American Tradition; Kennedy Galleries, Inc., and Da Capo Press; New York, New York; 1938 and 1969; p. 136.

[viii] Rourke, Constance; Charles Sheeler:  Artist in the American Tradition; Kennedy Galleries, Inc., and Da Capo Press; New York, New York; 1938 and 1969; p. 136.

[ix] Williams, William Carlos; Patterson; New Directions Publishing Corporations; New York, New York; 1992; pp. 6-7.     

IN THE AMERICAN GRAIN:  CHARLES SHEELER AND WILLIAM CARLOS WILLIAMS

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“We looked upon the French with a certain amount of awe because we thought they had secrets about art and literature which we might gain.  We were anxious to learn, and yet we were repelled too.  There was a little resentment in us against all the success of the French.  The time had come for us to talk on our own terms.  We felt this.”[i]

Charles Sheeler
“Buttresses, Chartres Cathedral”
1929
Gelatin silver print
9 5/8” x 7 9/16”
Gift of the artist
Museum of Modern Art, New York

“Even though I have so profound an admiration for the beauty of Chartres, I realize strongly that it belongs to a culture, a tradition, a people of which I am not a part….It seems to be a persistent necessity for me to feel a sense of derivation from the country in which I live and work.”[ii] 

Here are two important statements by 20th Century Americans:  the first from William Carlos Williams and the second from Charles Sheeler.  They became friends almost immediately after meeting for the first time and remained so for years to follow.  Sheeler was concerned as a painter and photographer with discovering an American vision and a local, immediate subject matter.  Williams, in his search for a poetic voice and an American idiom in his writing, incorporated everyday subjects and images, always insisting to ‘say it, no ideas but in things!’[iii]

In her early book on Charles Sheeler, Constance Rourke noticed the mutual interest in painting and poetry and the personal affection that had been established between the painter Charles Sheeler and the poet William Carlos Williams.  They travelled in some of the same social and aesthetic circles:  in Philadelphia within the Louise and Walter Arensberg family of influence, and New York, both were included in the circle built around the Steiglitz Group, which also included the artists Marsden Hartley and Charles Demuth. 

Elizabeth Black Carmer
“William Carlos Williams, Charles Sheeler and
Carl Carmer at the Carmer’s Octagon House”
1961
B&W photograph
26” x 21”
Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution,
Washington, DC.

“A new intercommunication between artists and writers had begun of which this lasting friendship was a symbol.  Williams, Wallace Stevens, and a few other ‘new’ poets had read some of their work at one of the Independents exhibitions.  Some of Sheeler’s drawings and photographs were reproduced in Broom. . . . Each group was tending more often to look at the work of the other, to consider it, stay with it, give it the warmth of immediate discussion.  Exchanges of ideas were taking place that might not be reflected directly in either painting or writing but could provide something in the way of a generative force for both.”[iv]

And here is one of Williams’ early observations regarding Sheeler’s work:  “Romance, decoration, fullness—are lost in touch, sight, a word, to bite an apple.  Henry Ford has asked Chas. Sheeler to go to Detroit and photograph everything.  Carte blanche.  Sheeler!  That’s rich. . . .”[v]

Charles Sheeler
“River Rouge Plant”
1932
Oil on canvas
20” x 24 1/8”
Whitney Museum of American Art, New York

Sheeler, in his capacity as a professional photographer, worked for several publications in the Conde Nast Group, as well as documenting the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Arensburg family private collection.  Williams also knew of the Arensburg circle of artists, realists and surrealists amongst them, and of the importance of the local avant-garde.  These are interesting parallels in their lives and activities.  Today however, writers and artists often see this as the glorification of the industrial object, or as nostalgia, or realism so real, that it becomes surreal. 

Charles Sheeler
“Rolling Power”
1939
Oil on canvas
15 “ x 30”
Smith College Museum of Art
Northampton, Massachusetts

The Descent of Winter 10/30

“To freight cars in the air
all the slow
         clank, clank
         clank, clank
moving above the treetops

the
         wha,   wha
of the horse whistle

         pah,   pah,   pah
         pah,   pah,   pah,   pah,   pah

         piece and piece
         piece and piece
moving still trippingly
through the morningmist

long after the engine
has fought by
                           and disappeared
in silence
                  to the left”[vi] 

Sheeler took great advantage of his many photographic essay commissions not just to document industrial sites in the East and the Mid-West, but to also collect valuable images for his own studio work in both drawing and painting.  Variations on many of these themes appeared in his work throughout his lifetime and they have continued to provide inspiration for several artists in younger generations.   

Charles Sheeler
“Criss-Crossed Conveyors—Ford Plant ”
1927
B&W Photograph
The William H. Lane Collection,
Museum of Fine Arts,
Boston, Massachusetts

Contemporary painters such as Donald Sultan and Robert Moskowitz have benefitted from this insight that is contained in Sheeler’s work:  an intense perception of the man-made environment and landscape.  Recent curators and art historians have also noticed this, especially those writing about the Industrial Sublime[vii] and Charles Sheeler and the Cult of the Machine.[viii]   It is an ongoing aesthetic.          

Donald Sultan
“Veracruz, November 18, 1986”
1986
Latex and tar on tile over Masonite
Matthew and Iris Strauss Collection,
Rancho Santa Fe, California

“A poem is a small (or large) machine made of words.  When I say there’s nothing sentimental about a poem I mean that there can be no part, as in any other machine, that is redundant. . . . Its movement is intrinsic, undulant, a physical more than a literary character.  Therefore, each speech having its own character, the poetry it engenders will be peculiar to that speech also in its own intrinsic form.  The effect is beauty, what in a single object resolves our complex feelings of propriety. . . .”

Charles Sheeler
“Stacks in Celebration”
1954
Oil on canvas
22” x 28”
Dayton Art Institute, Dayton, Ohio

“When a man makes a poem, makes it, mind you, he takes words as he finds them interrelated about him and composes them—without distortion which would mar their exact significances—into an intense expression of his perceptions and ardors that they may constitute a revelation in the speech that he uses.  It isn’t what he says that counts as a work of art, it’s what he makes, with such intensity of perception that it lives with an intrinsic movement of its own to verify its authenticity.”[ix]

Robert Moskowitz
“Stack”
2000
Pastel on paper
50 5/8” x 22 1/2”
Lawrence Markey Inc.,
San Antonio, Texas

[i] Rourke, Constance; Charles Sheeler:  Artist in the American Tradition; Kennedy Galleries, Inc., and Da Capo Press; New York, New York; 1938 and 1969; p. 49.

[ii] Tsujimoto, Karen; Images of America:  Precisionist Painting and Modern Photography; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and the University of Washington Press; Seattle & London; 1982; p. 85.  (Statement made by Sheeler on his series of photographs of Chartres Cathedral, originally published in Constance Rourke; Charles Sheeler:  Artist in the American Tradition; New York, New York; Harcourt, Brace; 1938; p. 130).

[iii] Williams, William Carlos; Patterson; New Directions Publishing Corporation; New York, New York; 1946 & 1992; p. 6.

[iv] Rourke, Constance; Charles Sheeler:  Artist in the American Tradition; Kennedy Galleries, Inc., and Da Capo Press; New York, New York; 1938 and 1969; p. 50.

[v] Williams, William Carlos; Imaginations; New Directions Publishing Corporation; New York, New York; 1971; p. 253. 

[vi] Williams, William Carlos; Imaginations; New Directions Publishing Corporation; New York, New York; 1971; p. 246.

[vii] Botwinick, Michael, et al; Industrial sublime; Empire State Editions, Fordham University Press; Yonkers, New York; 2014.

[viii] Lucic, Karen; Charles Sheeler and the Cult of the Machine; Harvard University Press; Cambridge, Massachusetts; 1991.

[ix] Williams, William Carlos; I Wanted to Write a Poem:  The Autobiography of the Works of a Poet; (Edited by Edith Heal); New Directions Publishing Corporation; New York, New York; 1978; pp. 78-79.

HOW TO DRAW A CATHEDRAL

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“…even though I have so profound an admiration for the beauty of Chartres, I realize strongly that it belongs to a culture, a tradition, a people of which I am not a part….It seems to be a persistent necessity for me to feel a sense of derivation from the country in which I live and work.”[i]

cathedral1
Charles Sheeler
“Chartres Cathedral”
1929
B&W photograph
9” x 7”
The Lane Collection, Charles Sheeler Archives
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Massachusetts

I have often had a similar feeling as that expressed by Charles Sheeler above.  As an American I have always felt that my voice and vision should grow out of my own country and experience.  However, I had not counted on participating in a graduate art history seminar at Indiana University on Gothic Architecture and seeing, for the first time, a beautiful little book titled “The Sketchbook of Villard de Honnecourt” that had been edited by Theodore Bowie.[ii] Many years later, searching through the ‘librairie’ at the Musee Cluny in Paris, I purchased a more recent and larger edition of the same title.

Villard de Honnecourt may have been an architect, or possibly an itinerant designer or draughtsman.  Some historians have described him as the Leonardo da Vinci of the dark-ages.  In any event, he did produce a sketchbook full of drawings and devices that changed how we see the world.  They were at least a ‘pattern book’ or stylistic guide to the articulation of Gothic facades and interiors.[iii]  These drawings by Honnecourt were not the only reason, but they were one of the reasons that allowed this new ‘gothic’ style to spread throughout Europe.

cathedral2
Villard de Honnecourt
“Double Row of Flying Buttresses, Rheims Cathedral VI”
(The Sketchbook of Villard de Honnecourt, [C.LXIV])
1230
Pen & ink on paper
9.25” x 6.1”
Bibliotheque Nationale, Paris
These little drawings are focused, insightful, powerfully structural, filled with character and attention to detail, and I always think of them immediately whenever I hear of the writer Raymond Carver or read about his short story “Cathedral.”

In this story, a young couple is surprised by a visit from a friend of the wife, an old blind man for whom she had worked several years ago.  She did his reading for him and other chores.  He was in town taking care of some business after the death of his wife and he wanted to ‘see’ them again.

The husband was a bit leery of this old man and his unexpected visit, as it was his wife who had been close to him.  They had dinner and a few drinks and afterwards they watched a program on Gothic Cathedrals on TV.  The wife had soon gone to sleep, leaving the two men in the living room, when the old blind man came up with this suggestion:  would the young man teach him how to draw a cathedral?  All that he really new about these things was what he had just heard on the TV program and didn’t know what they really looked like.

This young man, totally disoriented and slightly tipsy, searched the house for papers and pens and drawing materials and spread them all out on the living room floor.

“The blind man got down from the sofa and sat next to me on the carpet.”

“He ran his fingers over the paper.  He went up and down the sides of the paper.  The edges, even the edges.  He fingered the corners.”

“‘All right,’ he said.  ‘All right, let’s do her.’”

“He found my hand, the hand with the pen.  He closed his hand over my hand.  ‘Go ahead, bub, draw,’ he said.  ‘Draw.  You’ll see.  I’ll follow along with you.  It’ll be okay.  Just begin now like I’m telling you.  You’ll see.  Draw,’ the blind man said.”

cathedral3
Villard de Honnecourt
“Exterior and Interior Elevations, Rheims Cathedral IV”
(The Sketchbook of Villard de Honnecourt, [C.LXII])
1230
Pen & ink on paper
9.25” x 6.1”
Bibliotheque Nationale, Paris
“The blind man said, ‘We’re drawing a cathedral….Press hard,’ he said to me.  That’s right.  That’s good,’ he said.”

“‘You got it, bub.  I can tell.  You didn’t think you could.  But you can, can’t you?  You’re cooking with gas now.’”

“‘Close your eyes now,’ the blind man said to me.

I did it.  I closed them just like he said.

‘Are they closed?’ he said.  ‘Don’t fudge.’

‘They’re closed,’ I said.

‘Keep them that way,’ he said.  He said, ‘Don’t stop now.  Draw.”

cathedral4
Villard de Honnecourt
“North Tower of Laon Cathedral”
(The Sketchbook of Villard de Honnecourt, [C.XIX])
1230
Pen & ink on paper
9.25” x 6.1”
Bibliotheque Nationale, Paris
“So we kept on with it.  His fingers rode my fingers as my hand went over the paper.  It was like nothing else in my life up to now.”

“Then he said, ‘I think that’s it.  I think you got it,’ he said.  ‘Take a look.  What do you think?’”

“But I had my eyes closed.  I thought I’d keep them that way for a little longer.  I thought it was something I ought to do.”[iv]

 

 

[i] Tsujimoto, Karen; Images of America:  Precisionist Painting and Modern Photography; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and the University of Washington Press; Seattle & London; 1982; p. 85.  (Statement made by Sheeler on his series of photographs of Chartres Cathedral, originally published in Constance Rourke; Charles Sheeler:  Artist in the American Tradition; New York, New York; Harcourt, Brace; 1938; p. 130).

[ii] Bowie, Theodore; The Sketchbook of Villard de Honnecourt; Indiana University Press; Bloomington and London; 1959.

[iii] von Simpson, Otto; The Gothic Cathedral:  Origins of Gothic Architecture and the Medieval Concept of Order; Harper & Row Publishers; New York and Evanston; 1962; p. 198.

[iv] Carver, Raymond; “Cathedral” Where I’m Calling From; Atlantic Monthly Press; New York, New York; 1991; pp. 306-307.