Charles Sheeler

Charles Sheeler photographed and painted American factories as though they were cathedrals, and made one of the first avant-garde films in the United States with Paul Strand. He trained as an industrial draughtsman and then as a painter under William Merritt Chase, went to Europe in 1909 and came back convinced by Cezanne and the cubists, and supported himself for years photographing buildings and other artists' work for dealers - which is where the eye came from. Manhatta, made with Strand in 1921, is seven minutes of Manhattan cut to lines from Whitman and is generally called the first American art film. In 1927 Ford commissioned him to photograph the new River Rouge plant, and the thirty-two pictures he made there - conveyors, stacks, the crossed diagonals of the conveyor bridge, almost no workers - became the defining images of American industry and were reproduced worldwide. The paintings that followed, in the manner called Precisionism, are flat, hard-edged and without atmosphere, and they take the same subjects: factories, barns, machinery, Shaker furniture. The absence of people in them has been read as celebration and as critique for eighty years, and Sheeler said very little to settle it. A stroke in 1959 ended his working life. He was among the first artists represented by the Downtown Gallery in New York. The River Rouge series was commissioned through an advertising agency and used in Ford publicity. Bucks County barns were his other lifelong subject and he restored two houses himself. He worked as a staff photographer at the Metropolitan Museum in the 1940s.

• Lived: 1883 CE – 1965 CE
• Nationality: American
• Roles: artist