I am still catching up on email from the last couple of weeks. Going on business trip = distracting. Good thing I had this book report written up ahead of time. Ahem, Charles Sheeler: Across Media.
It's a coffee table art book featuring the art of Charles Sheeler. I made the mistake of trying to read some of the text. Art scholars have a tough job. If an artist becomes known for a certain style and you're supposed to come up with something original to say about each of these hundreds of similar paintings... Is it any wonder that so much writing about art is full of it-means-what-you-want-it-to-mean jargon and dwelling on clumsy verbal description of minutiae?
But if Sheeler distanced himself from the Whistlerian painterly touch of the pictorialists, he did not abandon the basic tenets of aestheticism expounded by Whistler, instead enlisting the camera in his own search for a timeless, abstract beauty.
Pages of the stuff, the work of a tortured soul who has slipped on a pair of red shoes and finds himself forced to dance about architecture until collapse.
But the art is good. It's kind of like what you find if you search the internet for [Charles Sheeler], but the book is higher resolution. I recommend it.
Labels: book, physical possessions, sublime