Machine Age, Philadelphia Style

Most 20th-century artists feel the presence of a little black rival in their studios. A round glass eye seems to stare fixedly over their shoulders and to imply, with an occasional clicking wink, that the camera can see and record better than they do.

In 1909, a young Philadelphia-born artist named Charles Sheeler took a trip to Paris, gazed at the Cubist experiments of Picasso and Braque, and came home an abstractionist. For a living he became a photographer, but his Art, which he spelled with a capital A, was safely outside the world his camera saw. Only two things bothered him: most people preferred the photographs, and so did he.

Soon Sheeler gave up trying to lead a double life between his canvases and his negatives, decided to see if he could paint reality even more clearly and cleanly than his camera did. It worked. Except for rather arbitrary color schemes, his fanatically realistic paintings looked just like photographs--retouched.

Last week Sheeler's first exhibition in five years opened in a Manhattan gallery. Sheeler, a knife-thin, steel-grey, bespectacled craftsman, works slowly to achieve his carefully balanced arrangements of reality, so it was not a big show--but each picture had a prim perfection. Most visitors acknowledged Sheeler's peculiar mastery, but were left a little cold by it.

Best and most revealing picture was The Artist Looks at Nature (lent by Chicago's Art Institute--see cut), which showed Sheeler in the daylight drawing a nighttime interior. The surrounding spring landscape was as neat and clean as a Quaker meetinghouse.

Sheeler's most recent picture, an oil storage tank surmounted by steel stairs, demonstrated how perfectly his antiseptic style applies to machine-age constructions. The title: It's a Small World (see cut). According to one enthusiast: "If . . . the dynamo has become a 20th-century Virgin, then Sheeler is its Fra Angelico."

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