Charles Sheeler was not the first artist to discover the American industrial landscape, but he may be the one who, without romanticizing or aestheticizing, found something very close to perfection in his portrayals of it.

He was certainly the right person for the job. Born in Philadelphia in 1883, Sheeler was a charter member of the tiny American avant-garde, having exhibited his Cubist-influenced work in the notorious Armory Show in 1913. Sheeler was associated with two key New York figures: Alfred Stieglitz, the impresario of modern art in America, husband of Georgia O’Keeffe, and leader of the new, “straight” (as in straightforward, nonmanipulative) movement in photography; and Walter Arensberg, the collector who harbored Marcel Duchamp in a studio on West 67^th Street throughout much of the First World War. Duchamp, along with another expatriate Frenchman, Francis Picabia, ignited a version of the Dada movement in New York that derived most of its energy from musings on the Machine Age in America.

Long before Andy Warhol expressed his desire to be a machine, Charles Sheeler had thoroughly investigated the role. The most important event in his career was a decision around 1912 to take up commercial photography in order to supplement his meager income as a painter. Painting remained Sheeler’s passion, but it would be affected in unforeseen ways by his discovery of photography. Although he claimed never to have handled anything more complicated than a Brownie before taking up photography as a professional, Sheeler’s work as a commercial photographer advanced swiftly as he specialized in architectural views. He put photography to use as fine art around 1917, in the Bucks County, Pennsylvania farmhouse he rented with studio-mate Morton Schamberg. Sheeler’s simple, reductive, and startlingly fresh photographs of vernacular architecture fuse modernist principles of abstraction with an American subject matter.

By the early 1920s, Sheeler had developed such formidable skills as a photographer, and commanded such admiration, that he threatened the standing of Stieglitz, the high priest of modern photography in America. Stieglitz contrived to condemn and banish Sheeler from his circle; he abhorred commercial photography and had excommunicated Edward Steichen for similar reasons. But it was commercial work that led to Sheeler’s most striking achievement: the commission from the Ford Motor Company to photograph its new, sprawling River Rouge industrial plant, just outside Detroit.

Sheeler received the commission through N. W. Ayer & Son, the Philadelphia advertising agency that had been hired to handle all the publicity surrounding the unveiling of the new Model “A.” Ford had spent ten years building the plant, which at the time was the largest single industrial complex in the world, employing 50,000 workers in 93 separate structures on 2,000 acres in Dearborn. The plant, which produced 15 million cars over the next 15 years, was designed to revive the company’s flagging market share, which was being steadily eroded by competition from General Motors.

Sheeler was given almost complete freedom during six weeks in late 1927 to photograph “details of the plant” and “portraits of the machines.” Although other photographers had made impressive and powerful images of industrial subjects before Sheeler—most notably Edward Weston—none matched the sustained level of pictorial invention and formal mastery of Sheeler’s River Rouge series.

Two of the images Sheeler produced have become icons of 20th-century art: “Criss-Crossed Conveyors” and “Stamping Press.” The first is a symphonic orchestration of forms that zigzag both across the picture plane and deep within it. The conveyor belts and their supporting structures, rendered in a wide tonal range from velvety blacks to misty gray, are crowned by the soaring smokestacks of the factory’s powerhouse, arranged as if they were designed to operate as heavenly organ pipes.

The harmonic equilibrium of the composition attains perfect balance. Not surprisingly, when several of Sheeler’s River Rouge photographs were published in Vanity Fair in 1928, the religious parallels were not spared. The caption under “Criss-Crossed Conveyors” read: “By Their Works Ye Shall Know Them,” a play on the biblical passage, “By their fruits ye shall know them.”

“Stamping Press” is an equally extraordinary composition, and an unforgettable portrait of a machine-making machine. Its giant bulk fills the frame but is animated, being set slightly askew from the plane of the picture. Tending the colossal structure are three figures. One is readily visible in front, while two are almost completely hidden within the machine itself: one peeks out almost comically from the gap where the stamper pounds out fenders; the other, at right, is a white-collar employee, perhaps even an executive, who looks a little bit lost. Sheeler portrays the River Rouge plant as the self-sufficient and all-encompassing organism it was designed to be.

One of the great ironies of Sheeler’s career—and a lingering, unresolved question—is the diminished role of photography in the artist’s work after 1929, especially in light of the extraordinary level of accomplishment represented by the River Rouge series. In the early 1930s, Sheeler came to recognize what photography could do for his painting; but many critics found works like “Classic Landscape” to be oppressively…photographic. Indeed, Sheeler’s business arrangement with Edith Halpert, his new dealer in the 1930s, required him to keep photography in the background, to prevent his paintings from being found overly dependent on the “machine.”

Photography assisted Sheeler in his desire to conceal his presence before the subject. His technique is dry and meticulous, drained of personality. He wants his subject to attain the highest degree of clarity. Sheeler said he preferred “the picture which arrives at its destination without the evidence of a trying journey, rather than the one which shows the marks of battle.” As he was fond of saying, “An efficient army buries its dead.”

Later in his career, however, Sheeler found a way to relax the grip that glassy and monocular photographic perfection came to acquire over his painting. The colorful, late 1940s paintings of obsolete and decaying New England mills, derived from overlapping photographic images, comprise a last note, almost, of liberation.

Charles Sheeler’s works can be seen in the exhibition “Charles Sheeler: Across Media” at the Art Institute of Chicago through January 7, 2007, and at the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco from February 10 to May 6, 2007. The exhibition was organized by the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., where it was on view earlier in 2006.

Daniel Schulman is an art historian and curator who lives in Chicago.

Image credits from top to bottom: "American Landscape," Museum of Modern Art, New York; "Ford Plant, River Rouge, Stamping Press," The Lane Collection; "Criss-Crossed Conveyors, River Rouge Plant, Ford Motor Company," Metropolitan Museum of Art; Sheeler's self-portrait, "The Artist Looks at Nature," Art Institute of Chicago.