Exhibition Guide
Charles Sheeler. Manchester. 1949. Oil on canvas. Framed: 33 x 27 7/8 x 3 in. (83.8 x 70.8 x 7.6 cm) Sight: 24 1/2 x 19 1/4 in. (62.2 x 48.9 cm). Baltimore Museum of Art: Edward Joseph Gallagher III Memorial Collection, BMA 1960.2.
Manchester
Audio
Looking with Artist, Designer, and Musician Bruce Willen
Read Transcript
Audio
A conversation about this painting
Read Transcript
Art Object Info
Half a century before Charles Sheeler’s arrival in Manchester, New Hampshire, the Amoskeag Manufacturing Company occupied 30 buildings on the Merrimack River. Aware that the enormous complex once employed some 17,000 textile mill workers, Sheeler imbued the abandoned complex with a ghostly yet elegant emptiness. In this crisp image, Sheeler exploited his twin talents—painting and photography—to create an idealized American industrial image. Blending cubist abstraction with a machine aesthetic, he distilled brick buildings into sharply delineated planar rectangles, cubes and wedges. Here, an empty sky seems as solid as the man-made structures below it. Yet the image is softened by semitransparent shadows that overlap hard edges. They reveal the impact of Sheeler’s experiments in photomontage, a process of producing a single print with two or three negatives sandwiched together in an enlarger.
Visual Description:
This oil on canvas painting measures approximately two feet high and one and a half feet wide. It shows multi-story buildings on either side of an alleyway or narrow street. The buildings are depicted in shades of brown and dark blue, with sharp geometric lines and minimal detail—including what appear to be fire escapes and power lines—creating a strong and somewhat claustrophobic sense of depth. Part of the buildings and street are bathed in sunlight, while other sections are cast in shadow. The effect creates geometric patterns on the ground and building surfaces. There are no humans or other living things in the painting. The cloudless sky above is a pale blue, adding to the overall stark atmosphere of the scene.
Manchester
Half a century before Charles Sheeler’s arrival in Manchester, New Hampshire, the Amoskeag Manufacturing Company occupied 30 buildings on the Merrimack River. Aware that the enormous complex once employed some 17,000 textile mill workers, Sheeler imbued the abandoned complex with a ghostly yet elegant emptiness. In this crisp image, Sheeler exploited his twin talents—painting and photography—to create an idealized American industrial image. Blending cubist abstraction with a machine aesthetic, he distilled brick buildings into sharply delineated planar rectangles, cubes and wedges. Here, an empty sky seems as solid as the man-made structures below it. Yet the image is softened by semitransparent shadows that overlap hard edges. They reveal the impact of Sheeler’s experiments in photomontage, a process of producing a single print with two or three negatives sandwiched together in an enlarger.
Visual Description:
This oil on canvas painting measures approximately two feet high and one and a half feet wide. It shows multi-story buildings on either side of an alleyway or narrow street. The buildings are depicted in shades of brown and dark blue, with sharp geometric lines and minimal detail—including what appear to be fire escapes and power lines—creating a strong and somewhat claustrophobic sense of depth. Part of the buildings and street are bathed in sunlight, while other sections are cast in shadow. The effect creates geometric patterns on the ground and building surfaces. There are no humans or other living things in the painting. The cloudless sky above is a pale blue, adding to the overall stark atmosphere of the scene.