Exhibition Guide

An abstracted, simplified oil painting of an urban scene with tall buildings casting long shadows down an alleyway or narrow street. The shadows form geometric patterns on the ground and walls.

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.

An abstracted, simplified oil painting of an urban scene with tall buildings casting long shadows down an alleyway or narrow street. The shadows form geometric patterns on the ground and walls.

Manchester

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Art Object Info

Charles Sheeler
American (1883-1965)

Medium:
Oil on canvas
Size:
Width: 20"
Height: 25"
Date:
1949

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.

Edward Joseph Gallagher III Memorial Collection BMA 1960.2

Manchester

Charles Sheeler
American (1883-1965)
Date:
1949
Medium:
Oil on canvas
Size:
Width: 20"
Height: 25"

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.

Edward Joseph Gallagher III Memorial Collection BMA 1960.2