Steel-Croton (Primary Title)
Charles Sheeler, American, 1883 - 1965 (Artist)
Charles Sheeler, a leading 20th-century modernist, is associated with a group of artists known as Precisionists. Focusing their descriptive method on monuments of the machine age— factories, skyscrapers, bridges—these artists were acclaimed by critics for producing work distinctly “American” in character, if stylistically informed by French cubism. In the postwar years, Sheeler adopted a more systematically geometric approach to his subjects, exemplified by this semi-abstraction. Steel-Croton represents a steel-span bridge—what the artist called a “beautiful combination of delicacy and strength”—located near his home in New York’s upper Hudson River Valley.
The painting was featured in VMFA’s contemporary art exhibition American Painting 1954 and purchased for the collection. In a letter to museum director Leslie Cheek Jr., whom Sheeler had met in the mid-1930s while working on a Rockefeller commission at Colonial Williamsburg, the artist expressed his pleasure in the museum’s acquisition.
Andrew Wyeth, a Trojan Horse Modernist, Greenville County Art Museum, Greenville, SC, March 9 – April 15, 1984
Art of the 30’s, Artmobile, Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Richmond, Va., January 1980 – June 1981
Images of Reality, F & M Gallery, Richmond, Va., February – March 1975
Charles Scheeler, National Collection of Fine Arts, Washington, D.C., October 9 – November 24, 1968; Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia, PA, January 9 – February 16, 1969; The Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY, March 10 – April 27, 1969
Charles Sheeler Retrospective, Allentown Art Museum, Allentown, PA, November 15 – December 31, 1961
Five Painters of America, Worcester Art Museum, Worcester, MA, February 17 – April 3, 1955
New Accessions USA, Colorado Springs Fine Art Center, Colorado Springs, CO, July 1 – September 6, 1954
Reality and Fantasy, 1900 – 1954, Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, MN, May 23 – July 2, 1954
American Painting, Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Richmond, Va. , February 26 – March 21, 1954; Des Moines Art Center, Des Moines, IA, April 4 – May 2, 1954
Some object records are not complete and do not reflect VMFA's full and current knowledge. VMFA makes routine updates as records are reviewed and enhanced.