Charles Sheeler in Doylestown: American Modernism and the Pennsylvania Tradition

Charles Sheeler in Doylestown investigates one artist's lifelong engagement with the rich, distinctive traditions of rural Bucks County, Pennsylvania. It charts Sheeler's discovery of the region's architecture and artifacts beginning about 1910, when he and fellow artist Morton Livingston Schamberg rented an 18th-century farmhouse in Doylestown. It assesses the impact this seminal event had on Sheeler's early career, and how his cyclical return to Bucks County themes in later life reveals poignant attachments and emotional depths not usually ascribed to this 20th-century painter and photographer -- known primarily as an iconographer of the machine.