In October 1941, California photographer Edward Weston visited his old friend Charles Sheeler, whom he hadn’t seen for twenty years, at Sheeler’s home in Ridgefield, Connecticut. During that interval, they remained bound together by mutual admiration and a dedication to modernist photography. Their reunion followed significant events in both artists’ careers. In 1937, Weston received a Guggenheim Fellowship (the first ever awarded to a photographer), which underwrote a year of travel throughout the West and another year of intense, creative work in the darkroom. In 1941, a commission from the Limited Editions Club to provide illustrations for a deluxe publication of Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass brought him east. During this same period, historian Constance Rourke published a biography of Sheeler, anointing him as an American modernist master. The Museum of Modern Art, New York, put on a major exhibition of his paintings and photographs in 1939. And that same year Fortune magazine’s publisher Henry Luce sent Sheeler on a multi-state trip that resulted in his celebrated Power series of paintings. These were reproduced in Fortune in December 1940, and several of them entered museum collections shortly thereafter.

During Weston’s visit, the two artists spent several days making photographs of buildings—mostly old barns—in northwestern Connecticut. Sheeler had always been fascinated by rural architecture, photographing and painting vernacular structures in the teens in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, and in Pennsylvania and New England during the following decades. Weston, on the other hand, had photographed barns only occasionally (see, for example, Barn, Monterey County, 1934; The Metropolitan Museum of Art). On their 1941 tour, Sheeler and Weston visited a site that Sheeler had photographed and then painted a few years earlier (see Silo, 1938, oil on canvas; private collection [1]). They also both pointed their cameras toward some farm buildings in New Milford, twenty-five miles north of Ridgefield. [2] That complex consisted of a long, plain, rectangular barn punctuated with windows, two cylindrical silos capped with rough triangular pediments, a corn crib, and a shed. Weston’s photograph (see Connecticut, 1941; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston) captures the buildings in all their messy complexity, viewing them at an angle, with a brokendown fence in the foreground. Sheeler’s photograph (Untitled [White Barn with Two Silos in Raking Shadows], 1941; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston) is direct and frontal, the geometries of the structures both insistent and majestic. Weston’s photograph was, apparently, a one-off. He did not use it for Leaves of Grass, although he may have included it in his 1946 retrospective exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art. Sheeler’s, on the other hand, would stimulate his work for the rest of his career: between 1942 and 1958 it provided a template for at least three temperas and two oils, including the pure and precise White Sentinels (private collection), painted in 1942, and, four years later, the handsome Grey Barns.

For much of his career, Sheeler would turn again and again to certain favorite images, continually renegotiating the balance between realism and abstraction through these motifs. He may have been motivated to paint Grey Barns when he saw White Sentinels again at his solo show at Downtown Gallery in March 1946 (by then it was owned by Richard Loeb, a discerning New York collector). The years between the two pictures had been difficult for Sheeler. He was painting and photographing less. The war had depressed the art market, and between 1942 and 1945 he largely supported himself as a staff photographer (although one with a lofty title: “Senior Research Fellow in Photography”) at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Sheeler may

have turned to the Connecticut barns to recapture some of the creative energy he felt during Weston’s visit. But since that time, the eloquent, tender realism of pictures like White Sentinels had hardened into an almost photographic literalism, which he was struggling to escape. His return to those barns in 1946 coincided with a renewed interest in abstraction. While he had always been dedicated to emphasizing shape, structure, and pattern even in his most descriptive paintings, these formal elements were now coming to the fore. Critics took notice, applauding his moving on from “effects that connote the anemic tinted photograph” to create “elegant stylizations” that reintroduced the artist as a “quasi-abstractionist.” [3] This new, graphic quality is apparent in both his industrial subjects and his images of commonplace architecture, such as Grey Barns.

In Grey Barns, the forms of the New Milford buildings are still readily recognizable: the two silos with their triangular tops, the long dark roof capping the barn itself, and the rather randomly placed fence posts. The shed is still present at the left, but has become both two-dimensional and transparent, and another long, low building overlaps the barn at right. The staccato pattern of square windows running across the barn has been replaced with a single opaque black door, and many other details, such as the stone foundation painted with such delicacy in White Sentinels, have been smoothed away. If White Sentinels is an idealized view of the buildings Sheeler recorded in his photograph, with all signs of age and wear eliminated, Grey Barns reduces and idealizes the barn complex even further, into a rich cadence of overlapping ghostly geometric shapes and pure flat color. While completely legible, it is at the same time abstract and somewhat mysterious.

Grey Barns was painted shortly before October 1, 1946, when Sheeler was invited to Andover, Massachusetts, to be artist-in-residence at the Addison Gallery of American Art. He also had an exhibition there, featuring Grey Barns and other pre-residency work. Surprisingly, during this period, he made no paintings. Rather, he spent his time seeking fresh inspiration and making “notes . . . in shorthand,” generally with his camera. [4] The experience was transformative: It was at Andover that he developed the idea of using photographic composites to generate designs for paintings. Yet some of the traits of his evolving style—the emphasis on overlapping forms, the hardening of shadows into substantial shapes while actual elements become transparent—have their beginnings in earlier works such as Grey Barns.

Even after painting Grey Barns (and the smaller, related tempera, Blue Barns [1946; private collection]), Sheeler was not done with the buildings from New Milford. In 1950, he painted a variant, Family Group (Orlando Museum of Art), emphasizing the horizontality of the barn complex and showing the buildings floating in space. And in 1958, working in somewhat larger scale, he created On a Connecticut Theme (1958; Whitney Museum of American Art). Painted in the emerald green/deep blue/mauve palette Sheeler favored in the 1950s, On a Connecticut Theme illustrates the ultimate development of Sheeler’s new method. He produced the painting’s design by sandwiching together, then printing, negatives he made in Connecticut nearly twenty years before. We now see three silos, two separate stone foundations, and any number of shadows that are as substantial as the forms that cast them. The result is a calliope of shapes very different from the processional dignity of Grey Barns. On a Connecticut Theme is vibrant while Grey Barns is serene; energetic, where Grey Barns is elegant and restrained. Each painting, in its own way, testifies to Sheeler’s continuing affection for these unprepossessing buildings, buildings that were for him an ongoing source of stimulation and richness.

—Carol Troyen

[1] Silo is reproduced in Carol Troyen and Erica E. Hirshler, Charles Sheeler: Paintings and Drawings (Boston: Museum of Fine Arts, 1987), p. 163.

[2] Thanks to James Maroney, who many years ago identified the location of these barns.

[3] Edward Alden Jewell, “Caravaggio & Co.,” The New York Times, March 10, 1946, 6.

[4] Sheeler, interview with Bartlett Cowdrey, December 9, 1958, Charles Sheeler Papers, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution.