Historians and art historians have a soft spot for Charles Sheeler, the American painter, filmmaker, and photographer who made a career out of his apparent love for industrial modernity during the interwar decades. It is customary for scholars of this period to bend their knees at his Machine Age altarpieces, because they so plainly depict the means and effects of the era’s mania for rational efficiency, and also because—let’s face it—the works are beautiful, all the more seducing in their tight-lipped, standoffish reserve. For Charles Sheeler: Across Media, the catalogue accompanying the exhibition by the same name, curator Charles Brock set for himself a single issue. Paying little attention to the many other artists of the interwar period who worked in a similarly hard-edged, Neoclassical register (the word “Precisionist” shows up with conspicuous rarity), Brock also largely avoids the social issues surrounding the dicey politics of a machine aesthetic. Instead, Brock’s narrow focus—like the scrutinizing attention of Sheeler himself—is trained specifically on the artist’s habitual process of reinterpreting the same images over and over again, translating an original scene (usually a photograph) into different mediums. Brock convincingly proposes that the result of this practice is a body of work that...