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 may be taken as an extensive theorization of “both the differences and similarities between” drawing, painting, film, and photography: a sort of cross-media dialogue that exists, Brock tells us, even among works of art that “manage to function as autonomous objects” in their own right (ix). For Brock, this is partly a labor of historiographic restitution. By looking at the interplay between painting and photography, Brock strikes a middle-of-the-road balance between the art world’s early emphasis on Sheeler’s painting (a calculated move on the part of his dealer, Edith Halpert), and a later twentieth-century revival that turned principally on the merits of Sheeler’s photography. Because one can read that earlier swing of the pendulum as so plainly indicative of shifting art-world investments, one is tempted to ask how Charles Sheeler: Across Media may also be taken as a particularly timely intervention, especially given the persisting vogue for theorizing mediums as they mix.

In our post-Greenberg moment (or “post-medium,” as Rosalind Krauss would have it), it is no longer important to vindicate an artist by arguing for their adherence to medium specificity. Spurning the bad old days of modernist purity, critics are now eager to identify points of tension, contingency, dialogue, and diversity. Happily enough, the historical record obliges. Referring to movements ranging from Arts and Crafts to Dada, Brock reminds us just how porous the boundaries between mediums were during the period in which Sheeler was active (18).

In this way, Charles Sheeler: Across Media feels like a productive and well-timed reconsideration of early twentieth-century art practice in the United States: a period in which artists pursued something closer to the expansive gesamtkunstwerk ideal, looking for a totalizing aesthetic capable of spanning not only different mediums but also the ideological divide between art and society more generally. The exhibition, initiated by the Smithsonian’s National Gallery of Art and traveling to the Art Institute of Chicago and the De Young Museum in San Francisco, nicely immerses its audience in the medium-defying echo-chamber of Sheeler’s artistic output. For instance, at the De Young Museum one wall features a small study of workmen traversing thin lines of steel beams, limned carefully in tempera; on another, the same men move in flickering silence in the frames of Manhatta, Sheeler’s experimental film collaboration with Paul Strand in 1920. Over here, a bottom-heavy photographic composition, the dark maw of a salvage barge cutting across its lower two-thirds; over there, a painted factory “landscape” (as Sheeler liked to call them) that we now see was enlarged from the original photo’s unremarkable top third. The show abounds with these kind of “a-ha!” moments, and it is as much a testament to the show’s conceit, as to Sheeler’s close manner of working, that visitors tend to view the show with little more than ten inches between themselves and the works. Looking for these self-quotations is half the fun. By contrast, and somewhat surprisingly, Brock throws up boundaries again in the structure of his catalogue text, which, after an initial exposition of Sheeler’s media-crossing ways, unfolds in sections: chronologically ordered and by turns devoted to photography, film, commercial photography, and then to a pair of more overtly synthetic chapters, “Mixing Media” and “Photomontage.”

In his chapter on photography, Brock considers the early forays Sheeler took into the medium while living in Doylestown, Pennsylvania, and offers instructive commentary on how both Dada’s readymade and Cubism’s collages provided points of reference. The chapter on film gives a fruitful account of the making of Manhatta, including discussions of Sheeler’s early film experiments, the influence of East Asian art on his treatment of perspective, and his use of the film as source material for later photographs and paintings. The chapter on commercial photography, somewhat disappointingly, is limited to Sheeler’s commission at Ford’s River Rouge plant, a commission that led to what is now a canonical body of work. Given what Patricia Johnson has achieved with Edward Steichen’s admittedly more prodigious commercial career (Real Fantasies: Edward Steichen’s Advertising Photography, Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), one wants more on this subject on behalf of Sheeler.

Similarly, Brock’s decision to omit Sheeler’s work in industrial design seems a missed opportunity. Although there are no overt moments of pictorial self-reference in Sheeler’s textile patterns or salt-and-pepper shakers (pictorial quotation seems to be the only way that Brock imagines Sheeler crossed media), scholarly inclusion of these objects might have offered an even deeper understanding of how the artist approached the issue of making: not just in the minutia of his own working habits, but also in the bigger questions with which he was perpetually engaged. After all, the process of making—crucial to theories of artistic media in general—was also at the heart of Sheeler’s career-long fascination with modern manufacturing. One is left to wonder how Sheeler’s designs for commercial reproduction might shed light on his two-dimensional works on paper and canvas: works that, as Brock demonstrates, are about reproduction not just in their attention to industrial sites of manufacturing but also in their procedural engagement with copying and duplication.

Brock’s chapter entitled “Mixing Media” carefully examines the artist’s self-portrait of 1943, The Artist Looks At Nature, an eerie, near-Surrealist work that cobbles together a number of earlier pieces, including his photographic self-portrait of 1931—which, in turn, shows the artist at work reproducing a photograph from 1917 in Conté crayon. This painting of a photograph showing the artist drawing from a photograph offers Brock ample opportunities to consider the medium-related mise en abyme of Sheeler’s self-quotations. The discussion here is lively and productive—including a deft reference to the contemporaneous and equally coy self-portrait, Citizen Kane—and it brings us to Brock’s most cogent explication of Sheeler’s understanding of photography.

The issue of Sheeler’s photographic imagination stands at the center of Charles Sheeler: Across Media, and the book hints at a dawning recognition of the degree to which Sheeler’s hand-painted and hand-drawn works were instrumental in actively defining the “look” of photorealism: a set of visual markers retrospectively coded “photographic” only through the intervention of an artist’s manual practice of imitating photographs. But, more to the point, Brock’s goal is to consider how Sheeler marshaled this photorealist objectivism toward the end of aesthetic transcendentalism. Throughout the text, Brock argues that Sheeler’s allegiance was first of all and always to aestheticism, a kind old-fashioned commitment to the timeless durability of beauty-as-such. This is uncontroversial ground, given the degree to which Precisionism has always been linked to Neoclassicism. But Brock pushes harder on the point, working to understand the strange truce between aesthetic transcendence and mechanical materiality, as brokered by that unlikely mediator, photography. A crucial moment in this line of argument comes earlier in the text, as Brock follows other scholars (notably Karen Lucic in Charles Sheeler and the Cult of the Machine, London: Reaktion, 1991) in considering Sheeler alongside Walter Benjamin’s “Work of Art in the Age of Reproduction.” Whereas Benjamin cheerfully viewed photography as a fatal threat to art’s auratic properties, Brock argues that Sheeler used photography to reinvigorate aura for the Machine Age, regarding the camera’s capacity for mechanical mimesis to be a boon, not a threat, to artistic transcendence. The idealist, even spiritual, embrace of materialist objectivism vis-à-vis the machine is one of the era’s central ironies: a strange kind of piety long of interest to literary scholars (as in studies of Ezra Pound or William Carlos Williams), but just now attracting serious attention among historians of American art. Of course, Brock has not fully unraveled all the complexities of idealist materialism, but he very admirably moves the debate forward, especially by demonstrating the necessity of approaching the question through art history, with its acute sensitivity to issues of process, perception, and—crucially—materiality itself.

If “Mixing Media” gets a boost from the show-stopping nature of the work it highlights (indeed, traffic in the gallery slows when one arrives at The Artist Looks At Nature), “Photomontage” limps a little in its attention to Sheeler’s later works, which possess little of the earlier works’ oomph. Here, Brock offers the little-considered history of Sheeler’s New England commissions, painted in the 1940s and dealing with the discarded industrial ruins of the region’s nineteenth-century mills. This portion of the text introduces the reader to Sheeler’s photomontage works and his studies on glass (a trajectory Brock fruitfully traces to Sheeler’s earlier photographs of Duchamp’s The Large Glass), but the works themselves are far less rich, perhaps because the references here are so tightly limited to Sheeler’s own artistic processes and prototypes. Indeed, the comparative weakness of these later works demonstrates the degree to which Sheeler’s early career was animated not just by his practice of auto-critique but also, and crucially, by his implicit habit of relevant social reflection.

Whether wittingly or not, Sheeler’s early work not only crossed media, it also crossed artistic debates with social concerns. Was his work an uncomplicated celebration of mechanical rationalization? And, if so, what to make of the painstaking approach he took to drawing and painting, effectively rescuing artistic labor from modernity’s deskilling effects? These sorts of questions have been more central to scholars including Wanda Corn (”Home, Sweet Home,” The Great American Thing: Modern Art and National Identity, 1915–1935, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), Susan Fillin-Yeh (“Charles Sheeler and the Machine Age,” PhD diss., City University of New York, 1981), and Sharon Corwin (”Selling ‘America’: Precisionism and the Rhetoric of Industry, 1916–1939,” PhD diss., University of California, Berkeley, 2001), all of whom use Sheeler’s twinned obsessions with modern machines and bygone folk crafts as grist for their interpretive mills. How the values of anonymity and utilitarianism were already engrained in an American craft tradition—and how Sheeler’s unilateral embrace of these values might have served as an apology for modern industrialization—is a question usefully considered by these authors. Bringing Sheeler’s love for Shaker tables and chairs into the mix might have provided Brock with another very interesting facet to Sheeler’s intricacy, but it might also have forced a more social-historical consideration of the artist’s career. Instead, Brock keeps this line of debate safely to the side, content to adopt Lucic’s verdict of political ambivalence and leave it at that. But what sort of social world is pictured in Sheeler’s thoroughgoing dedication to a Taylorist world remains an important question, particularly for understanding the social legacy of the Machine Age will-to-aestheticize. An active debate of the period, this unsettled question remains critical to our own cultural moment: a moment still engaged with what it means to blur the distinctions between art and life, and a moment to which Brock’s theoretical compulsions are otherwise so well-suited.