CHARLES SHEELER (American, 1883-1965). Peaches in a White Bowl, 1910. Oil on canvas. 10-1/2 x 13-3/4 inches (26.7 x 34.9...

Description

CHARLES SHEELER (American, 1883-1965)
Peaches in a White Bowl, 1910
Oil on canvas
10-1/2 x 13-3/4 inches (26.7 x 34.9 cm)
Signed and dated lower right: C.R. Sheeler - 1910

PROPERTY FROM THE KING COLLECTION, TEXAS

PROVENANCE:
The artist;
Mrs. Charles Sheeler, the artist's wife;
Terry Dintenfass, Inc., New York;
Sotheby's, New York, June 4, 1982, lot 115;
Acquired by the present owner from the above.

EXHIBITED:
Owings-Dewey Fine Art, Santa Fe, New Mexico, "Intimacy and the Creative Pair," July 13-September 22, 2001;
Montclair Art Museum, Montclair, New Jersey, and elsewhere, "Cézanne and American Modernism," September 13, 2009-January 3, 2010;
Phoenix Art Museum, Phoenix, Arizona, June 26-September 26, 2010;
El Paso Museum of Art, El Paso, Texas, "Modern American Painting 1907-1936: The Maria and Barry King Collection," September 8, 2013-January 8, 2014, no. 10.

LITERATURE:
C. Troyen and E. Hirshler, Charles Sheeler: Paintings and Drawings, New York, 1987, p. 4, fig. 4;
J. Driscoll, "Charles Sheeler's Early Work: Five Rediscovered Paintings," Art Bulletin, no. 1, March 1980, pp. 124-33;
J. Anderson Kyle, Cézanne and American Paintings 1900-1920, Ph.D. dissertation, Austin, Texas, 1995, pp. 403-16, 107, illustrated;
Owings-Dewey Fine Art, Intimacy and the Creative Pair, exhibition catalogue, Santa Fe, New Mexico, 2001, p. 27, illustrated;
G. Stavitsky & K. Rothkopf, Cézanne and American Modernism, exhibition catalogue, Montclair Art Museum, New Haven, Connecticut & London, 2009, pp. 298-301, no. 101, illustrated;
American Art Review, October 2009, pp. 118-25, 128;
"Discovering the American Modern 1907-1936: The King Collection," American Art Review, December 2013, pp. 80-87, 127, illustrated;
P.S. Cable, Modern American Painting 1907-1936: The Maria and Barry King Collection, exhibition catalogue, El Paso Museum of Art, El Paso, Texas, 2013, pp. 45-46, no. 10, illustrated.

Peaches in a White Bowl is one of approximately thirty paintings known to have survived from Charles Sheeler's 1910 to 1913 period. This Cézannesque work--a graceful study in the contrasts of natural and geometric forms--is a historically noteworthy painting in that it is one of the artist's earliest-dated Modernist paintings to precede his Precisionist period. It is also one of the artist's rare canvases dating from his first exposure to European modernism in the 1910s.

Dr. Patrick Shaw Cable writes, "Sheeler made several trips to Europe from 1904-1909. One of the most important was spent in the company of Morton Schamberg; together the two young men discovered Cézanne, Fauvism, and Cubism, as well as the simplified structure of Renaissance frescoes by Piero della Francesca when they visited Arezzo in 1909. A few years later at the 1913 Armory Show, Sheeler included paintings influenced by Cézanne and Synchromism. Among Sheeler's few existing works, perhaps the closest thing to the King picture is Plums on a Plate (fig. 1), which sold on the New York market in 2003. Though perhaps painted on panel, the work is very close in size to Peaches in a White Bowl; like the King canvas it uses Cézannesque modeling and intense natural coloring to focus on a simple arrangement of fruit, which is set upon a bare white dish and placed within a reductive environment. The elemental structure of Peaches in a White Bowl possesses resonance with the artist's later Precisionist style. Here, however, the simplicity of the composition melds with the glowing colorism and broad painterly modeling to endow the picture with a sense of hushed poetry--a fact that can only lead us to regret that Sheeler, in his 'desire to remove the method of painting,' did not permit himself any similar flights of painterly expression later in his career as the leader of Precisionism. Studying the broad luscious handling of the ordinary peaches, one cannot help but think of the exotic Tahitian fruits of Gauguin" (Modern American Painting 1907-1936: The Maria and Barry King Collection, exhibition catalogue, El Paso Museum of Art, El Paso, Texas, 2013, p. 45).



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