Charles Sheeler Born in Philadelphia, he created paintings, a few lithographs, and photographs that reflected his interest in industrial scenes. He was the major exponent of Precisionism. He was born in Philadelphia and there enrolled at the School of Industrial Art. He then studied with William Merritt Chase at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts from 1903 to 1906. He made several trips to Europe, several times traveling with Chase, and from 1908 to 1910 with Morton Schamberg. On this trip, his interest in modern art was awakened, and he spent the next decade trying to shake-off the more representational style of Chase. In 1917, his signature work began with the exhibiting of a painting, "Barn Abstraction." Striving for precision and simplification, he was much influenced by Shaker artifacts and by his interest in commercial photography that had begun in 1912. His mature paintings are abstractions of facades with details isolated in space. He also pioneered in using sharp-focus techniques in response to the same movement in photography. In the 1930s, the objects in his paintings were more realistic but more abstract in arrangement, and in the 1940s, his work showed disembodied planes and forms suggesting industrial shapes. Much influenced by Paul Cezanne and Cubism, he was very much a part of the early 20th century New York avant-garde art world that included Charles Demuth, Joseph Stella and Louis Lozowick. Unlike many of his contemporaries, he focused on American and not European subjects. He died in Dobbs Ferry, New York in 1965.

Biography with permission from AskArt.com

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