Charles Sheeler

Precisionists have been classified as a group of artist who began to depict the use of machinery using styles and techniques of the previous movements before them such as abstraction, cubism and abstract expressionism. This movement came around shortly after World War 1, when the use of machines began to boom within the United States. The precisionist movement was originally started in nineteen hundred and fifteen when a group of artists got together and decided to look forward to the art of the future. The movement was built around the idea of artists using the precision of their instruments to display these ideas of machinery throughout America. (Precisionism in America . . . 12-13).

Construction and machinery were the two main influences of the precisionism movement which became big in the nineteen twenties around the time World War one was ending. With streamlining though mechanization becoming an ideal everyday thing for Americans, and things such as skylines going up in New York, anywhere from fifty to seventy story buildings in cities such as Cleveland and cities like Memphis and Syracuse were beginning to install twenty story buildings. Precisionism became an art movement more as a response to society and the production of new products like motion picture films, antifreeze and cigarette lighters (Lucic. . .16).

Cubism, abstraction and abstract expressionism are the common art movements that come to mind when asked about artists. However, these movements all led up to and strongly influenced the movement of the precisionist artists. Precisionism is roughly a combination of these three movements together, using geometrical shapes and using them in abstract forms. These two ways are influenced by cubism and abstraction, while abstract expressionism comes from the expression of the artists' mind and feelings of the subject matter (Doezema, 74-75).

American Artists always find it important to truly reflect the transformation that is occurring in the society. Artworks in the 1920s tended to show the rapidly growing nation along with its expansion of technology and industry. As a typical artist strongly influenced by big changes of the new age, Charles Sheeler revealed a love for contemporary urban life and the beauty of the machine through many of his photographs and paintings.

As a son of an executive of a steamer company, Charles Sheeler (1883-1965) began his very first art classes at the School of Industrial Art in Philadelphia. After