The Old Precisionist

At 81, with his right arm paralyzed, Charles Sheeler is nearly beyond accolades. Like blueprints of a new aesthetic, his precision paintings were the reductio ad minutam of the machine age. He mixed the academicism of his teacher, William Merritt Chase, with the cubist masters, made a living as a photographer until his immaculate industrial visions caught on. He could refine the reality of a locomotive's monstrous driving wheels so that even when they are frozen in two dimensions, their tremendous momentum leaps out.

A stroke stopped Sheeler's production in 1959. Some of his last works, now on view in Manhattan's Downtown Gallery, show that his precise touch never faltered. The 14 paintings are executed in tempera on small Plexiglas plates, something he often did before expanding them on large canvases. Some seem like multiple-photo exposures of oil refineries, lonely steelscapes gyrating in the sky. Others are pure scenery, where patchy foliage parts to let a background watercolor peep through the Plexiglas.

Sheeler's fame in U.S. art history is already assured. Hard-edge and pop artists today acknowledge that they owe a clear debt to him. But he was "deeply moved by the response of the youngest generation," aged seven to twelve years, who have rated him No. 1 among such company as Cezanne, Franz Kline, Ben Shahn, Van Gogh and Robert Indiana. Some 300 children at U.C.L.A.'s University Elementary School preferred slides of Sheeler's work to those of any other artist. Their art teacher suggested last year that they write to the artist and tell him so. Their letters are among Sheeler's most treasured critical notices.

Wrote Carol Rogers, 9: "I always recognize your paintings because they give me a quiet, lonely, deserted feeling." Paul Rangell, 9, wrote: "The reason I like your art is you put mathematics in it." "I like your paintings because they're clean and weird," wrote Francis Sidney Howard Goldwyn, 10. "Not weird scary but weird unusual." One eight-year-old had a request. "I can draw a ruler-perfect picture too," wrote Larry Sprowls. "You can make it so you can't tell what it's doing. I can't. What kind of ruler do you use?"

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