Charles Sheeler was an American artist known for his involvement in the Precisionism movement along with Charles Demuth, Gerald Murphy, and others. Working with photography, film, and painting in tandem, the artist explored planar light, notions of objectivity, and the man-made forms of industry. Both in his use of the Ford Motor Company’s River Rouge plant as subject matter for the painting American Landscape (1930), and his probing of the camera’s objective gaze in his film Manhatta (1921), Sheeler was unique to his time. “Photography is nature seen from the eyes outward, painting from the eyes inward,” he once reflected. “Photography records inalterably the single image, while painting records a plurality of images willfully directed by the artist.” Born on July 16, 1883 in Philadelphia, PA, he went on to study at the Pennsylvania Museum School of Industrial Art and later under William Merritt Chase at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts. While visiting Europe, the artist became enthralled with the Cubist works of Georges Braque and Pablo Picasso and upon returning home he applied his interest in their work to his scenes of America. He died on May 7, 1965 in Dobbs Ferry, NY. Today, Sheeler’s works are held in the collections of the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles, the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, the Art Institute of Chicago, The Museum of Modern Art in New York, and the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., among others.