Charles Sheeler
(Oil on Canvas)
1943
& ignores it. Instead, the artist paints himself & his easel perched on the edge of a landscape of stone edifices & staircases that hug the earth like the rumored hanging gardens of antiquity. Moving close to the frame, I see the image his self-portrait is attempting to render. A small den, half-finished. A coal-black furnace. The crosshatched frame of a closed window. The landscape attempts to crowd the mind, but the canvas blocking his eyes hampers it. It is walled off like a living room. The painting is a comment on the impossibility of representation, the curatorial notes explain, but the true intent remains unknown. Around the corner, there is a museum cafe located in a solarium at the interstices of four galleries. To enter, I walk through a tunnel of interwoven birches. I step over patches of moss & dirt crushed between marble tiles.
