Charles Sheeler in Doylestown: American Modernism and the Pennsylvania Tradition investigates one artist's lifelong engagement with the rich, distinctive traditions of rural Buck's County. It charts Sheeler's discovery of the region's architechture and artifacts beginning about 1910, when he and fellow artist Morton Livingston Schamberg rented an eighteenth-century farmhouse in Doylestown. It assesses what impact this seminal event had on Sheeler's early career, and how his cyclical return to Bucks County themes in later life reveals poignant attachments and emotional depths not usually ascribed to this twentieth-century painter and photographer - known primarily as an iconographer of the machine. By analyzing Sheeler's core attachment to the preindustrial vernacular, this exhibition and its catalovue reconstruct his attempt to reconcile part and present in a series of powerful complex pictures that resulted from his enduring fascination with the Pennsylvanian tradition.
--- excerpt from book's Preface
