Browse

Accession #	49.67
Artist	Charles Sheeler
Title	Incantation
Date	1946
Medium	Oil on canvas
Dimensions	24 1/8 x 20 1/8 in. (61.3 x 51.1 cm) frame: 32 3/4 x 38 3/4 x 3 in. (83.2 x 98.4 x 7.6 cm)
Signed	Signed and dated lower right: "Sheeler -- 1946"
Credit Line	Ella C. Woodward Memorial Fund and John B. Woodward Memorial Fund
Location	American Identities: Colony to Nation / Inventing American Landscape

Curatorial Remarks: Charles Sheeler saw the modern equivalent of the imposing religious architecture of the past in the expansive, streamlined masses of factory buildings and refineries. Incantation, whose very title sounds like a spiritual evocation, is a fragmentary view of a continuous-flow oil production plant. Here Sheeler reduced the architectural forms to a more two-dimensional design in which shadows play as weighty a role as the metal tanks and pipes. The lack of a human presence suggests the degree to which these vast plants had come to be viewed as nearly autonomous forces.