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==Biography==
==Biography==
On April 2, 1939, Musya Metas Sokolova marred [[Charles Sheeler]] (1883 – 1965), one of America’s leading [[Modernism|Modernists]], becoming his second wife six years after the death in 1933 of Sheeler's first wife Katharine Baird Shaffer (whom he married April 7, 1921). In 1942 Sheeler joined the [[Metropolitan Museum of Art]] as a senior research fellow in photography, worked on a project in [[Connecticut]] with the photographer [[Edward Weston]], and moved with Musya to [[Irvington, New York|Irvington-on-Hudson]], some thirty-two kilometres north of New York. Sheeler worked for the Metropolitan Museum’s Department of Publications from 1942 to 1945, photographing a wide range of works from the collection, including [[Assyria|Assyrian]] reliefs, classical Greek and Roman sculpture, European painting, and Chinese objects.
On April 2, 1939, Musya Metas Sokolova marred [[Charles Sheeler]] (1883 – 1965), one of America’s leading [[Modernism|Modernists]], becoming his second wife six years after the death in 1933 of Sheeler's first wife Katharine Baird Shaffer (whom he married April 7, 1921). In 1942 Sheeler joined the [[Metropolitan Museum of Art]] as a senior research fellow in photography, worked on a project in [[Connecticut]] with the photographer [[Edward Weston]], and moved with Musya to [[Irvington, New York|Irvington-on-Hudson]], some thirty-two kilometres north of New York into the gardener's cottage that was the remaining building on what was the Lowe estate.<ref>Westinghouse Broadcasting Corp. produced television series, "America: The Artist's Eye," 1961-1963; film of Charles and Musya Sheeler at home, and Charles Sheeler at work in his studio, ca. 1950</ref> Sheeler worked for the Metropolitan Museum’s Department of Publications from 1942 to 1945, photographing a wide range of works from the collection, including [[Assyria|Assyrian]] reliefs, classical Greek and Roman sculpture, European painting, and Chinese objects.


Sheeler took many pictures of Musya, in the nude in both a black and white (3x4inch) series and in 35mm colour slides; other black and white prints show her laughing or leaning out of a window, or - on one occasion -sick in bed. Quite different from each other in temperament–he cool and reserved, and she, warm and outgoing–they made good friends amongst the artistic community of New York.
Sheeler took many pictures of Musya, in the nude in both a black and white (3x4inch) series and in 35mm colour slides; other black and white prints show her laughing or leaning out of a window, or - on one occasion -sick in bed. Quite different from each other in temperament–he cool and reserved, and she, warm and outgoing–they made good friends amongst the artistic community of New York.

Revision as of 10:03, 9 August 2018

Musya S. Sheeler (1908–1981), born Musya Metas Sokolova, was a Russian dancer (1908-1981), who at age 15 fled with her family from the Revolution to the USA, where she became a photographer. Her work was exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art three times and featured in magazines including Life and Vogue.

Biography

On April 2, 1939, Musya Metas Sokolova marred Charles Sheeler (1883 – 1965), one of America’s leading Modernists, becoming his second wife six years after the death in 1933 of Sheeler's first wife Katharine Baird Shaffer (whom he married April 7, 1921). In 1942 Sheeler joined the Metropolitan Museum of Art as a senior research fellow in photography, worked on a project in Connecticut with the photographer Edward Weston, and moved with Musya to Irvington-on-Hudson, some thirty-two kilometres north of New York into the gardener's cottage that was the remaining building on what was the Lowe estate.[1] Sheeler worked for the Metropolitan Museum’s Department of Publications from 1942 to 1945, photographing a wide range of works from the collection, including Assyrian reliefs, classical Greek and Roman sculpture, European painting, and Chinese objects.

Sheeler took many pictures of Musya, in the nude in both a black and white (3x4inch) series and in 35mm colour slides; other black and white prints show her laughing or leaning out of a window, or - on one occasion -sick in bed. Quite different from each other in temperament–he cool and reserved, and she, warm and outgoing–they made good friends amongst the artistic community of New York.

A close friend was poet William Carlos Williams who in his writing on ‘projective verse’ explains the theory in terms of the marriage of Charles and Musya Sheeler.[2][3] A 1949 portrait by Musya shows Williams with a dog in dappled shade, Williams leaning from his chair to pet the dog and in that moment, both have their eyes closed as if in ecstatic contemplation.[4] Ansel Adams described his coming to New York to be welcomed by Musya, whom he described as “a vibrant Russian: a former ballet dancer who had an abundance of affection for their friends.”[5] Charles and Musya traded photographs for the pottery of their friends Mary and Edwin Scheier, whose marriage was nearly contemporary with theirs and as creatively abundant. The Scheiers’ photographs by Charles and by Musya Sheeler are now in the Currier Gallery of Art.[6] Through Williams, Charles and Musya knew professor of English John C. Thirlwall.[7] Edward and Charis Weston visited them in 1942[8][9] and also, as befitting Musya’s interest in dance, Martha Graham and Barbara Morgan.[10] In 1946 Bartlett H. Hayes Jr., an educator and art historian and director of the Addison Gallery of American Art at Phillips Academy in Andover invited the couple to be artists-in-residence in an early instance of such programs.[11]

Recognition

In 1950 Musya exhibited with Ansel Adams, Edward Weston and Brett Weston, and Charles Sheeler in Plants and Plant Forms in Photography arranged by Victor Salvatore,[12] and also that year made flashlit photographs of Edward Steichen, curator of Photography at MoMA, Sheeler and painter John Marin toasting each other with tumblers of whisky at the Sheeler house[13] Steichen included her that year in Photographs by 51 Photographers, August 1–September 17, 1950, at the Museum.

In 1949 Musya had realised an ambition to make a series of portraits of nuns. Visiting a convent in Tarrytown, N.Y., she found an opportunity to make more than portraits and to exploit her particular interest in figurative imagery that later was to catch the eye of editors at Condé Nast.[14] The result was ‘Nuns at Play’,[15] a Life magazine essay on the religious novices in moments of relaxation from their training as teachers. One of the photographs shows the nuns, veils and habits flying, gleefully riding a schoolyard merry-go-round. It caught the eye of Steichen during his selection for the world-touring 1955 Museum of Modern Art exhibition The Family of Man, seen by 9 million visitors. For Vogue, in 1951, with journalist Edna Woolman Chase, Musya produced a slower-paced photoessay on a sleepy, conservative rural hamlet; classically illuminated with the available light, the series illustrates the timeless traditions and attitudes of small town life.[16]

Musya was included in a third MoMA show From the McAlpin Collection, December 14, 1966–February 12, 1967[17]

Late career

Despite her successes, Musya’s career trajectory was clearly affected when Sheeler suffered a debilitating stroke in 1959 and died on May 7, 1965 in Dobbs Ferry, New York. After Musya’s death in 1981, she was buried next to Sheeler in Sleepy Hollow Cemetery, Sleepy Hollow, Westchester County, New York, USA [3]

Collections

  • Clervaux Castle, Luxembourg
  • Center for Creative Photography, The University of Arizona, holds Fishing nets on boat, skyline (1949) and Stacked quarried rock slabs, snow, bare tree (1950)

References

  1. ^ Westinghouse Broadcasting Corp. produced television series, "America: The Artist's Eye," 1961-1963; film of Charles and Musya Sheeler at home, and Charles Sheeler at work in his studio, ca. 1950
  2. ^ Paul, Sherman; Williams, William Carlos, 1883-1963. Desert music. 1968 (1968), The music of survival : a biography of a poem by William Carlos Williams, University of Illinois Press, p. 57, ISBN 978-0-252-72572-2{{citation}}: CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link) CS1 maint: numeric names: authors list (link)
  3. ^ In presenting the construction of the poem as one of the major occupations of the intelligence in our day, take the following example. After nine years Charles Sheeler had married again. His bride was Musya Sokolova, a dancer who at the age of fifteen had been driven from Russia by the Revolutionists. He abandoned the place at Ridgefield where he had taken her, and came to Ih'e in the Hudson River Valley near New York.. He had got hold of the gardener's collage of the former Lowe estate, a miniature mansion of gray stone, mansard-roof style, deep-set French windo ..... s that was perfect to his purpose, We have the location: a wilfully destroyed Hudson River estate, a former home of the ‘aristocracy’ of American Colonial history with subsequent wealth engrafted upon it to make it lovelier, Washington Irving's country, the country of the early Dutch and English- the Livingstons, the Phillipses, the woman who might have married George Washington and made him a New York State instead of a Virginia planter, with all that is implied in that. The main building of sixty or more rooms had been torn down, out of very spite, it seemed, toward Franklin Roosevelt, leaving only the small cottage, the voluminous barns, and the remains of as beautiful a grove of trees, maples, purple beeches, basswoods, Japanese ginkos to be found in the eastern part of the country. Many of them were over seventy years old when Charles and Musya moved in. The poem is our objective, the secret at the heart of the matter–as Sheeler’s small house, reorganised, is the heart of the gone estate of the Lowes–the effect of fortune founded on tobacco or chicle or whatever it was.Williams, William Carlos (1951), The autobiography of William Carlos Williams, MacGibbon & Kee, p. 332-4, retrieved 9 August 2018
  4. ^ Photo from the William Carlos Williams papers in the Yale Collection of American Literature
  5. ^ The impact of New York City was for me one of expanding waves of contacts and events, washing an endless shore of personalities and activities. I remember a bright New York day: spring, flowers, a bit of snap in the morning stride of pedestrians. Nancy and I had been invited to the home of Charles and Musya Sheeler. Under light clouds and a gentle sky we drove to lrvington along the Hudson River, At about five we arrived at the Sheeler home, a beautiful, small granite structure, formerly the gate house of a large Hudson River estate. Musya greeted us with warmth and Charles with his usual austere admission of pleasure to see us. He was a deceptively shy man, firm and quiet, and a great artist. I admire his photography but believe he was even more impressive as a painter. Musya was a vibrant Russian: a former ballet dancer who had an abundance of affection for their friends. Many Sunday afternoons were spent at the Sheelers'. On this particular day with Nancy and I visiting the Sheelers, there was a light fragrant breeze, more friends arriving, more tea and vodka dispensed. Musya was queenly in her dispensation of the vodka and cookies. The euphoria expanded while the mind vacated the cranium. Adams, Ansel; Alinder, Mary Street, 1946- (1985), Ansel Adams, an autobiography, Little, Brown, ISBN 978-0-8212-1596-8{{citation}}: CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link) CS1 maint: numeric names: authors list (link)
  6. ^ Komanecky, Michael; Currier Gallery of Art; Arizona State University. Art Museum (1993), American potters : Mary and Edwin Scheier, Currier Gallery of Art, ISBN 978-0-929710-12-9
  7. ^ Thirlwall, J. (1970). WILLIAM CARLOS WILLIAMS AND JOHN THIRLWALL: RECORD OF A TEN-YEAR RELATIONSHIP. The Yale University Library Gazette, 45(1), 15-21.
  8. ^ Stark, A. (1986). Edward Weston Papers. The Guide Series, (13).
  9. ^ Stebbins, Theodore E; Sheeler, Charles, 1883-1965; Keyes, Norman; Whitney Museum of American Art; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; Dallas Museum of Art (1987), Charles Sheeler, the photographs (1st ed ed.), Little, Brown, ISBN 978-0-87846-285-8 {{citation}}: |edition= has extra text (help)CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link) CS1 maint: numeric names: authors list (link)
  10. ^ Leibowitz, Herbert A (2011), "Something urgent I have to say to you" : the life and works of William Carlos Williams (1st ed ed.), Farrar, Straus and Giroux, ISBN 978-0-374-11329-2 {{citation}}: |edition= has extra text (help)
  11. ^ oral history transcript of a tape-recorded interview with Charles Sheeler on December 9, 1958 conducted at Charles Sheeler's home at Irvington-on-Hudson by Bartlett Cowdrey for the Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution [1]
  12. ^ Bulletin of the Garden Club of America, 1950, Page 10 [2].
  13. ^ Mccoy, G. (1972). Photographs and Photography in the Archives of American Art. Archives of American Art Journal, 12(3), 1-18.
  14. ^ Sheeler, taped conversation with William H. Lane, February l , l 959 (The Lane Collection)
  15. ^ ’Nuns at Play: camera records their carefree, graceful moments of relaxation’ LIFE, 14 Nov 1949,  ISSN 0024-3019. Time Inc. 139-141
  16. ^ Woolman Chase, Edna. (1951). People and Ideas: Little Town: Fitzwilliam, New Hampshire. Vogue, 117(2), 206, 207, 208, 209, 210, 211.
  17. ^ Bunnell, P. C. (1968). The David H. McAlpin Collection. Members Newsletter (Museum of Modern Art), (2), 7-8.
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