Bird's Nest

Bird's Nest depicts Charles Sheeler's home in Irvington-on-Hudson, New York, just up the Hudson River from Manhattan. Throughout his career, Sheeler portrayed his homes from unusual vantage points, emphasizing the abstract patterns created by their architecture. Sheeler's tendency to depict simplified geometric forms in bright, clear light with few visible brushstrokes affiliates his work with Precisionism. Precisionist artists typically used eccentric compositions that invited viewers to experience familiar objects-such as a house-in a new aesthetic context.
Sheeler studied with William Merritt Chase and traveled to Europe, where he was affected by the Cubists' analytical approach to painting. His Precisionist style developed in the 1920s. By the 1940s he had begun to add more gestural passages, such as the foliage in Bird's Nest, perhaps in response to the developing movement of Abstract Expressionism.