Fig. 35 Charles G. Shaw Polygon 1938
by April Richon Jacobs
Fig. 35 Charles G. Shaw Polygon 1938
A gadabout from his early years at Yale, Charles G. Shaw—poet, journalist, photographer, and artist—was a true Manhattan bon vivant. His paintings, inspired by the New York skyline, are infused with a life intimately connected to the city and its haunts. Known to many as a charming man-about-town, Shaw avidly explored the city and its nightlife; his articles in Vanity Fair, the New Yorker and the Smart Set chronicled Manhattan's sophisticates while simultaneously revealing the intense fascination and artistic eye with which he viewed the ever-changing urban scene.
During the early years of the 1930s, Shaw traveled to Paris, where he visited the studios of Pablo Picasso, Georges Braque and Fernand Leger, three artists who were becoming increasingly popular among American abstractionists. George L. K. Morris and A. E. Gallatin, two founding members of the American Abstract Artists, readily incorporated the simple, geometric forms of Picasso and Braque, while emphasizing the bright colors and mechanized imagery of Leger. Shaw not only developed a deep friendship with Gallatin, but also adopted his preferred American modernist aesthetic of primary colors and simple geometric shapes. Gallatin, in turn, provided a venue for displaying Shaw's work. Exhibitions in 1935 and 1936, including the influential Five Concretionists at Gallatin's Museum of Living Art, helped establish Shaw's artistic career.
In 1933 Shaw commenced work on the plastic polygons, his most influential and well-known series. In the 1920s an intense fascination with Manhattan had dominated his writing. Shaw now applied this to painting; his plastic polygons make manifest the ever-evolving urban landscape. Writing in 1938 for Plasttque, a journal published by Morris, Shaw explains the city's effect on the polygon: "In the main these experiments were founded upon the New York scene—or rather the Manhattan skyline— ... Structurally and functionally [the plastic polygon] is solely of America."1 And although these compositions are influenced by the stylistic devices of Picasso and Leger, the paintings' subjects are purely American in inspiration, setting Shaw's work apart from that of many of his contemporaries (pl. xv and fig. 36).
Plastic Polygon, 1938 (Whitney Museum of American Art, New York), not only encapsulates the New York skyline in a dense grouping of brightly-colored polygons, but also embodies a complex Cubist rhetoric adopted from the works of Picasso and Braque. Reinterpreting the fundamental Cubist language of papier collé, Shaw emphasizes the flatness of the canvas by placing a number of multicolored polygons of varying widths and sizes against a dark ground. The composite plastic polygon, situated in the center of the composition, seems to rise from the surface of the canvas. From the edges of the canvas inward, Shaw's polygons grow increasingly taller, leading the eye toward a single, light-colored monolithic rectangle, the shape of which mimics that of the canvas itself. Two polygons near the painting's upper register are severed at oblique angles; their shape is inherently dynamic, "sprouting, so to speak, from the steel and concrete of New York City."2
Plastic Polygon, 1938, with its simple, elemental forms, grew from an evolutionary process that had occupied Shaw ever since he initiated the series. Beginning with more realistic compositions such as Twilight, ca. 1933.3 Shaw evolved towards the flattened, spare composition of the plastic polygons. In Twilight, a number of illusionistic devices create depth and perspective; for example, Shaw deploys the dense grouping of buildings before a light, airy background with cloud formations. These devices create a repoussoir that lends weight and three-dimensionality. The forms of Plastic Polygon, 1938, however, are flattened, devoid of mass, Shaw explained:
By a gradual trend of simplification and removal of all superfluous detail, my initial polygon in due course evolved. Strangely enough, in its embryonic stage all semblance to the original germ had almost vanished; rather than a form comprising a series of varying planes, it had taken on the rigid tranquility of a sidewalk pattern viewed from above.4
The resulting composition of Plastic Polygon, 1938, embodies the style for which Shaw is known; as forms are reduced, a greater clarity emerges. He writes, "Distance had yielded to design; depth had surrendered to a wall of equal planes ... By a broader elimination I have sought to arrive at a greater purity."5
The fundamental concepts inherent to Shaw's paintings are further refined in his Plastic Polygon, 1937 (pl. i), in which the towering skyscrapers of the Twilight scene are translated into simple geometric shapes. These forms, rendered without any attempts at illusionism, are composed of flat, primary colors clearly inspired by Léger and Piet Mondrian. Here, Shaw's choice of color creates a repoussoir effect; as warmer colors come forward, cooler ones recede. Further accentuating the polygonal forms of the composition, Shaw shapes the canvas itself and surrounds it with a thin wooden frame. Commenting on this new technique, Shaw explains, "My intention in abandoning the orthodox four-stripped frame has been to give the figure wider freedom."6
The plastic polygons are intricately connected to the fundamentals of architecture: basic shapes serve as the building blocks for Shaw's paintings. Indeed, shortly after finishing his coursework at Yale, the artist studied architecture at Columbia University, and he incorporated these lessons in his plastic polygons for the rest of his career. This process aligns Shaw to Constructivist artists such as the Russian Vladimir Tatlin. Tatlin worked in opposition to traditional sculptural technique, which typically began with a single block of material (characteristically marble or wood), from which sculptural forms were progressively reduced. A wide variety of materials were combined, into compositions often created from modern materials such as sheet metal or glass, in complex assemblages that resulted from the addition of material (as opposed to the reduction of it). Shaw, too, incorporated building materials within his work. While Tatlin preferred metal and glass, the more conservative Shaw used wood, masonite, and sometimes sand.
The fundamental language of this series, already established in Plastic Polygon, 1937, is further expanded upon within Shaw's Plastic Polygon, 1938 (pl. xvi), which is composed of five multi-colored polygons—some painted, some made of wood—set against a two-toned background. Darker polygons, painted brown and gray, and composed of thick pieces of wood, appear to recede into flatness, but their three-dimensionality casts ambiguous shadows over the work. Lighter polygons are painted over the dark, so
Fig, 36 Charles G. Shaw Geometric Combination ca. 1940
that what appears to be above is really below; what appears to come forth actually recedes. In this subtle transformation of Constructivist and Cubist principles, Shaw experiments with notions of illusion and perception, a technique which mirrors his self-professed love of visual trickery. His collection of playing cards, an extension of his youth, when he was "crazy about magic,"7 was extensive, with cards from Persia, France, China, and beyond. A lover of Lewis Carroll, Shaw knew "Jabberwocky" by heart, and delighted friends with its recitation.
sky." Such fascination with illJusionary devices is especially evident in Shaw's biomorphic constructions such as Polygon, 1938 (fig. 35). The organic twin of Shaw's geometric plastic polygons of the same era, this piece, with its curving forms of wood varnished with a glossy sheen, is clearly inspired by Jean Arp, an artist whose work was exhibited at Gallatin's Museum. A founding member of the Zurich Dada group, Arp delighted in word games and ambiguity; at the Cabaret Voltaire, Arp and his fellow Dadaists often staged readings of nonsense poetry. Arp's biomorphic constructions of the 1930s, such as Configuration of 1930 (Philadelphia Museum of Art), which was in Gallatin's collection, evoke images of metamorphosis and transformation. Similarly, It Looked Like Spilt Milk, the children's book Shaw wrote and illustrated in the 1940s, contained pale white, oddly shaped forms. As these shapes evolve from page to page, the text at the end reads, "It looked like spilt milk, but ... it was just a cloud in the
The abstract forms of the plastic polygons sustained the artist for much of his career. By the 1960s, Shaw had turned to a more minimal style, with works composed of only one or two colors. When asked why he stopped making the plastic polygons, he responded simply, "Nobody was interested."8 The polygons, though, captured an era of constant change and nascent modernity, which is perhaps best described in the catalogue from Shaw's first solo exhibition, Manhattan Patterns, held at the Valentine Gallery in 1934:
The steel and stone and concrete with which Manhattan makes its patterns are here reflected in the harmonious and structural simplicity of his emotional reactions.... Yet ... the treatment is neither literary nor sentimental. It is bold, non-imitative, and intensely personal ... the way in which Manhattan endears herself. In a pink haze of summer loveliness, or in the murky coziness of a winter evening, she asks one to forget her defective details and respond to her total charm.9
1. Charles G. Shaw, "The Plastic Polygon," Plastique, no. 3 (Spring 1938), 28. Reprinted in this volume.
2. Ibid.
3. Illustrated in Charles G. Shaw (1892—1974): Abstractions of the Thirties, exh. cat. (New York: Richard York Gallery, 1987), fig. 2.
4. Shaw, "The Plastic Polygon," 28.
5. Ibid.
6. Ibid.
7. Charles Shaw, interview with Paul Cummings, April 15, 1968, p. 38, Charles G. Shaw Papers, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution.
8. David Bourdon, "Little Master of Audacious Abstraction," Vogue, August 1977, n.p.
9. Ernest Boyd, Manhattan Patterns, exh. cat. (New York: Valentine Gallery, 1934), n.p.