SHEELER is one of the most accomplished painters the U.S. has ever known, though his machine-smooth, machine-cold pictures are not the sort to move many people. A reticent, wry, steel-grey and bespectacled craftsman of 71, Sheeler waited long and patiently for the recognition he has today. Last fall Frederick Wight, director of U.C.L.A.'s Art Galleries, organized a retrospective exhibition of Sheeler's art; this week the show was in its fifth week at the De Young Memorial Museum in San Francisco, and during 1955 it will be seen at San Diego, Fort Worth, Philadelphia and Utica, N.Y.

Sheeler's abstract yet convincing Family Group (above] bears out a realization that marked his emergence as a major artist: "I had come to feel that a picture could have incorporated in it the structural design implied in abstraction and be presented in a wholly realistic manner." His Rolling Power (below) employs a typically photographic device--the closeup--but is richer in tones and more tightly meshed in design than any photograph.

His subject is controlled violence; the control is what he makes count. The Artist Looks at Nature (opposite) is subtler, and possibly Sheeler's most personal pic ture. In it he sits alone, turned from the viewer--a pale, spindly fellow in a lyre-back chair. As with most longtime painters, his neck cranes from hunched shoulders. Having the blinkered oblivion necessary to painstaking art, he works at a nighttime interior in the sunlit open air.

But the landscape before him is the sort he prefers: smooth-shaven, without litter, walled, serene, and mastered by man's works. The whole has a two-edged humor; it is self-deprecatory and yet dignified.

Sheeler came roundabout to the direct style that is his specialty. He learned showy technique in Philadelphia under a flamboyant academician named William Merritt Chase before teaching himself self-effacing craftsmanship. In his 205 Sheeler toured Europe, fell in love with the more austere Renaissance painters--especially Piero della Francesca, who brought home to him the rigors of composition. He also admired modern French art, which helped free his mind from too great dependence on the eye. For most of his career, he made his living as a photographer, and gained from that trade a.

fruitful reverence for objects, together with the belief that "light is the great designer."

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