NILES SPENCER 1893-1952
The Watch Factory, 1950
Oil on canvas, 28 X 42" (71.12 x 106.68 cm.)
Signed, lower left
Museum purchase, 950-0-113

Niles Spencer received his formal training at the Rhode Island School of Design and in summer classes with Charles Woodbury in Ogunquit, Maine. Later he studied briefly with Kenneth Hayes Miller at the Art Students League, and with Robert Henri and George Bellows at the Ferrer School. However, the deciding influence on Spencer was a 1921 trip to Europe, where he was exposed to the work of Paul G6zanne, and the Cubism of Pablo Picasso, Georges Braque, and Juan Gris, which provided the basic vocabulary on which Spencer's uninhabited industrial landscapes are based. Primary among his American influences is Charles Sheeler, whose use of an exacting, geometric interpretation, also inspired by Cubism, is apparent even in Spencer's early work. City Walls (1921, Museum of Modern Art, NY), a pivotal work in his career, shows an assimilation of Cubist principles. The typical simplification of form, flattened perspective, muted tonalities, and urban subject in City Walls were a prelude for Spencer, who would rework and explore these same elements in his art for the next thirty years. Captured with stark and elegant beauty, the reductive urban compositions of buildings, factories, and smokestacks became his signature. Along with Spencer, Charles Sheeler, Charles Demuth, and Preston Dickinson utilized similar elements in the formulation of a Precisionist style.
The Watch Factory, an important late work produced at the peak of Spencer's artistic maturity, is dominated by disciplined organization and an integrated compositional arrangement illustrating the artist's idiomatic approach: austere, controlled, intellectualized, and remote. The abstracted sense of space in this work presents one of his least representational subjects and was singled out by artist-critic Fairfield Porter in a review of the 1952 Downtown Gallery exhibition.1 Spencer's late works are contrived abstractions of architectural space, relying less on literal reality. Articulating the philosophy behind his work, he stated in 1941 that "the deeper meanings of nature can only be captured in painting through disciplined form and design. The visual recognizability is actually irrelevant. It may be there or not."
Deliberate in his working method, using studies and preparatory drawings to work out tonal relationships and formal arrangements of delicately balanced compositions, Spencer produced at least two works related to The Watch Factory: Factory, Sag Harbor (c. 1950, The Newark Museum) and The Watch Factory No. 2 (c. 1950, The Regis Collection, Minneapolis). The subject of these works is a factory in Sag Harbor, Long Island, where Spencer purchased property and spent time beginning in 1948. Titles and dates in his work are often subject to dispute, with sequences and chronologies uncertain. Though The Watch Factory No. 2 is titled as the second version, it would appear to be an earlier work. Subtle variations between the two versions are perceptible, the changes providing clarity, depth, and definition of spatial ambiguity in the larger finished painting. The tonal modulation in The Watch Factory is more subdued, and the tightened spatial configuration produces a more resolved composition. The artist has toned and lightened some areas to bring forth details and make other areas recede, as well as altering shadows, alignment of angles, and placement of windows.
Highly regarded by both colleagues and critics, Spencer's classical industrial landscapes, understated and remote, combined with his personal reticence, did not further his popular reputation or make his work more accessible to the public. He attempted occasional portraits, but apart from some notable still lifes, modernistic views of the landscape were his primary and most successful expressive vehicle. Unconcerned about artistic convention, the quiet contemplative mood of Spencer's work cannot be separated from the spirit in which it was created.

VALERIE ANN LEEDS