Charles Goeller was born in Irvington, New Jersey in 1901, the third of five children of a relatively prosperous family of German emigrants.  His father, a skilled iron craftsman, groomed his sons to join the family’s iron and steel ornamental fabrication business. Encouraged by his parents, Goeller took architectural, engineering and related courses at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and Cornell University but soon abandoned that path to pursue his true passion for art. With grudging family support, he studied in Paris from 1923 to 1928, adopting modernist principles and refining an approach rooted in meticulous draftsmanship, linear precision, dramatic lighting and strong, saturated colors.*

    Upon his return, Goeller affiliated with the Daniel Gallery, a New York dealer known for its stable of Precisionist painters including Sheeler, Dickinson, Spencer and Demuth.  In 1930, his work appeared at the Museum of Modern Art in An Exhibition of Work of 46 Painters and Sculptors under 35 Years of Age.  Despite persistent struggles with loneliness, financial reversals, smoking, alcoholism and a painstaking and laborious painting process that severely restricted his artistic output, Goeller still managed to produce a remarkable body of meticulous still lifes, portraits, urban and rural landscapes and an idiosyncratic group of illustrative drawings of which Soda Jerk (Lipstick) is among the most appealing.

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     Soda Jerk (Lipstick) demonstrates the artist’s “keen ability to lampoon through caricature,”** a skill manifest in a number of similar, small-scale (roughly nine-by-twelve) crayon drawings (including, e.g., She Gets Her Way (Couple With Vase) and Man Trimming Tree),*** in which Goeller reveals the wry wit of an astute observer. Rendered with his trademark fastidious clarity, Soda Jerk (Lipstick) captures a pair of food service workers in the quiet, unguarded moments preceding (or perhaps following) the appearance of diners or partygoers: the “soda jerk” studiously polishing the taps as the waitress casually inspects a tumbler for lipstick stains.  At least a half-dozen of such drawings survive, each depicting one or more figures in a vignette of largely unremarkable everyday activity. 

     Plagued by his doubts, frustrations and vices, Goeller died of a brain aneurism in 1955, leaving behind a relatively small body of highly individualistic work which, ironically, commands increasing attention with the passage of time.

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*[Walther, Chris], Charles Goeller: A Wistful Loneliness (exhibition catalogue produced for CW American Modernism), 2023, p. 3.

**Ibid., p. 8. 

***Ibid., plates 27 and 30.