By and large, Precisionist works omit humans and any concern for how mechanization or industrialization my affect the lives of workers. Precisionists are formalists, concerned principally with aesthetic values. For depiction of human life in the age of modernization, art turns to social realism and regionalism.
Charles Sheeler, 1883-1965
The artist who had the most canvases in the show was Charles Sheeler, whose career spanned from the 1920s to the 1950s.
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| Church Street El, 1920 |
In this early canvas, Sheeler was interested in the geometry created by flattening an aerial perspective. The 'El' is an elevated railroad, here seen on the right, from on high.
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| Interior, 1926 |
This interior view also flattens the perspective in order to create a large geometric structure, containing four shapes with geometrical patterns. The painterly look of the table is in contrast with all this precisionism.
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| Upper Deck, 1929 |
This painting idealizes industrial forms to bring out their classical geometric shapes. Creamy white, delicate pastels, and perfect light-balance create a pearly heaven of pure forms.
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| Upper Deck, 1929 |
Sheeler based the painting above on this photo that he took.
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| American Landscape, 1930 |
The epitome of mechanization, industrialization, and modernization in Sheeler's day was the Ford Motor Company's huge complex outside Dearborn Michigan. Sheeler was one of several artists who toured and painted the plant. This scene over looks the River rouge toward the factory's massive cement plant. Some elements are hyper-realistic, but the piles of raw materials are soft and undefined. The romance of the scene is in the reflection in the canalized river, and the soft smoke blending into the gentle clouds.
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| Bucks County Barn, 1932 |
Precisionists appreciated barns for their straightforward shapes. The barns' efficient simplicity connected them with industrial structures.
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| City Interior, 1936 |
This painting is a hyper-realistic depiction of a claustrophobic urban industrial setting, with a convincing depiction of deep space in order to show the complexity of life in the city.
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| Kitchen, Williamsburg, 1937 |
Williamsburg is a restored American Colony. In this painting, Sheeler depicts pre-industrial technology. This is a small picture, reminiscent of a Dutch interior. The realism is photographic, with realistic perspective, but he brings out the geometry of the architecture and the furnishings.
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| The Upstairs, 1938 |
By contrast, this interior is cropped, flattened and stripped of details. Doorways into interior spaces had been a popular subject since the beginning of American art, and before that were popular in Dutch art of the Golden Age.
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| Suspended Power, 1939 |
Usually Sheeler presented his machines and structures abstractly, as pure structures, as though they were separate from real life. The tiny figures examining this huge rotor seem threatened by its heavy, downward thrusting shape and giant blades.
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| Rolling Power, 1939 |
This painting is another example of an idealized photograph, more real than reality. You can study just how each element is connected to the others.
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| Conversation—Sky and Earth, 1940 |
Clearly Sheeler was in awe of the power that could be harnessed electricity-generating dams. His composition suggests that electricity is a form of communication between the earth and the universe.
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| Golden Gate, 1955 |
Toward the end of his career, Sheeler used completely flattened shapes and severe cropping to make the image nearly abstract, yet still recognizable.
Charles Demuth, 1883-1935
Born the same year as Charles Sheeler, Charles Demuth had similar aesthetic principles. His career spanned the 1920s and the first half of the 1930s; he died at the age of 52.
Georgia O'Keeffe, 1887-1986
Although the bulk of O'Keeffe's work depicts natural forms, some of her work was included in this group because her style is both hard-edge and smoothly blended.
Gerald Murphy, 1888-1964
Gerald Murphy would be considered a minor artist, but he did two canvases in the 1920s that are very interesting.
George Ault, 1891-1948
After Sheeler, in number of canvases in the show, comes George Ault, whose career spanned the 1920s through 1940s.
Born the same year as Charles Sheeler, Charles Demuth had similar aesthetic principles. His career spanned the 1920s and the first half of the 1930s; he died at the age of 52.
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| From the Garden of the Château, 1921 |
The forms in this painting are drastically cropped, as they were in the view from his studio, in order to remove context and emphasize the geometry in the scene; but Demuth couldn't resist a subtly tinted sky, full of longing. The title is meant as an ironic comment on the contrast between the urban scene and an imagined 18th century French painting from the window of a château.
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| Buildings, 1930-31 |
Demuth liked to used bold, dynamic lines in rays suggesting changing light and the passage of time. These geometrical buildings are treated like eternal forms.
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| Chimney and Water Tower, 1931 |
Demuth continued to work with this dramatic subject.
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| Incense of a New Chruch, 1921 |
In this scene of smoke pouring out of a factory at night, Demuth makes his boldest statement that industry is the new religion. The innovation here is the introduction of swirling forms to contrast with vertical geometry. Unfortunately, the lighting created a glare on this painting.
Georgia O'Keeffe, 1887-1986
Although the bulk of O'Keeffe's work depicts natural forms, some of her work was included in this group because her style is both hard-edge and smoothly blended.
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| City Night, 1926 |
This photo is marred by glare and reflections, but it shows extreme simplification of form and color to convey the looming monumentality of sky-scrapers of New York City, where she lived at the time.
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| Lake George Barns, 1926 |
In the same year as the cityscape above, O'Keeffe applied a similar approach to these humble barns. These barns were at the family home of her husband, Alfred Stieglitz, in Lake George, but O'Keeffe had a special attachment for barns as she spent her formative years on a dairy farm.
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| East River from the 30th Story of the Shelton Hotel, 1928 |
Views of New York with shipping traffic were very popular with Precisionists. O'Keeffe had a gift for extracting pure form without extraneous detail. Instead of flattening the composition, as with the two previous canvases, she conveyed great depth with strong diagonals, sizes decreasing with distance, and subtle gradation of shading from darks in the foreground to cotton-candy pastels in the distance.
Gerald Murphy, 1888-1964
Gerald Murphy would be considered a minor artist, but he did two canvases in the 1920s that are very interesting.
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| Razor, 1924 |
This is a modernist interpretation of the fool-the-eye still life, simplifying the color and flattening the objects into geometric forms. Three essentials for every man's life in the 1920's: a razor, a fountain pen, and wooden matches for lighting pipes.
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| Watch, 1925 |
This remarkable painting is a sort of rhapsody on the mechanism that enabled the measure of time. This is not any particular watch, but an abstract composition inspired by the parts of different watches.
George Ault, 1891-1948
After Sheeler, in number of canvases in the show, comes George Ault, whose career spanned the 1920s through 1940s.
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| The Mill Room, 1923 |
The Mill Room is dark and impersonal, except for red geometrical shapes, which suggest pain or danger. Seen through old-fashioned arched windows, the sky is azure and the light is warm.
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| Sullivan Street, Abstraction, 1924 |
This painting uses linear projection to indicate deep space, but it 'de-contextualizes' the scene by eliminating all detail and creating abstract geometries. The dark colors and bright spots make the scene mysterious and frightening.
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| New Moon, New York, 1945 |
This painting from much later in his career also employs linear perspective, abstract geometries, and an ominous palette.
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| From Brooklyn Heights, c. 1928 |
Perspective is the major interest of this outdoor scene, but instead of a strong linear design, perspective is created by tonality, with the foreground being the darkest and the distance being the lightest. Forms are simplified and details are eliminated.
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| January Full Moon, 1941 |
This is Ault's tribute to the humble barn, using moonlight to reduce its form to near-abstraction.
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| Daylight at Russell's Corners, 1944 |
The snow acted as a natural simplifier of the geometry of this humble scene. Many painters would have left out the wires, and maybe even the poles, to bring out the rustic quality of this scene, but Sheeler wanted to connect it with modern technology.
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| Bright Light at Russell's Corners, 1946 |
The electric light in the center gives the scene a mysterious look, but in reality, it made a once-dark and scary corner much safer.
Elsie Driggs, 1898-1992
The three works shown by Elsie Driggs were all from the 1920s. Like Charles Sheeler, and other artists, she made a study of Ford's River Rouge plant.
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| Blast Furnaces, 1927 |
In this piece, Driggs used dark, heavy, geometric forms to express the threatening aspects of industrialization. Toward the bottom, off-center, are two humble brick columns and the steps of an old building, showing that the old world is being consumed by the new.
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| Queensborough Bridge, 1927 |
By contrast, Driggs used light, linear, up-thrusting shapes, arbitrary rays of color, and overlapping views to express hopefulness and awe in this painting.
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| Aeroplane, 1928 |
Here Driggs makes unique use of lines to express streamlined modernity in the airplane, and a different set of lines to suggest the airplane's passage through space.
Clarence Holbrook Carter, 1904-2000
Clarence Carter was a little known painter of both scenes and abstractions whose career started in the 1930s and continued through the 1970s. He is included here because this painting is such a dramatic and memorable image.
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| War Bride, 1940 |
In this painting, the romance of mechanization becomes a catastrophe for human life and individuality.
Ralston Crawford, 1906-1978
Ralston Crawford continued the aesthetic approach of Charles Sheeler into the following generation.
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| Coal Elevators, 1938 |
There's no sign of coal in this picture; it's hidden in the pristine cylindrical forms.
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| Public Grain Elevator in New Orleans, 1938 |
Crawford kept his colors in solid planes, but he created the illusion of deep space through the use of linear perspective.
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| Overseas Highway, 1939 |
This painting is only a few steps from pure abstraction. A highway projects out over the ocean. The linear perspective, ending in a cloud, suggests infinite depth of space, though the colors remain unmodulated by the distance.
Conclusion
This was an extremely satisfying show because the paintings were orderly in their compositions, clear in their aesthetic values, and relevant to real life without really being challenging. It started March 24 and runs until August 12. There's a ton of material about the show at the de Young's website.
