Summary of Precisionism
Images of factories, skyscrapers, bridges, road and rail networks, steel works, and rural scenes featuring grain elevators and depots, were the order of the day for the Precisionists. Though it never published a manifesto, or even defined itself as a coordinated "movement", this loose-knit group of American modernists were united in their vision for a truly home-grown American art. Showing a collective preference for the simplified geometric forms associated with Cubism, Futurism and Orphism, and borrowing from the sharp focus and tight cropping techniques being pioneered by America's leading art photographers, the Precisionists marked the dawning of America's brave new industrial and scientific age through a language of coolly detached semi-abstraction.
Key Ideas & Accomplishments
- Precisionists represented their industrial American landscapes with a modern dynamism. Through their willingness to adopt strong contrast in color as a means of highlighting volumes and planes (in a way that the likes of Picasso and Braque did not), artists were able to present to the world a confident and optimistic vision of the dawning of this new era in American art and society.
- Precisionism has been describes a "cool art" in the sense that it established an objective distance between the work of art and the viewer. Precisionist artists, who passed over scenes of individual human activity, were connected through a "cool" level of detachment whereby the artist in question rendered their man-made environments through a combination of smooth brushwork and geometric precision. For these artists, images of modern America had no need for gratuitous embellishments.
- Analysts of a more pessimistic persuasion, have picked up on the absence of human figures in Precisionist works and interpreted this as a critique of the dehumanizing effects of the new age. But Precisionism was seen much more widely as a celebration of America's industrial and scientific prowess. Precisionism was not, then, a movement driven by social concerns but one that prioritized over everything else a tight rapport between a modern content and a modern style. In this respect, one can say that it pre-empted the global dominance of Abstract Expressionism.
- Precisionists tended to focus on urban subjects. But figures such as George Ault, Sanford Ross, and indeed Sheeler, applied the same approach to pastoral subjects, painting starkly geometric barns, grain elevators, cottages, country roads, and farmhouses. Subjects were chosen for the clean geometry and line of their formal qualities. On entering a Shaker meeting house, for instance, Sheeler enthused "No embellishment meets the eye" and reasoned that "Beauty of line and proportion through excellence of craftsmanship [would] make the absence of ornament in no way an omission".
- Although artists such as Morton Schamberg gravitated towards technological imagery, these objects would often be removed from their industrial setting and reduced to their raw components. Thus, the objects were transformed into an amorphous images that very often bordered on pure abstraction. Though historians have made comparisons between these pieces and those by the likes of Marcel Duchamp and Francis Picabia, Precisionist works tended to be more sincere, or less playful and ironic, that those of their European elders.
Overview of Precisionism
"Every age manifests itself by some external evidence", declared painter and photographer Charles Sheeler. "In a period such as ours", he continued, "when only a comparatively few individuals seem to be given to religion, some form other than the Gothic cathedral must be found", and it is the American factory that will be "our substitute for religious expression".
