(In addition to his meticulously detailed paintings like River Rouge Plant and American Landscape, Sheeler, like his friend Paul Strand, also created sharply focused photographs of factories and public buildings. The Figure 5 in Gold (1928) by Charles Demuth, an homage to William Carlos Williams' imagist poem about a fire truck is abstract and stylized, while the paintings of Charles Sheeler sometimes verge on a form of photorealism. Varying degrees of abstraction are found in Precisionist works. Possible exceptions to this statement are some of the darker, more claustrophobic city paintings of Louis Lozowick and the comic anti-capitalist satires of Preston Dickinson. To the contrary, Driggs always claimed that she intended an ironic beauty in the image and referred to it as 'my El Greco.' Upon seeing the painting, Charles Daniel dubbed her 'one of the new classicists.' More often than not, Precisionism implicitly celebrated man-made dynamism and new technologies. A painting of black and gray steel-mill smokestacks, thick piping, and crisscrossing wires, with only clouds of smoke to relieve the severity of the image, viewers have been tempted to see this dark painting as a statement of environmental concern. Elsie Driggs' Pittsburgh (1926) illustrates this gap in perception. Like Pop Art, Precisionism has on occasion been interpreted as a criticism of the de-natured society it portrays, though its artists did not often feel comfortable with this reading of their work. There is a degree of reverence for the industrial age in the movement, but social commentary was not fundamental to the style. Precisionist artists embraced their American identity and some were reluctant to acknowledge European artistic influences. While influenced by European modernist artistic movements like Cubism, Purism, and Futurism, Precisionism focused on the themes of industrialization and modernization in the American landscape, using precise, sharply defined geometrical forms. The stiffness of both art-historical labels suggests the difficulties contemporary critics had in attempting to characterize these artists.Īn American movement Charles Demuth, I Saw the Figure 5 in Gold, 1928, Metropolitan Museum of Art Painters working in this style were also known as the 'Immaculates', which was the more commonly used term at the time. Barr although according to Amy Dempsey the term 'Precisionism' was coined by Charles Sheeler. At the height of its popularity during the 1920s and early 1930s, Precisionism celebrated the new American landscape of skyscrapers, bridges, and factories in a form that has also been called 'Cubist-Realism.' The term 'Precisionism' was first coined in the mid-1920s, possibly by Museum of Modern Art director Alfred H.

Influenced by Cubism, Purism, and Futurism, Precisionist artists reduced subjects to their essential geometric shapes, eliminated detail, and often used planes of light to create a sense of crisp focus and suggest the sleekness and sheen of machine forms. Precisionism was a modernist art movement that emerged in the United States after World War I. Charles Demuth, Aucassin and Nicolette, oil on canvas, 1921 For the racehorse, see Precisionist (horse).

Cubo futurism paintings