Preston’s Precisionism

Preston Dickinson - Factory - c. 1920 - Oil on canvas - Height: 75.88 cm (29.88 in.), Width: 64.14 cm (25.25 in.) Columbus Museum of Art, Columbus, OH (click photo for larger image)American artist Preston Dickinson (1891-1930) was among those modern artists known as Precisionists. Dickinson grew up in New York, where he worked as an office boy in a marine architect’s firm. One of the partners of the company was so impressed by the young boy’s sketches that he offered to pay for his tuition at the Art Students League. Dickinson studied there for four years, then traveled to France, where he sketched at the Louvre and exhibited at the Salons. On his return to New York, he painted images of Manhattan and the Harlem River while selling socks door-to-door to support himself. He moved to Spain in 1930 but died a few months later from pneumonia, at the age of forty-one.

Precisionism is a smooth, sharply defined painting style used by several American artists in representational canvases executed primarily during the 1920s. While Precisionism can be seen as a tendency present in American art since the colonial period, the style of 20th-century Precisionist painters had its origins in Cubism, Futurism and Orphism. Unlike the artists affiliated with the latter movements, the Precisionists did not issue manifestos. They were not a school or movement with a formal program. During the 1920s, however, many of them exhibited their works together, particularly at the Daniel Gallery in New York City.

Jack Tworkov: Broad Strokes

Jack Tworkov - West 23rd - 1963 - Oil on canvas - 60 in. x 6 ft. 8 in. - Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) - New York, NY (click photo for larger image)Jack Tworkov (1900-1982) was a Polish-born American painter. An exponent of Abstract Expressionism, Tworkov was a founding member of the New York School, whose style was characterized by gestural brushwork.

Tworkov immigrated to the United States in 1913. After receiving a degree in creative writing from Columbia University (1923), he returned to his earlier interest in painting. While Tworkov’s early paintings reflect a profound admiration for the work of Paul Cézanne. While working for the WPA federal arts project in 1935, however, he met the painter Willem de Kooning. (Cézanne and de Kooning are both discussed elsewhere on What About Art?)

Tworkov subsequently abandoned his figurative style. After World War II he joined de Kooning and other artists, who together evolved Abstract Expressionism. By 1955 Tworkov revealed his mature style in works that are built up of countless diagonal strokes of paint, creating shimmering atmospheric fields of color. Later he replaced the multitude of flickering lines with broad strokes, such as seen in the work featured here.

From 1963 to 1969, Tworkov was chairman of the department of art at Yale University. Many of his writings about art were published posthumously in The Extreme of the Middle (2009), edited by Mira Schor.

Amédée Ozenfant: Purism

Amédée Ozenfant, 1921, Nature morte au verre de vin rouge (Still Life with Glass of Red Wine), oil on canvas, 50.6 x 61.2 cm, Kunstmuseum Basel (click photo for larger image)French artist Amédée Ozenfant (1886-1966) was once associated with the Cubism movement, but found himself in disagreement with the direction of the movement as time moved forward. 

Purism, referring to the arts, was a movement that took place between 1918 and 1925, and was led by Ozenfant and Le Corbusier (Charles-Édouard Jeanneret) (1887-1965). It was a variation of Cubism, where objects were represented as elementary forms devoid of detail. The main concepts were presented in a book they wrote, Après le Cubisme (After Cubism), published in 1918.

Purism was an attempt to restore regularity in a war-torn France during hte post World War I era. Unlike what they saw as the “decorative fragmentation” of objects in Cubism, Purism proposed a style of painting where elements were simple and robust form, which also embraced technology and the machine.

Christian Schad: The Classical Collides with Symbolism

Christian Schad - Agosta, the Pigeon-Chested Man, and Rasha, the Black Dove - 1929 - Oil on canvas - 1200 x 800 mm - Tate Museum - London (click photo for larger image)

German artist Christian Schad (1894-1982) was associated with both the Dada and the New Objectivity movements. Considered as a group, Schad's portraits form an extraordinary record of life in Vienna and Berlin in the years following World War I. The work featured here is a large portrait-orientated oil painting of two funfair performers. It was created in 1929, in Berlin, where Schad lived from 1927 to 1943. It is executed on a plain-weave linen canvas with the paint applied consistently all over. Schad met the subjects in north Berlin, where they appeared together using the bird-related names referenced in the work’s title. As part of their performance, Agosta displayed his upside-down ribcage – a deformity with which he was born – while Rasha, who was from Madagascar, appeared with a large snake wrapped around her. In a 1977 text, Schad claimed that the models were “simple, obliging and, like all performers, dependable and punctual. They told me much about their lives that was much more interesting than what I would have been told at a five o’clock tea”. 

André Masson: Exquisite Forms

André Masson - Ibdès de Aragon - 1935 - Oil on canvas - 743 x 1660 x 54 mm - Tate Gallery, London (click photo for larger image)André Masson (1896-1987) was a French painter, sculptor, illustrator, designer and writer. He began the study of art at age eleven.

Masson initially experimented with Cubism but later became more heavily involved with Surrealism. He embraced the idea of automatic drawing, which was a form of spontaneous composition intended to express impulses and images arising directly from the unconscious.  Eventually, however, he found that practice too restrictive. “A natural draftsman, he used sinuous, expressive lines to delineate biomorphic forms that border on the totally abstract. 

Masson made a series of paintings of Spanish landscapes from 1934 to 1936, when he was living in Catalonia, including the one featured here, of Ibdes, a village in Aragon.