Precisionism

also: Immaculates · Cubist-Realism

movement c. 1918-1940 United States North America

Precisionism was a modernist movement that emerged in the United States after the First World War, when painters such as Charles Sheeler and Charles Demuth turned Cubism, Purism and Futurism onto the new American landscape of factories, bridges and skyscrapers. Subjects were reduced to essential geometric shapes, detail was stripped away, and planes of light gave machine forms their sleek, crisp focus. At its height in the 1920s and early 1930s the style - also called 'Cubist-Realism', its painters nicknamed the 'Immaculates' - celebrated industrial modernity with a cool reverence that stopped short of social commentary. Ranging from Demuth's near-abstract Figure 5 in Gold to Sheeler's meticulously detailed factory views, Precisionism became America's signature contribution to interwar modernism.

Lead image of the Wikipedia article "Precisionism".
Lead image of the Wikipedia article "Precisionism".Public domain (credit: Charles Demuth) · source

Defining characteristics

  • Hard-edged, sharply defined geometric forms with detail reduced to essentials
  • Smooth, immaculate surfaces with little or no visible brushwork
  • Planes of light and shadow that suggest machine-age sheen and crisp focus
  • Industrial and urban subjects: factories, silos, bridges, city skylines
  • Tightly cropped, flattened compositions with graphic clarity
  • Cool, still, mostly depopulated scenes

Key figures

  • Charles Sheeler (1883-1965) — Painter-photographer whose meticulously detailed factories set the movement's benchmark
  • Charles Demuth (1883-1935) — Painter of poster-like architectural homages that push the style toward abstraction
  • Georgia O'Keeffe (1887-1986) — Applied Precisionist clarity to the modern city and to New Mexico landscape
  • Elsie Driggs (1898-1992) — The movement's only female participant, known for the steel-mill canvas Pittsburgh (1926)
  • Ralston Crawford (1906-1978) — Pushed industrial geometry toward flat abstraction in painting and lithography

Example works

  • Aucassin and Nicolette — Charles Demuth (1921)
  • I Saw the Figure 5 in Gold — Charles Demuth (1928)
  • American Landscape — Charles Sheeler (1930)

Sources

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