Ralston Crawford's Uncanny Precisionism.
I haven’t seen the painting in twenty years: a 1934 canvas, putatively by Ralston Crawford, with a series of steps ascending to an unmarked column. It is unsigned and not listed in the catalogue of Crawford’s early works.1 It sold at auction in 2005; I’m not personally acquainted with the seller and the buyer is unknown to me. Nonetheless, the painting haunts me. It’s not not a Precisionist painting, but it is definitely eerie.
Ralston Crawford (1906 - 1978) Column on Stairs, 1934
II. Magic Realism.
In 1943, MoMA put on one of those touchstone exhibitions that both clarifies and complicates everything I think I understand about American art: Americans 1943: Realists and Magic-Realists.2 The curation left much mystery as to who were the realists and who were the “magicians”: while there were a few genuine magicalists3 in the from of Paul Cadmus and Peter Blume, these represented a minority. Other painters that evinced the uncanny included contemporary realists Edward Hopper and Andrew Wyeth; traditional realists Thomas Cole and John James Audubon; and Precisionists Louis Lozowick and Charles Sheeler. When you string those names together in a sentence you can distill the spirit that animates them all: a sliver of twilight between a deadpan view of a strange world and a strange view of a deadpan one.
That’s the milieu in which Ralston Crawford was working when he produced Column on the Stairs. You can see the hallmarks of Precisionism: the industrial column, presumably under construction; the elevating quality of stairs, the tidy composition and clean lines. But taken in the context of the moment, it’s hard to ignore the eeriness of it. Stairs imply people, but we almost never see any in Crawford’s work.4 In this case, they lead up to an unadorned cylinder: if the column is monumental, what does it memorialize? Marcel Duchamp quipped that “the only works of art America has given are her plumbing and her bridges”5—and in other works by Crawford, this column might support one of those bridges. But not here.
What is a column that supports nothing?
Thomas Cole, The Course of Empire — Desolation (detail), 1836, New-York Historic Society.
III. Desolation.
Ralston Crawford’s career didn’t end with his Precisionist hits; its long arc reveals something of a big-picture classicist at work. He would continue to be fascinated by industry—still a lot of things and very few people in his canvases—but he didn’t offer a relentless optimism for the nuclear age.
This was true in some of his most famous Precisionist canvases. Crawford was commissioned by an industrialist to depict the new lighting system at an aircraft plan in 1944. “[The industrialist] rejected the composition, noting that it lacked the rushing perspective he was familiar with in Crawford’s work.”6 (Eventually Crawford produced a series of works that the industrialist found sufficiently exciting—he donated Lights in an Aircraft Plant to the National Gallery, and the work adorns the cover of the Whitney’s retrospective catalogue on the artist. )
The rush toward the future could be exciting—the industrialist was probably thinking of Crawford’s Overseas Highway of 1940 when he hired the painter—but it could also be daunting. This became all the more explicit in the years after the war. Visiting a bombed-out Cologne in 1951, Crawford produced a series of photos, prints, and drawings that echoed the words of the architect tasked with rebuilding the city: “World’s greatest heap of rubble.”7 For the next three decades, he turned again and again to junk yards and gravestones—not to the exclusion of imagery of new building, but in harmony with it. Not unlike the sprawling Course of Empire series Thomas Cole had executed a century prior, Crawford’s post-war work gives us the whole cycle of life, with conception and creation joining decay and death.
Uncanny, but at the same time, undeniably real.
I’m trying to keep it light during anxious times; this is the best I can do. These columns are drafted sometimes long in advance, but I say with confidence that our time of anxiety is nowhere near its end. Art, art history, and collecting can be a refuge; they can also be a therapeutic process for addressing trauma, anxiety, and despair. I don’t omit the darkness of the news from these newsletters because I’m unaware or unsympathetic, but because the work we do here is important to our ability to cope with everything out there. Thanks for reading, and hang in there.
Jonathan
Jonathan@JonathanMillerSpies.com
Richard B. Freeman, Ralston Crawford, 1953. I say “putatively” not because I dispute the painting’s attribution, but because I can’t independently verify it. If you own this picture, I’d love to come see it.
I’ve mentioned Americans 1943 before, and if you haven’t reviewed the checklist, it’s worth a look.
I’m enjoying the search for the best term, but so far I like “Magicalists.”
On canvas, there are two notable canvases of the 1940s featuring dockworkers loading and unloading the cargo—but there are plenty of drawings and photographs that feature the human form.
In “The Richard Mutt Case,” The Blind Man, 1917.
Jerry N. Smith, Ralston Crawford: Air and Space and War, 2021, p. 122.
In the 75-minute Operation Millennium, one thousand Allied bombers—that’s the number of bombers, not the number of bombs—destroyed most of the city. I’m as opposed to Nazis as anyone, but the devastation of war is no less horrific for whatever metric of justice might be applied.