George Ault, Haunted Precisionist.
The ruins of Europe became the painter's last muse.
George Ault was haunted. A family fortune had been lost; his mother died in an asylum, and his three brothers took their own lives. Ault was a beloved and renowned leader of the interwar Precisionist style—clean-lines and industrial subjects, a putatively upbeat school that took the future to be brighter than the past. World War II tainted that promising vision of industrial progress—in spite of winning the war and the generation of American prosperity that lay ahead, Ault’s outlook grew only bleaker after the war. His vision was going, and attempts to self-medicate with alcohol grew more dire and less effective. In the last days of 1948, he set off for a walk in the stormy woods near his studio in Woodstock, New York—the last time anyone saw him alive.
His body was found in early 1949 full of the water of the creek in which it floated. The coroner’s judgment was that it was a suicide; his widow argued that he had been in failing health and had not intended to die. But if the canvases he produced in the last five years of his life give us any insight into his state of mind, it’s clear that his mind was filled with lachrymose memories of a bygone Europe.
II. Ruins.
George Copeland Ault was born in Cleveland in 1891, but moved to England with his family shortly thereafter. George’s father Charles—himself an Impressionist painter, exhibiting at the Salon of Paris and sitting for William Merritt Chase—promoted his son’s interest in art by taking him on trips to London and Paris to see works by Old Masters. George went to University College School in London, the Slade School, and St. John’s Wood School of Art, training as an impressionist. The family summered in France during their time in England, returning to America in 1911, where the young Ault would begin his career in New York.
“He talked to me of those boyhood summers in Brittany, Normandy and Piccardy, and the frequent visits to Paris,” his wife later recalled.
Summer after summer the Ault family had lived with the same French family, the Hamarils, at Cap Gris Nez, pas de Calais. Here as a boy, living the French farm life on a farm that had belonged to the same family for four hundred years, he had taken interest in the indigenous system of crop rotation, diversification and soil renewal. It was a good life, achieving for the French family a remarkable self-sufficiency, and it impressed him indelibly. As a boy he had painted the French landscape with the red tile housetops, the coastal cliffs, the channel. He still kept a piece of Quimper, a little cream pitcher from that time, that place. That French farm table.1
Ault’s work won easy admirers for its polished simplicity. He jettisoned the broken-stroke of his father’s Impressionism for sharp edges and clean planes of color, and poured gallons of black into moody deserted nightscapes. Not unlike Edward Hopper, he painted a sense of desolation, owning the nighttime as much as Hopper owned the late afternoon.
In 1937, Ault and his wife Louise moved to Woodstock—already home to a thriving community of artists, all who sought a quiet respite from the city life. In 1943, Ault painted Black Night: Russell’s Corners, a Precisionist painting of Woodstock barns engulfed in inky blackness. The property just beyond these barns was owned by Emma Bellows, whose husband, painter George Bellows, bought it from the eponymous Cyrus Russell just before Bellows’ death in 1924. Such was the state of Woodstock in the 1940s: the rustic town offered an escape from municipal water and even electricity on some homesteads, but one couldn’t peer into blackest night without espying some displaced fragment of the New York art world.
The move to Woodstock satisfied Ault’s need for order, but also sharpened his ennui. Ault’s paintings from this period evince the height of Precisionist clarity, but also, increasingly, a sense of personal despair. “In his work of the 1940s I believed he had gone beyond himself,” Louise recalled. Ault’s sense of the uncanny drew on the immense tragedy of his personal life, and the war in Europe compounded this despair. Louise recalled, “As Hitler’s armies spread out in victorious marches, he scanned the headlines of The New York Times, his hands trembling from the agitation they caused him, then put the newspaper aside for calm perusal in the evening and sat down at the easel to paint.” Curator Alexander Nemerov observed that Ault’s “agitation” often found painterly expression in “wartime depictions of nighttime stillness in America,” a stillness charged by awareness of the deafening carnage in Europe.2
“The day France fell,” Louise recalled,
“I knew he would not paint . . . there was little to say, the thought—Paris in the hands of Germans!—could not be uttered . . . Next day, a serene sunny day, he worked silently, but thinking, I could be certain of Paris. Suddenly, he jumped away from his easel and went out the back door. A moment later through the window I saw him sitting on the porch steps, face buried in his hands; I found him sobbing.3
III. A Complete Sense of Unreality.
No Precisionist subject could absorb Ault’s sadness. When he finally returned to the easel, he prepared a surreal scene: a shipwreck; a natural stone arch; a slouching nude, sitting alone on a windswept beach. On one level, this painting made explicit reference to Ault’s childhood summers on the French side of the English Channel. At the same time, these memories were brought jarringly to the present by the German occupation Ault’s experience of the German invasion must have had the added element of invading his own childhood, overrunning a countryside he associated only with the innocence of his youth.
Nemerov observed:
“Memories, of 1944, may have anticipated or followed the Allied invasion of France on June 6 of that year. Either way, it evokes the look of a wartime French beach. Coincidentally or not, the wrecked boat and leaning posts call to mind the carnage and anti-landing obstacles down the coast from Calais at Normandy, where the Allied invasion took place. Although the sky is bright, the scene is desolate and lonely, overhung by feathery clouds of aggressive shapes such as arrowheads and cockscombs. Louise noted the paintings ‘agitation of cloud movement that seemed to betray his nervous uneasiness concerning the outcome of the war.’ The black pool beneath the seated figure, in which her reflection barely appears, no less than her featureless face, suggests the limpid blankness of the windswept beach. The eroded rocks contort to Dali-like shapes, an apt sign for the strangeness of the times: ‘I have a complete sense of unreality, especially after reading in the newspapers what is going on in the world,’ Ault told Louise. ‘It’s an unbelievable world.’4
“Think of it,” Louise recalled her husband observing. “‘Along that beautiful coast where I used to walk!’”5
The ruins are personal in addition to global. Ault’s past—his entire family, its places and geographies—had been obliterated by madness of the smallest and largest scales, and now George Ault drifted away from time and location—his sense of unreality perfected.
And so he set out one stormy night to walk the strange terrain.
If you are having thoughts of suicide, call or text 988 to reach the 988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline or go to SpeakingOfSuicide.com/resources for a list of additional resources.
Thanks for reading. We’ll turn to sunnier subjects next week—join us for more Precisionist ruins in seven short days.
Jonathan
Jonathan@jonathanmillerspies.com
Louise Ault, Artist in Woodstock: George Ault: The Independent Years, 1978, p. 96.
As quoted by Alexander Nemerov, To Make a World: George Ault and 1940s America, p. 27.
Ibid., p. 27.
Ibid., p. 30.
Louise Ault, Artist in Woodstock: George Ault: The Independent Years, 1978, p. 95.