Precisionism

( 1915-1945 )

   The radical innovations of the new style, Cubism, confused and upset the public and most critics, but the avant-garde saw in them the future of art. It became clear to the art world that something of great significance was happening. Some artists put these innovations into the service of a less radical art, as can be seen in the cubist-inspired responses of American Precisionists on the other side of Atlantic. The Precisionists endeavored to create a representational system that would be in tune with their time.

   Charles Sheeler, Charles Demuth and Georgia O'Keeffe, as the most typical representatives, were inspired by the development of Cubism in Europe. Architecture, in particular the architecture of industrial buildings was their favorite subject. In their pictures people and nature were usually absent. The visual language that Precisionists developed combined realism and geometric schematization. Demuth regarded his paintings as abstractions produced from observed reality. Some art historians have used the term "cubo-realism" to describe his work.

   Building upon the experiments of European art avant-gardes, these geometrical landscape painters reduced volumes to colored planes, and outlines to ridges. Their canvases combined effects of flatness with effects of depth and perspective.

   Precisionism was an important development in American Modernism and in some respects, Precisionists works are harbingers of the Pop Art aesthetic. Dealing as it did with pure form more than with narrative or subject matter, Precisionism gradually evolved towards Abstraction, and faded away as an important influence.