Collection: Precisionism

Precisionism, also called Cubist Realism, is the American painting tendency that ran from roughly 1915 to 1940 and took the industrial landscape as its principal subject. Factories, grain elevators, suspension bridges, water towers, refineries, and skyscrapers were rendered with sharp edge clarity, simplified geometric volumes, and a near absence of human figures. The painters combined the geometric vocabulary of Cubism, Purism, and Futurism with a distinctly American attention to industrial form. Critics of the period sometimes called the group the Immaculates.

The principal figures were Charles Sheeler (1883–1965), Charles Demuth (1883–1935), Georgia O'Keeffe (1887–1986) in her urban work of the late 1920s, Joseph Stella (1877–1946), Niles Spencer (1893–1952), Ralston Crawford (1906–1978), Elsie Driggs (1898–1992), George Ault, Louis Lozowick, and Stefan Hirsch. Sheeler's photographs and paintings of the Ford River Rouge plant, commissioned in 1927, set the canonical example, including American Landscape (1930) and Classic Landscape (1931). Demuth's My Egypt (1927), depicting a Pennsylvania grain elevator, became the period's emblematic monumentalisation of American industry, paired with his poster portrait The Figure 5 in Gold (1928). Stella's Brooklyn Bridge (1919–20) had earlier prefigured the programme.