City Arabesque (Primary Title)
Berenice Abbott, American, 1898–1991 (Artist)
Over his long and fruitful career, Ralston Crawford developed a Precisionist idiom in paintings, drawings, prints, and photographs. Trained at Otis Art Institute in Los Angeles and the Barnes Foundation and the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts in Philadelphia, Crawford worked briefly for Walt Disney Productions in 1927. 2009.352 and 2009.353 are studies for the oil painting Construction #5 (2008.41) which was created for Wolfson Construction Company, one of the era’s largest general contracting firms. The firm commissioned ten New York artists to interpret its twenty-story building project that was then rising at 100 Church Street in Lower Manhattan. According to the artist’s son Neelon Crawford, he and his father visited the site on various occasions, “climbing to the highest point possible during the erection of the steel structure.”
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