Construction (Primary Title)
Ralston Crawford, American, 1906 - 1978 (Artist)
The term precisionism typically designates American paintings and works on paper produced between the two World Wars using a linear aesthetic, pronounced contours, and localized colors to depict architectural, infrastructural, mechanical, and often urban imagery. The VMFA’s photograph (2009.352) and drawing (2009.353)—studies for a painting also in the VMFA’s collection (2008.41) —demonstrate the staying power of those principles well into the Cold War years. It was common for the artist to work directly from works on paper of varying media made on-site, as these were. For all his abstraction, Crawford enlists the building’s parameters as a framing device and its beams as a compositionally stabilizing grid.
Inscribed in ink lower right: July 3, '58. Inscribed in graphite on verso lower left: RCE D-807 NC.
Gift of Neelon Crawford
© artist or artist’s estate
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