Precisionism

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Grain elevators, factory chimneys, water tanks and skyscrapers appear in American painting of the 1920s and 1930s stripped of smoke and people, reduced to clean geometric volumes. The Precisionists never formed a group but shared a cool, hard-edged style that owed something to Cubism's simplified planes and much to photography's sharp focus.

Charles Sheeler, who photographed Ford's River Rouge plant in 1927, turned those images into immaculate paintings such as American Landscape (1930). Charles Demuth gave a grain elevator in his home town of Lancaster, Pennsylvania, the monumental title My Egypt (1927), and in I Saw the Figure 5 in Gold (1928) he built a portrait of the poet William Carlos Williams from lettering and diagonal rays. Georgia O'Keeffe painted Manhattan towers at night, and Ralston Crawford followed a highway bridge into the distance in Overseas Highway (1939). Critics still debate whether Precisionism celebrates industry or questions it.