PRECISIONISM

smooth, precise technique used by several American painters in representational canvases, executed primarily during the 1920s, depicting sharply defined forms. While Precisionism can be seen as a tendency present in American art since the colonial period, the 20th-century Precisionist painters' style had its origins in Cubism, Futurism, and Orphism (qq.v.). Unlike the artists affiliated with the latter movements, the Precisionists did not issue manifestos, and they were not a school or movement with a formal program; during the 1920s, however, many of them exhibited their works together, particularly at the Daniel Gallery in New York City. Among the artists associated with Precisionism were Charles Demuth, Charles Sheeler, Ralston Crawford, Preston Dickinson, Niles Spencer, and Georgia O'Keeffe. The favourite subject matter of these artists was the skyline, either urban or rural, Manhattan, the industrial landscape of factories and smokestacks, buildings and machinery, and the country landscape with its grain elevators and barns or empty desert and sky. Because the Precisionists used these motifs primarily to create formal designs, there is a certain amount of abstraction in their works. Precisionism is thus not an art of social criticism. When the artist painted the city street, factory, or farm landscape, he was not making a comment on the environment depicted (though occasionally a faintly humorous approach is suggested by a witty title, such as Charles Demuth's "Modern Conveniences" [1921; Columbus Gallery of Fine Arts, Ohio], a painting that portrays a factory rooftop reached by a somewhat unstable ladderlike stairway); the scenes are always devoid of people or signs of human activity. Precisionism is a "cool" art, which keeps the viewer at a distance; the artist's attitude seems to be one of complete detachment, which he achieves largely by smoothing out his brushstrokes, erasing, as it were, his personal handwriting. The painting's light is idealized-brilliant and sharply clear-as in Charles Sheeler's "Upper Deck" (1929; Fogg Art Museum, Harvard University). The forms chosen are frequently geometric, either inherently, as in the cylinders of "Upper Deck" and the cylindrically shaped grain elevators of Demuth's "My Egypt" (1927; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York City), or because the artist exaggerates these qualities through Cubist techniques. The Precisionists' style greatly influenced the American Magic Realists and the Pop artists; (see Pop art): Demuth's painting "I Saw the Figure 5 in Gold" (1928; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City) was particularly influential, in both technique and imagery, on the works of Jasper Johns and Robert Indiana.