|
Parisians
were hoping that the “Lost Generation” would live up to its name
and either get lost or go back where they came from. The European
art community looked around and saw a battered and imprecise world.
They imagined that if there was to be a new art movement, it would
have to come from America.
They looked across the Atlantic where (on a clear day) they could
see skyscrapers sprouting like mushrooms. Somedays they could even
see cousins in the tall windows – cousins who still owed them money.
America was where plains were fruited and where people drove on
the right side of the road. America, being an artistic adolescent
even had art museums with uncountable acres of bare walls.
Despite the onset of the Great Depression, the beauty (and potential
salvation) of industrialization and modernization gave people hope.
Precisionism became all-American. Monoplane manufacturing, streamlined
trains, shipbuilding, and architecture kept people looking up –
and forward. America's artists saw the same things and got out their
palettes and canvases.
These new artists embraced the machine age with its sharply defined,
geometrical forms and painted them in bold colors with an occasional
shadow or two thrown in. It’s not easy to embrace anything so sharply-defined,
but times were hard and they did what they had to do. Water
towers were celebrated, bridges
were lionized, and even the taken-for-granted grain
elevators had their day in the sun (as if they needed more days
in the sun). It got to the point where people’s dreams were hot-riveted.
The hard-edged style was never fully-embraced by the general public
who remained enamored with the softer lines of Art Deco whose subjects
included animals and humans. This need was satisfied by the softer
and more crowd-pleasing post
office murals.
Edward Hopper painted the geometry of Mexican rooftops and New England
lighthouses and is widely considered to be a Precisionist. Even
Andrew Wyeth (who was never considered a Pecisionist) was a master
at geometry with his weather-beaten barns and Cape Cod saltbox houses.
Other artists paid homage to Precisionism, including Texas’ own
Jerry Bywaters. Bywaters often included oil rigs, sawmills and cotton
gins in his paintings, but never made them subjects.
In this series, TE wishes to showcase photographs that might have
once been considered Precisionism. Some of the subjects are new
and some of them are rusty and dull. Others are the much more familiar
houses and barns of the countryside. But one common trait they share:
they all still catch the sun and they all still cast a shadow.
|
