Although Ralston Crawford was considerably younger than many of the key figures associated with Precisionism, he has long been considered one of the most talented practitioners of the style. [1] Precisionism’s principles were codified in the 1927 Machine Age Exposition, which displayed works of modern architecture, engineering, industrial design and fine art as evidence of American technological and cultural accomplishment; it was one of the two major strands of American art (the other being Regionalism) through World War II. At the time of the show, Crawford was twenty-one years old, had just completed a tour of duty as a seaman on a commercial steamer, and was enrolled at Otis Art Institute in Los Angeles. By the fall of that year, he had transferred to the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, which had become a rather conservative institution, steeped in European modernism. Crawford’s earliest work was Cézannesque in paint handling and conventional in subject matter. It showed little of the artist he would become.

In 1931, Crawford moved to New York, where Precisionist works were prominently displayed at the inaugural exhibition of the Whitney Museum and at its first annual the following year. He soon began trying his hand at such Machine Age subjects as smokestacks, coal elevators, and foundries, rendering them with smooth brushwork, simplified shapes, strong color, and clear silhouettes in a manner that foreshadowed his signature style. He exhibited occasionally in those years and attracted some positive critical attention: Edward Alden Jewell, writing for the New York Times, said he painted with “considerable vigor.” [2] In the spring of 1935, to reduce expenses and out of concern for his wife’s health, he moved back to the Philadelphia area and—as Charles Sheeler had nearly twenty years earlier in nearby Bucks County (see, e.g., Bucks County Barn, 1918; Columbus Museum of Art)—began painting barns.

Despite their age and old-fashioned construction, barns were seen by Precisionist painters as proto-modernist. As social critic Lewis Mumford had written a decade earlier: “the modern factory [and] the old New England mill, the modern grain elevator [and] the Pennsylvania barn, the steamship [and] the clipper” share qualities of “precision, economy, finish, [and] geometric perfection.” [3] The barns of Chester County provided Crawford with an intriguing vehicle through which to develop his mature voice.

Barn with Red Gable was one of at least two barn paintings included in Crawford’s December 1937 solo show at Philadelphia’s Boyer Galleries. The artist used a canvas size—36 x 30 inches—and a compositional formula that he would turn to repeatedly. He depicted the building as a Cubist-inflected pile-up of boxy shapes, which he set in the middle ground of an ordinary landscape and silhouetted against a blue sky. The landscape is portrayed naturalistically, though it is deliberately bland and open—there are no trees, plants, animals, or people—so that the geometries of the barn dominate the composition. Crawford’s paint handling is smooth and uninflected. His color scheme is likewise austere: he painted the barn in black, white, and the kind of metallic gray more characteristic of an industrial building than an old barn, a somber palette animated by a single coloristic detail. Crawford painted the roof of a small gable of the central building a deep, nail polish red, and so transformed what might otherwise seem a compositional exercise into a design of visual delight.

Although Crawford occasionally made watercolors or ink drawings of the Chester County barns (see, for example, the watercolor Exton Barn No. 3, 1936, Museum of Modern Art), he typically used pencil to make studies at the site in preparation for oils done in his studio. A drawing dated 1937 (Des Moines Art Center Permanent Collections) and labeled “Pennsylvania Barn” appears to represent the same barn that is depicted in Barn with Red Gable, though shown from a slightly different point of view. In it, he drew a blocky structure with a small gable and attached shed set squarely in a bare landscape. There are a few color notes, though nothing as witty as the red gable. Back in the studio, still using pencil, he adjusted the proportions of some of the structures and used black ink to sharpen the roof’s profile and reinforce other outlines so that a genial little rural landscape became a study in geometry. Striving to master the style and vocabulary of Precisionism, Crawford sought to reveal the underlying abstract structure of his barns, the ideal beneath the incidental.

In January 1938 Crawford began a term as artist-in-residence at the Research Studio in Maitland, Florida. Unsurprisingly, there were few old-style barns nearby. Instead, Crawford was captivated by the newly constructed bridges, gas tanks, and factories in the area. From this time, such industrial buildings became his primary subject matter, and his work became increasingly objective, streamlined, and abstract. He had found his mature voice. Having learned what he needed from the old-fashioned architecture of rural Pennsylvania, he did not paint barns again.

—Carol Troyen

[1] Charles Sheeler, to whom Crawford is most often compared, was born in 1883, as was Charles Demuth. George Ault was born in 1891, Louis Lozowick in 1892, and Niles Spencer in 1893. Crawford, Demuth, Sheeler, and Spencer were grouped together in an important Precisionist exhibition, “A New Realism,” organized by the Cincinnati Art Museum in 1941.

[2] Jewell, “Three Phases of a Hardy Perennial,” New York Times, April 14, 1935, p. 7.

[3] Mumford, Sticks and Stones (New York: Boni and Liveright, 1924), pp. 179, 219.