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EDWARD BIBERMAN
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Edward BibermanWilshire-Coronado Corner, 1938
“Precisionism may be the forgotten bandwagon of 20th century American art. Today, the hard-edged style and many of the artists it attracted remain overshadowed by Abstract Expressionism, which definitively put American art on the international map in the early 1950’s. But in the late 1920’s and early 1930’s when modern machines and architecture held the promise of a bright, streamlined future, Precisionism seemed like an art movement whose time had come and a sure sign of American art’s international stature.”
Roberta Smith, “Precisionism and a Few of Its Friends,” The New York Times, December 11, 1994
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MARGARET BOURKE-WHITE -
CLARENCE CARTER -
HOWARD COOK -
GORDON COSTER -
It is a commonly held belief that World War II and the explosion of creative energy introducing action painting, new abstraction, and the New York School was the “Big Bang”–the genesis of the first independent American art movement. Generations of scholars, art dealers, and collectors have focused on that important moment in the mid-1940s–at the peril of a broader understanding of earlier American modernist movements and the intellectual value of new ideas. This misunderstanding has relegated earlier efforts to derisive comments suggesting the work of America’s leading artists of the first half of the century were “derivative.” In fact, the burst of American pride and creative energy in the United States started much earlier, in the years between 1910 and 1917, and expanded dramatically in the decade following the signing at Versailles. Among the most significant independent achievements are the works of American artists now referred to as “Precisionists.”
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CHARLES GOELLER -
LEWIS HINE -
Lewis HineElectrical Industry Generators, c. 1930
In the years following 1916, “Precisionism” took center stage. The hallmarks of the style are based on a new interpretation of Cubism unified with an undeniable surge in American economic and military might, and the uniquely American character of the themes and motifs adopted to portray a new modern world. Skyscrapers burst on the New York skyline, shiny metal surfaces gleamed in this new cityscape, and the precision of sophisticated machinery invited new ways of considering the American experience.
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EDMUND LEWANDOWSKI -
LOUIS LOZOWICK -
JAN MATULKA -
Alfred H. Barr, Jr., the Director of the Museum of Modern Art, is believed responsible for coining the term Precisionism, but it was more common to refer to the artists embraced by the term as members of a loosely composed group “The Immaculates.” The scholar Milton Brown preferred the term “Cubist-Realism” to connote his sense of the derivative essence he suggested American artists borrowed from the leading European Cubists.
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The favored term “Precisionism” settled into our vocabulary in the 1950s and is preferred today, but it took time to embrace the entire sweep of the movement. It is instructive that leading scholars and curators struggled to find the correct moniker for the work. We believe this further reinforces a more nuanced understanding of the unique attributes of this first independent American art movement. That nuanced understanding has suffered because the artists approached this new aesthetic in various media–through painting, watercolor, photography, and printmaking–and through different pictorial subjects, from architectural cityscapes to new approaches in still-life motifs, to Charles Sheeler’s hallmark images of the sterile industrial landscape of America’s Midwest.
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Charles Sheeler -
If you are interested in speaking with us directly about the available works, or would like to learn more about The Immaculates, please do not hesitate to connect with Alana Ricca by phone call, to the gallery at (212) 879-8815, or by mobile at (203) 524-2694. We look forward to being in touch with you soon.