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.”

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.