FRANCIS CRISS

 

FRANCIS CRISS

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Feature ART of Architecture -by Gautam Shah

Francis Criss, (1901-1973) was born in London, but based in America. He was a Precisionist painter, known for colourful portrayals of Manhattan urban scenes. Precisionism was a style of painting emerging after WW-I, strongly affected by Cubism, Purism, and Futurism. Precisionist artists (often called Immaculates), reduced the subjects to their essential geometric machine shapes, used fewer details, monotone colours and stiff forms as highlighted by crisp light and absence of human forms.

Criss said, ‘I attempt to capture the layers and depth of the city’s environment, not paint it brick by brick’. Lewis Mumford, compared Criss's oeuvre with that of Sheeler in terms of its dry accuracy, although he declared that it operated on a higher imaginative level.

Francis Criss painted surreal urban scapes with distorted perspectives and crude juxtaposition and odd contrasts. This was a post-war period, with new-age structures of bridges, elevated subway tracks, skyscrapers, factories. Yet. It was time of severe Economic. Social and Political depression.

Francis Criss was compared with Charles Sheeler (1883-1965) and Ralston Crawford (1906-1978). Criss experimented with many different styles including, pointillism, cubism, realism, with art-form such as, portraits, collages from old photographs, commercial art and large format murals. 

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