PRESTON DICKINSON

 

PRESTON DICKINSON

SUNDAY Feature on ART of Architecture -by Gautam Shah 

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William Preston Dickinson (1889-1930) was one of the first American artists of industrial-scapes in Precisionist # style.

Dickinson’s earliest Precisionist works used basic geometric shapes with abstraction as well as realism. He works, uses many styles and effects of contemporary art, but never consistently or in any definable in a chronological order. Many of his industrial scenes were imaginary.

Dickinson loved fluid effect of water colour and sharp strokes of crayons, and took both to the oil painting. He emphasized the vertical and upward perspective through, towers, chimneys, pipes, columns, grains elevators, water tanks. Very little representation of the nature is seen, be it trees, skies, or water bodies.

The urban structures were depicted in precise, sharply defined geometrical forms. The angular geometry was also part of cubist practice, but here in Dickinson’s works, the abstraction was not as obvious.

# Precisionism was the first exclusively US art movement relating to indigenous style of Modernism, emerging in post WW-1 period, around 1915. It became popular during 1920-30s for dealing with new lifestyles of skyscrapers, bridges, railway stations, automobiles and factories. It has also been called ‘Cubist-Realism. Contemporary critics had tough time to define the emergent trend in art. Another Precisionist artist Charles Chillers work was called the ‘Immaculates’. 

 

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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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