RALSTON CRAWFORD
Third Avenue Elevated #4.
Color lithograph, 1952. 435x260 mm; 17x10¼ inches, full margins. Signed and numbered 27/45 in pencil, lower margin. Printed by Desjobert, Paris. A very good impression of this extremely scarce lithograph.Crawford (1906-1978) is known for his depictions of industry in a Precisionist style. He was born in Ontario, near Niagara Falls, and moved to Buffalo, New York in 1910. He studied at the Otis Art Institute in Los Angeles, The Pennsylvania Academy of Art, the Barnes Foundation (where he came into contact with masterpieces by Paul Cézanne and Henri Matisse) and the Hugh Breckenridge School. Over the course of his career, working in both country (Chadds Ford and Exton, Pennsylvania) and urban settings, notably New York and New Orleans, Crawford developed into one of the foremost American Precisionists, along with Stuart Davis (1892-1964), Charles Sheeler (1883-1965) and Louis Lozowick (1892-1973).Precisionism evolved from its roots in European Cubism with its sharp edges and flattened forms, but American Precisionists focused primarily on depicting industrial subjects. Crawford's work emphasized American symbols of industry such as skyscrapers, bridges, silos and machinery, creating dynamic, modern and innovative compositions out of flattened forms. He also experimented with photography and graphic media such as screenprints.The third avenue elevated train was a subject of Crawford's photographs in the 1940s. Later he decided to transfer them to other media; his series of eight lithographs was completed in the early 1950s in Paris. Each lithograph shows the elevated pared down to its most basic form so that it takes on a new abstract shape.