Artist: Ralston Crawford (American, 1906-1978 ?)

Title: Construction #4

Date: 1958

Medium: oil on canvas, 24 x 36"

About the Art
Construction #4 is one of a series of works Crawford completed in 1958,
when he was among ten artists commissioned by the Wolfson Construction
Company to interpret the erection of a building at 100 Church Street, in
Manhattan. The works of the Constructions series are linked by their
use of interlocking, straight-edged shapes of grays, browns and black
and white, by the use of short parallel lines or crosshatchings, and by
the sensation, found throughout Crawford's art, that what is solid
object or open space suddenly becomes a color shape on a relatively
flat field, where depth and distance are rendered ambiguous. Though
most of his early work consisted of paintings, comparable in style to
the abstracted views of industry and architecture produced by Charles
Sheeler and Charles Demuth, Crawford also produced work in printmaking
and photography. These different media, applied to similar subjects,
constantly informed and played off one another throughout Crawford's
career.

About the Artist
Born in St. Catherines, Ontario in 1906, Ralston Crawford was the son
of a ship captain whose family moved to Buffalo, New York when he was
four. After graduating from high school, Crawford's own experiences working
on tramp steamers on the Great Lakes, the Eastern Seaboard and the
Caribbean provided him direct access to the industrial architecture of
ships, ports and harbors. This formative visual experience, along with
subsequent exposure to Cubism and other strains of European Modernism,
eventually inspired Crawford to create paintings, prints and photograph
in the geometricized, Precisionist style for which he is best known.
Crawford's formal art education began in Los Angelos, where he studied
at the Otis Art Institute while working at Walt Disney Studios in 1927.
He then studied on scholarships at the Academy of Fine Arts and the
Barnes Foundation in Pennsylvania, and was in New York again in
1930-32, studying and painting on a Tiffany Fellowship. Crawford
traveled to Italy, France and Spain in 1933, where he witnessed
European modernism firsthand and studied at the Academies Colarossi and
Scandinave in Paris.