Well known for his Precisionist and geometrically
abstract style, Crawford was born in Ontario, Canada, in 1906. He moved with
his family at the age of 10 to Buffalo, N.Y., and spent time sailing with his
father on the Great Lakes. Following his high school graduation, Crawford
worked on cargo ships for six months, traveling to the Caribbean and the
Pacific. In 1927, Crawford began his artistic education at Otis Art Institute,
working at the Walt Disney Studio as an animator for a side job. He returned to
the East Coast to study at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts and at the
Barnes Foundation. It was during his later round of studies that he was
influenced in his work by the art of Pablo Picasso and Henri Matisse. In 1934,
along with being a member of the Independents, a collective of modernist
painters, Crawford had his first one-man art show at the Maryland Institute
College of Art.
Crawford went through multiple
artistic phases in his life, the most notable being his Precisionist and
geometrically abstract phases. His Precisionist work focused on realistic,
sharp renderings of industrial areas, such as factories, bridges, and
shipyards, all of which incorporated straight edges and clear borders between
separate elements. Crawford’s early work in this vein placed him among other
Precisionist artists such as Charles Sheeler, whose noteworthy accomplishments
include being one of the founders of American modernism and one of the master
photographers of the 20th century. The use of straight lines in the majority of
Crawford’s work evolved into his geometrically abstract period, in which he
would utilize the shape as the focus of his paintings, taking events such as
bullfighting in Spain or spaces such as cemeteries in New Orleans and re-forming
them into how he envisioned them in a geometric spectrum.
One of the highlights of
Crawford’s career was an assignment from Fortune
Magazine. He traveled to the Bikini Atoll in 1946 to record a portion of
the events during Operation Crossroads, a series of nuclear weapons tests that
provided information on atmospheric and underwater detonations of atomic bombs.
The test was incredibly high-profile due to the fact that it was the first
detonation of any nuclear device since the bombing of Nagasaki on Aug. 9, 1945.
Additionally, Crawford worked with photography and experimented with film and
printmaking. Crawford died on April 17, 1978, in Houston, Tex., succumbing to
cancer.
The Georgia Museum of Art’s permanent collection
includes Crawford’s depiction of the blast generated by the atmospheric bomb,
nicknamed Able, from Operation Crossroads. For anyone interested in the artistic
aspects of such an almost literally “volatile” period in American history, GMOA
invites you to come in and experience the reverberations of what Crawford
witnessed years ago.
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| Ralston Crawford Test Able 1946 |
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