How Precisionist art got its name and what gave rise to it?

How Precisionist art got its name? and where?

After WWI, during the 1920s and 1930s, some American artists in the North Eastern cities, adopted a style that was distinguished by its clarity and precision. Initially it was called Cubist Realism because it was inspired by Cubism and the forms were realistic like photographs. However, one of its pioneers, Charles Sheeler, described himself as a Precisionist and that’s how the movement got its name. Precisionism was never an official movement and the artists did not have a manifesto.

What gave rise to Precisionist art?

1. America wanted its own art style

For centuries, Paris was the capital of Western art, but after WWI, New York City and North Eastern USA challenged that position. (Eventually, after the Second World War, NYC would emphatically be the center of art.) During the 1920s, there was a great craving for a genuinely American art style that does not imitate or follow European art styles such as Cubism, Futurism and Impressionism. That sense of an American identity was not only artistic, it was cultural and political with many voices demanding a policy isolationism from the global stage following the Great War. In that atmosphere, some American artists shared a certain style that was only inspired by European avant-garde including Synthetic Cubism, its reducing forms to simple and sharply defined geometric patterns.

2. Believe or not, many people believed technological progress will solve all problems

They were also inspired by Futurism in their glorification of machinery and modernity. Precisionist paintings differed from the Futurist ones by not focusing on dynamism and motion. Long before WWII and its nuclear bombs and gas chambers, there was a belief that technology might be a salvation for all that ails society. Although this art style emerged after the First World War which had its share of unprecedented destruction through new inventions like machine guns, tanks and poison gas, the optimism that followed its end had a streak of techno-utopianism. Precisionist artists were inspired by the Italian Futurist fascination with industrialization.

During that period, it was hard not to see the promise of technology in making life better. Innovation was entering all fields from transportation to communication. For the first time, millions of cars were being sold every year. American life was physically changing everywhere.

3. The American landscape and the rise of industrialization

The 1920s was a milestone decade where more Americans had moved from rural to urban areas. Precisionist art appeared to capture the changing American city. As more people move there, they worked industrial environments like factory complexes and automobile plants. Most of the Precisionist display chimneys, towers, factories, bridges, steel foundries, grain elevators and skyscrapers. Their paintings were always clean from any deterioration to the environment or even industrial debris as what you see around coal mines. Idealism was represented in elegant and clear outlines, bright colors, minimal details and smooth surfaces. It is important to note that their glorification of machines curiously replaced human activity, hence you won’t see any signs of life in their cityscapes. More people were working in “filthy” factories than ever, but you wouldn’t know that from their paintings. It is as if machines are of higher importance than humans. (In a sense, one could say it was also a harbinger of the future replacement of workers by robots.) In fact you won’t even see animals or plants. Nature versus machines, it was clear which of the two the Precisionist embraced and celebrated.

It’s no coincidence that one of the Precisionist pioneers, Charles Demuth, gave a painting the title, My Egypt. In glorifying the new industrial landscape, they likened it to the architecture of Egypt and Greece. The treated the industrial structures in their paintings with an aura of grandeur befit of the temples of antiquity.

4. The recent invention of photography as an inspiration

While many artists saw photography as a threat in visually representing life and society, the Precisionists found in it a source of inspiration in how to create photographically realistic paintings, with extreme “precision.”