Ralston Crawford was an American painter, lithographer and photographer. His artworks made in a Precisionist style depicted the industrial landscapes of the United States in abstract manner.
Background
Ralston Crawford was born as George Ralston Crawford on September 5, 1906, in Saint Catharines, Ontario, Canada to a family of a ship’s captain George Burson Crawford and Lucy Colvin.
When Ralston was a four-year-old child, his family settled in Buffalo, New York, United States where the artist had lived till 1926. It was the first travelling from a great number of the wanderlusts he did thereafter.
As a child, Crawford often accompanied his father in the trips around the Great Lakes and gradually took interest in ports, shipyards, bridges and other marine attributes. Perhaps, it was this passion that influenced the main subject of his future artworks – the industrial world.
Education
Ralston Crawford started his artistic training at the Otis Art Institute (currently Otis College of Art and Design) which he entered in 1926. The following year, he enrolled at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts where he had studied art under the painter Hugh Breckenridge for three years. Simultaneously, from 1928, Crawford attended the classes of the Barnes Foundation. There, the young artist discovered the art of Pablo Picasso, Henri Matisse and his American contemporaries Charles Sheeler and Charles Demuth.
To pursue his artistic education, in 1932 Ralston Crawford travelled to Paris where he took art lessons at the Académie Colorossi (Colorossi Academy) and a year later at the Académie Scandinave (Scandinavian Academy).
Then, Crawford came back to the United States where he finished his education at the Columbia University in the City of New York.
Ralston Crawford began his career in 1926 as a sailor and had travelled on steamships to Central America, California, and the Caribbean since then. The following year, he became an illustrator at the Walt Disney’s studio.
The debut personal exhibition where the artist presented his early artworks depicting technological world in a realist manner took place in 1934 at the Maryland Institute College of Art in Baltimore, Maryland.
Crawford continued to experiment with painting techniques and by the end of the 1930s, more and more geometrically abstract elements appeared in his canvases and photos. In search of the new inspirations for his artworks, he came to Pennsylvania with its rural architecture. In 1941, the artist demonstrated his artworks on the group exhibition at the Cincinnati Art Museum.
A year later, he tried his hand as a teacher of art at the Albright Art School in Buffalo. Later in his lifetime, the artist pursued his activity as a professor of art or a guest lecturer at many other art institutions around the United States, including the Brooklyn Museum Art School, the New School for Social Research in New York City (1952-57), Honolulu Museum of Art and others.
At the outbreak of the World War II, Crawford joined the United States Army Air Forces in 1942. He served in a rank of a master sergeant as a Chief of the Visual Presentation Unit of the Weather Division where he applied his painting skills by creating the simple icons aimed to indicate the weather situation for the military personnel.
After the War, the artist had a number of solo exhibitions, including three solo shows at the Downtown Gallery (1944, 1946, 1950) and the show at the Grace Borgenicht Gallery in 1954, all in New York City.
During the post-war period, the artist also worked as a photographic consultant. So, in 1946, he received an invitation from ‘Fortune Magazine’ to cover a nuclear weapons test at the Bikini Atoll on the Marshall Islands. He also photographed the Indian cave temples, painted and took photos of the African American jazz performers for the Archive of New Orleans Jazz at Tulane University.
In 1960, Ralston Crawford occupied the post of an associate professor at the art department of the Hofstra College (currently the Hofstra University) in Hempstead, New York. He had taught there till 1962.
The huge retrospective of Crawford’s artworks was held at Creighton University Fine Arts Gallery in Omaha, Nebraska six years later.
In 1969, Crawford was recruited by the United States Department of the Interior to work on special art program.
Except the above-mentioned exhibitions, Ralston Crawford presented his artworks at the Milwaukee Art Museum, the Flint Institute of Arts, the Portland Art Museum, the Santa Barbara Museum of Art, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Saint George’s Gallery in London and elsewhere.
Quotations:
"I don't feel obligated to reveal the forms. They may be totally absent to the viewer of the work, or even to myself, but what is there, however abstract, grows out of something I have seen. I make pictures."
"I look ahead to the left and to the right, ahead and behind. Then I paint from my memory and from the thoughts about the things I have remembered."
Membership
Independents Art Group
,
United States
Interests
Artists
Pablo Picasso, Henri Matisse
Connections
Ralston Crawford was married two times.
His first wife became a sculptor Margaret Stone on October 17, 1932. They had lived together for six years and had one son.
In 1942, Crawford married Peggy Frank. The family produced two sons, John Ralston and Robert Frederick. The couple divorced in 1970.