Ralston Crawford Sees the Light

Certain exhibitions cast doubt upon the received wisdom. They force us to reconsider an artist’s achievement and standing—often deserved, sometimes not. Ralston Crawford (1906-1978): Photographs, at Zabriskie Gallery, is such an exhibition.

Re-evaluations aren’t always happy. But the Zabriskie show doesn’t exact any damage whatsoever on Crawford’s underrated contribution to 20th-century American art. Instead, it complicates our appraisal of it.

Crawford is best known as a painter connected to the Precisionist movement, a quintessentially American style that divined the sublime—or something close to it—from the industrial landscape. Artists like Charles Demuth, Elsie Driggs and Niles Spencer, having been influenced by the pictorial innovations of Modernism, delineated factories, shipyards, ductwork and smokestacks in a rigidly defined manner. Flirting with abstraction, the Precisionists never abandoned representation; geometric underpinnings, however severe, served recognizable ends.

The exception may have been Crawford. His paintings, with their sharp lines and intersecting planes, radically distill observed phenomena. Telephone lines, bridges, anonymous buildings and machines of mysterious purpose become scaffolds that support startlingly simplified compositions. But even when the pictures are accumulations of fractured shapes and colors, they nonetheless hearken to specific and concrete sources.

As Crawford once explained: “What is there [in the paintings] … grows out of something I have seen.” And what he saw was often originally documented as photographs, which were later used as references. Those familiar with his paintings can identify their source material in the photographs at Zabriskie. What they might also realize—if not necessarily admit—is that the photographs surpass the paintings in quality.

In light of this exhibition, Crawford must now be considered less a painter who took photographs than a photographer who made paintings. At a historical moment when painters who work from photographs are all but ubiquitous—often to evade the rigors and responsibilities of drawing—Crawford’s example bears scrutiny. The relationship between photography and painting is essential rather than secondary to his aesthetic explorations.

An inveterate traveler, Crawford took a camera along with him for a practical reason: It fit in his car. In many ways, his photographs are similarly no-nonsense. His shots of construction cranes, ripped signs, the Grand Coulee Dam and the sandstone cliffs of southern Utah are bracingly to-the-point. He created tight correlations between objects—the photographs are absent of people—and fixed them exactingly within the framing edge. Though cropped, the pictures are never incomplete or fractured.

Under Crawford’s gaze, a piece of machinery or a gear on a sailboat lose their original function. They are reimagined solely as stone-cold visual incidents. Forget documentation or the picturesque; these photographs are pure abstractions. They are made all the more unnerving because we do, in fact, recognize things within them: street signs for “good modern eye glasses,” high-tension wires, a chain-link fence, a roof, an empty city street. Crawford was drawn to urban environments, industry and nautical motifs, yet these subjects are untouched by romance, lyricism or sentiment. The photographs are strangely hollow. That’s one reason they’re so gripping.

Despite how stable the compositions are, they sometimes offer abrupt elisions of space and image. A length of rope zooms in front of a ship’s bow with brute concision; fishing nets set out to dry become imposing monumental edifices; sunshine peeking through the tracks of the Third Avenue El creates a staccato rhythm of light and dark. Crawford loved diagonals: Steep, veering angles introduce tension to otherwise classically poised pictures.

An austere strain of Surrealism sneaks into some of the photographs. That they’re markedly absent of figures creates an eerie sense of unease. The tightly focused juxtaposition of objects suggest narratives independent of human will. A ship’s light stares intently into space; a crane and the girders of a building engage in erotic repartee; electrical generators become alien visitors from a campy 1950’s drive-in movie.

At the risk of comparing apples to oranges, the photographs best the paintings in terms of texture and, in particular, light. A stringent sensuality replaces the dryness of affect typical of the canvases. Light, in Crawford’s hands, is clean, powerful and abrasive. You’ll have to look elsewhere for exquisite luminosities: Light in these photos doesn’t define form so much as scour it to the core. Texture isn’t emphasized so much as exposed; shadows, in contrast, are engulfing voids. And both light and dark unapologetically flatten each image.

Crawford’s photographs are almost unbearably taut and unforgiving. But it’s the artist’s job to rattle and renew our perception of the world, and Crawford does this to an extreme degree. There will be few exhibitions this year that are more thrilling—or uncompromising—than this one.