Early in his career, Ralston Crawford (1906-1978) earned acclaimed for
his Precisionist paintings of architectural subjects associated with a
forward-looking, industrialized America, most famously his Overseas
Highway of 1939. But Crawford was a multifaceted artist with an
adventurous spirit and a curiosity for the world beyond the United
States, one whose work in various media and painting styles continued to
evolve throughout his life, with his later, more abstract painting
having a remarkable emotional dimension.
This new book, published to accompany an exhibition at the Vilcek
Foundation in New York focuses on two series of works - 'Torn Signs' and
'Semana Santa' - that Crawford developed mostly over the course of the
last 20 or so years of his life (although his first 'Torn Signs'
photographs date from the late 1930s, thus making this Crawford's most
enduring theme or motif). Rick Kinsel, President of the Vilcek
Foundation, begins by considering how and why his travels to Europe,
especially to Andalusia in Spain, were so inspiring to Crawford. Semana
Santa, or Holy Week, the last week of Lent, is observed in Seville with
public processions of penitential confraternities through the streets.
Witnessing this event proved to be a moving experience for Crawford, and
he revisited the subject of the penitents, with their distinctive
conical hats, multiple times across a number of years.
The art historian William C. Agee provides a biographical essay on
Crawford's peripatetic life, examining in particular the relation
between the 'Torn Signs' and 'Semana Santa' bodies of work and the
artist's later decades, after the Second World War, when Crawford was
interested less in the life-affirming view of modernity associated with
Precisionism, and more in giving expression to disillusion and decay.
Crawford's son John writes about the complex interrelationship of the
two series, with emphasis on the way in which Crawford's photography
relates to his painting and printmaking. Individual works in both series
are then explored in depth in the main part of the book by Emily
Schuchardt Navratil, Curator of the Vilcek Foundation.
Reproductions of the pages of sketchbooks from 1971 (the year he was
diagnosed with leukaemia) illuminate Crawford's approach to remembering
colour through writing and his incredible visual memory; here, drawings
of torn signs, Semana Santa and the streets of Seville are interspersed
with the artist's thoughts on colour, the connection between drawing and
writing, and his own life and death.
