“My work is usually charged with emotion, and not of a basically geometric character. I realize this comment is quite at variance with many responses to my pictures, but I am never concerned with a pictorial logic to the exclusion of feeling.”
—Ralston Crawford, Ralston Crawford, Barbara Haskell, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, 1985, p. 59.
Ralston Crawford (1906-1978) was born in St. Catherines, Ontario, Canada. He grew up in Buffalo, New York, and as a child, he explored the Great Lakes with his father, a ship captain. In 1926, Crawford went to sea on a tramp steamer and sailed the Caribbean and Pacific Oceans. Settling briefly in Los Angeles, he found work at the Walt Disney Studios while studying at the Otis Art Institute.
From 1927 to 1930, scholarships enabled Crawford to study at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts in Philadelphia, under Hugh Henry Breckenridge, and at the Barnes Foundation in Merion, Pennsylvania. After briefly painting in New York, he became interested in the innovations of the then nascent American modernist art movements. He won a Tiffany Foundation Grant and traveled to Europe in 1932. In Paris, he attended the Académie Colarossi and the Académie Scandinave.
Crawford initially worked in a representational style upon his return to New York in 1933. His first one-man show was held at the Maryland Institute of Art in Baltimore in 1934. He attended the first American Artists Congress in New York in 1936 and became allied with the left-wing artists active in New York City. Until 1939, he painted at Chadds Ford and Exton, Pennsylvania, and taught briefly at the Art Academy of Cincinnati and Albright School in Buffalo, but after 1940, New York City remained his home.
During World War II, Crawford served as Chief of the Visual Presentation Unit in the Army Air Force Weather Division in Washington, D.C. His experience there, creating easily identifiable maps and icons in charting weather movements, greatly influenced his work—the distillation of physical objects and felt experience into essential graphic forms became a key impetus to his highly personal abstraction. He was posted to the China-Burma-India Theater of War as an artist-correspondent for Fortune Magazine. Crawford was the only painter to witness the tests of nuclear weapons at Bikini Atoll in the Marshall Islands in 1946. These wartime experiences reinforced Crawford’s preoccupation (perhaps engendered by his time at sea) with the dual and polar aspects of life’s energy: creation and destruction. While employing the Precisionist vernacular of solidity and permanence in his paintings and prints, Crawford continued to express his concern with the counterpoint themes of decay and transformation.
After his discharge from the Army, Crawford served as director of the Honolulu School of Art in 1947. During this period, his Precisionist paintings depicted ships and industrial landscapes—dynamic compositions of hard-edge shapes and flat color. To support himself, he took on temporary teaching jobs and residencies at colleges and universities across the country. Between 1948 and 1950, he taught at the Brooklyn Museum School, the Art Academy of Cincinnati, the University of Minnesota, and Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge, where he was first introduced to New Orleans jazz, a form of creative expression and culture that would become a lifelong fascination.
Crawford took up photography around 1937 and continued to photograph during his extensive travels, focusing on representational abstraction as well as genre images and reportage. In 1950, he began photographing and documenting the lives of black jazz musicians in New Orleans, Louisiana, a city and subject to which he would frequently return.
In 1951, Crawford returned to France to paint and to collaborate with the French master lithographers in 1954-55, 1957, and 1959. He taught at the New School for Social Research in New York from 1952 to 1957. Although he worked unceasingly, sales of his paintings were slight during the 1950s; however, consistent demand for his prints encouraged him to continue making lithographs. His first solo exhibition, which included many of his graphic works, was held at the University of Alabama in 1953 and marked the publication of Richard B. Freeman’s monograph on Crawford’s lithographs.
In 1958 an important retrospective of Crawford’s paintings, drawings, prints, and photographs was held at the Milwaukee Art Center. After a residency at the University of Colorado, he joined the faculty of Hofstra College in 1960. He later taught briefly at the University of Kentucky and the University of Southern California. Sixty-five of Crawford’s lithographs were featured in a traveling show organized by the University of Kentucky at Lexington in 1961. In the same year, another retrospective of his paintings and prints was held at the Tweed Gallery of the University of Minnesota in Duluth, where Crawford taught during the summer.
During the last years of his life, Crawford traveled extensively, journeying to North Africa, the South Pacific, and the Far East. In 1971, the artist learned that he had cancer; however, neither his travel nor his work abated. Crawford died in Houston, Texas, on April 27, 1978, in the midst of arranging for another exhibition. Survived by his wife and three children, his family laid him to rest in his much-loved city of New Orleans with a traditional jazz funeral.
Crawford’s unique contribution to American modernism was recognized throughout his career and to the present. His work has been the subject of numerous solo exhibitions beginning in 1934 at The Maryland Institute, Paintings by Ralston Crawford, and extending to the 1922 Dayton Art Institute exhibition Ralston Crawford: Air + Space + War.
The many public collections holding work by Ralston Crawford include, Addison Gallery of American Art, Clay Center for the Arts and Sciences, Fred Jones Jr. Museum of Art (University of Oklahoma), Georgia Museum of Art (University of Georgia), Harvard University Art Museums, Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Honolulu Museum of Art, J. Paul Getty Museum, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, James A. Michener Art Museum, Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art (Kansas City, Missouri), Kresge Art Museum (Michigan State University), Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Mead Art Museum (Amherst College), Museum of Modern Art (New York City), Saint Louis Art Museum, National Gallery of Art, Norton Museum of Art (West Palm Beach, Florida), The Phillips Collection, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Tweed Museum of Art (University of Minnesota, Duluth), Walker Art Center (Minnesota), Utah Museum of Fine Arts (Salt Lake City), Cincinnati Art Museum, Munson-Williams-Proctor Arts Institute (Utica, New York), and Whitney Museum of American Art.
