Ralston Crawford

Steel Foundry, Coatesville, Pa.
1936–1937

A painting depicting an urban landscape with a focus on geometric shapes and lines. In the foreground, there's a tall wooden pole on the left and a similar pole on the right, both connected by a series of electrical wires. Behind the poles, a large, dark building with a sharply angled roof dominates the scene. The building has a few small windows and casts a prominent shadow. A wooden fence with vertical slats painted in shades of brown and orange runs across the middle ground, separating the sandy foreground from the building. The sky above is painted with soft, realistic clouds against a light blue backdrop. The artist's signature, "CRAWFORD," is visible in the lower left corner.

During the Depression, Ralston Crawford’s paintings of highways, grain elevators, and steel foundries captured America’s enduring optimism about technology and progress. Like the work of his Precisionist contemporaries, such as Elsie Driggs and Charles Sheeler, Steel Foundry, Coatesville, Pa. depicts the functional architecture of commerce and industry using bold geometric forms and crisp lines. In Crawford’s portrayal, the foundry becomes a looming silhouette devoid of human presence, its architecture reduced to an arrangement of flat, monochromatic planes. Two fences act as barriers that close off the structure from the street. Crawford exaggerates the size and severity of the building by contrasting it sharply with the flattened fences and telephone poles in the foreground, as well as the background of wispy clouds.

Not on view

Date
1936–1937

Classification
Paintings

Medium
Oil on canvas

Dimensions
Overall: 32 1/8 × 40in. (81.6 × 101.6 cm)

Accession number
37.10

Credit line
Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; purchase

API
artworks/2274