Ralston Crawford: Air + Space + War 2021
Ralston Crawford’s War Years by Rick Kinsel
American art underwent a sea change during the period 1940–55, and nowhere is that change better exemplified than in the work of Ralston Crawford (1906–1978). Crawford worked in a variety of media throughout his career, and his wartime and early postwar art ranged from designing camouflage and creating weather infographics for the US Army Air Forces to documenting the detonation of the atomic bomb for Fortune magazine. This book examines Crawford’s influences
and the ideas and experiences he had during World War II and its aftermath, doing so through various works of art, graphics, and documentation that have been collected by the Vilcek Foundation or else made available to the foundation through the cooperation of other cultural institutions and Crawford’s son John. As such, the book chronicles a period of change, during which Crawford gradually moved away from a Precisionist vision toward something more inward-looking and emotionally complex. While his earlier, prewar work celebrated the growth and transformation of the American landscape through feats of engineering and industrial development, the work that he created during and after the war, even when based on actual scenes or experiences, was more abstract, hermetic, and open-ended, and far more personal.
Crawford’s military and commercial production during the 1940s, which included witnessing firsthand the testing of the atomic bomb over Bikini Atoll, ultimately led him toward imagery that reflected the grief and anxiety of the postwar world. The horrific revelation, at the end of the war, of the damage wrought by unrestricted aerial warfare, genocide, and the deployment of nuclear weapons against civilian targets threw many artists and intellectuals, Crawford among them, into years of disillusionment and angst. In Crawford’s case, his wartime exposure to such horrors propelled him into a new and very different phase of his career.
For the most part, Crawford’s painting during the 1930s had been a series of dazzling Precisionist works that reflected American advances in industry, engineering, and technology. His paintings and prints of factories, highways, ships, loading docks, and bridges were also a demonstration of his great enthusiasm for the purified geometry of modernist engineering and architecture. They thus fit well into the broader American artistic narrative of the late 1920s and the 1930s, which is probably best described as a celebration of American progress and identity.
During the years after World War I, industry provided jobs and opportunities for people even as it transformed the American landscape, and the art world took note. The Social Realism movement served as a direct reflection of that industrial and social advancement at the human level. The Mexican Muralists, meanwhile, introduced a more politicized, pro-labor vision of American capitalism at work, often through such monumentally scaled works as Diego Rivera’s Detroit Industry murals of 1932–33, which depicted laborers, mechanics, engineers, and businessmen working in collaboration. As the 1930s progressed, younger American artists, including Rivera’s assistant Ben Shahn, continued to regard the skilled laborer as a central component of that American success.
The American Precisionists, led by the artists Charles Demuth and Charles Sheeler, gave a different and more specifically modernist response to this notion of American progress, one in which politics and ideologies were far less centrally important. Influenced by late Cubism, they seized upon the great structures of American progress—its factories, grain elevators, ships, airplanes, monumental bridges, and highways—as manifestations, for better or worse, of the way American society and the landscape were taking on a new shape.
At the same time, American Surrealists, including the Armenian-American artist Arshile Gorky, incorporated Futurist ideas about the significance of movement into a visceral understanding of modern—and now, specifically American—progress. In his incisive essay for this catalogue, Jerry N. Smith, Chief Curator at the Dayton Art Institute, surveys various American and European abstract and naturalistic renditions of airplanes and flight as a means by which to place Crawford’s interest in aviation during World War II in a broader historical context. Smith helps us to understand how Crawford was influenced by the experience of flying, and also how he was affected by aerial warfare and the horrors of aircraft failure.
Crawford was unable to paint for much of World War II and its immediate aftermath because he joined the war effort and worked for it full-time. Even so, his wartime work was of a creative nature. His first assignment after enlisting in the Army was the development of large-scale camouflage, as part of the 603rd Engineer Camouflage Battalion. He then moved to the Weather Division at the headquarters of the US Army Air Forces, and eventually became Chief of the Visual Presentation Unit, helping to develop a new form of visual communication that is known today as weather infographics—an easily comprehensible visual language that helps to explain weather patterns, frontal movements, winds, barometric shifts, and other weather events. Crawford’s skill at developing a visual language to assist in the analysis of military information and data led him, when possible, to take on similar work for Fortune magazine, creating infographics for its stories and adapting his paintings for use as cover art. In her essay for this catalogue, Amanda C. Burdan, Curator at the Brandywine River Museum of Art, looks at this extraordinarily varied work, much of it tied to graphic art and cartography, and sees its relation to Crawford’s later, more abstract style of painting.
Though Crawford’s ability to create paintings was limited during his time in the Army, his interest in photography remained undiminished. For Crawford, the camera was a tool for both documentation and artistic expression. As John Crawford explores in his essay in this volume, his father was inundated by photographs during the war, many in the form of official government bulletins. John has discovered numerous photographs in these journals that his father, unconcerned with issues of authorship, mined for source material for his own art. John’s research continues to uncover related photographs and new connections, significantly expanding our understanding of his father’s artistic process. Crawford also continued taking photographs during the war, documenting the Curtiss-Wright factory in Buffalo, New York, and using these photographs in concert with pencil sketches and ink drawings to create a suite of related paintings.
As Burdan notes in her essay, Crawford brought a broad technical expertise to his wartime image-making, for he had spent the years before the conflict moving among the nation’s foremost graphic artists and illustrators, including students of that leading artist of the Brandywine School, the great illustrator Howard Pyle. As a result, Crawford’s work is probably best understood as a combination of modern, stylized graphics, efficient visual storytelling, and (in the case of his fine art paintings and photographs) carefully restrained emotional turmoil. Whether creating infographics, paintings, or stylish covers for Fortune magazine, Crawford remained fascinated with what the curator Keith F. Davis has described as “the purified geometry of man-made things.”
Read more of my essay in the Air + Space + War catalogue.
