RALSTON CRAWFORD (1906-1978)
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Biography • Ralston Crawford (1906-1978)
George Ralston Crawford was born in St. Catharines, Ontario, near Niagara Falls, in 1906; his family moved to Buffalo, N.Y. in 1910. Crawford's interest in docks, shipyards, bridges, and grain elevators stems from a childhood spent traveling around the Great Lakes with his father and also from several years as a young sailor. In the mid-1920s Crawford turned to art, studying until 1932 at the Otis Art Institute in Los Angeles (1925), the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts (1927), the Barnes Foundation, Merion, PA (1927-1930), and the Hugh Breckenridge School, East Gloucester, MA. His exposure to the precisionist art of Demuth and, especially Sheeler while a student at the Barnes Foundation from 1927 to 1930, fueled his interest in industrial subjects. During the early 1930s, at a time when many American artists were turning away from the wave of modernism that had swept the country since the early teens, Crawford adopted a precisionist style, creating smoothly painted images of subjects specifically associated with America, such as skyscrapers, industrial structures, and still lifes with domestic fruits and vegetables on American-made tables. His work was characterized by flat geometric planes, well defined, and illuminated by shafts of clear light and shadow, which is a feature of Still Life on Dough Table, 1932.
Crawford traveled in Europe for some time in late 1932 into 1933 before attending Columbia University in the fall of 1933. He had his first one-person show in 1934 at the Maryland Institute of Art, Baltimore. Fascinated with rural architectural forms, he returned that year to Pennsylvania to paint, living in Chadds Ford and Exton until 1939.
In 1940 Ralston Crawford’s work was included in a Whitney Museum exhibition. In 1941 his paintings were exhibited at the Cincinnati Art Museum, the Flint Institute of Arts, and the biennial exhibition at the Corcoran Gallery of Art. Between 1940 and 1942 Crawford held teaching positions at several universities, including the Cincinnati Art Academy and the Albright Art Academy in Buffalo. Crawford joined the army in 1942 and was stationed in Washington, DC, and later China, Burma, and India. He served as a designer of charts making meteorological data more comprehensible to Army pilots. In his 1940s work, Crawford eliminates modeling from his paintings in favor of flat and nearly abstract architectural renderings.
On the recommendation of Stuart Davis, Edith Halpert began to show Ralston Crawford’s work at her Downtown Gallery. Crawford had a solo exhibition at the Downtown Gallery in 1946 titled Paintings of ‘Operation Crossroads” depicting his experience of the first atomic bomb testing at the Bikini Atoll, a commission he received from Fortune magazine. In the 1950s Grace Borgenicht became Crawford’s dealer.
An inveterate wanderer, Crawford traveled extensively in the United States and Europe to paint, produce lithographs, lecture, and teach. In 1950, Crawford began to regularly visit New Orleans, where he had first visited in 1926 and then in 1938. There he focused on photographing the movement of black jazz musicians. In the early 1960s, Crawford contributed photographs to the covers of a series of jazz records produced by Riverside Records.
Crawford died in 1978, in Houston, but was buried in his beloved New Orleans. Ralston Crawford had a retrospective of 155 works at the Whitney Museum of American Art in 1985.