Monday, January 1, 2018

Artist of the day, January 1: George Copeland Ault, American painter.

 George Copeland Ault (1891 – 1948) was an American painter. He was loosely grouped with the Precisionist Movement and was also influenced by Cubism and Surrealism.

Ault was born in Cleveland, Ohio, and spent much of his youth in London, England, where his father was engaged in ink manufacturing. He studied at the Slade School of Art and St. John's Wood School of Art (where his painting style was described as an Anglicized version of Impressionism). In 1911 he returned to the United States where he would spend the rest of his life in New York and New Jersey. He began to paint New York night scenes and architectural subjects in a spare, modernist style (similar to those of Joseph Pennell). He became interested in night effects, a major theme in many of his later works. His shift towards a modern painting style caused his father (an academic painter) to stop supporting him. His financial and personal life became troubled; he became alcoholic during the 1920s, after the death of his mother in a mental institution, and the suicides of his three brothers.

By the mid-1920s, personal problems began to interfere with Ault's artistic progress. The home in which he had grown up was emotionally troubled; his mother died in a mental institution and three of his brothers committed suicide. By the time of his father's death in 1929, the family fortune was largely dissipated. These unfortunate circumstances may explain the increasing turbulence and unhappiness of Ault's personal life. Whatever the exact cause, during the 1920s, Ault grew neurotic and reclusive. He developed a severe case of alcoholism, almost blinding himself drinking poisonous bathtub gin. His behavior became so strange that his artist and dealer friends began to avoid him.

In 1937, Ault moved to Woodstock, New York and tried to put his difficulties in the past. Depending on his wife for income, he created some of his finest paintings during this time, but had difficulty selling them. A nearby barn, which he painted three times, was a favorite subject, symbolizing for hire a dying, agrarian way of life in the Catskills.

Although Ault is often grouped with Precisionists Charles Demuth, Ralston Crawford and Charles Sheeler, he did not idealize modern life and machinery as they generally did. Rather, his urban landscapes, filled with a sense of disquiet and psychic distress, echo both Giorgio de Chirico, the Italian Surrealist, and Albert Pinkham Ryder, the American romantic visionary.

Ault worked in oil, watercolor, and pencil. He is often grouped with Precisionist painters such as Charles Sheeler and Ralston Crawford because of his unadorned representations of architecture and urban landscapes.

However, the idealist and Futurist aspects of Precisionism are not so apparent in his work—in fact, he once referred to skyscrapers as the "tombstones of capitalism". He employed flat shapes and portrayed the underlying geometric patterns of the manmade structures that found homes on his canvases.


1946, The Artist at Work
1910, City Scene with Omnibuses

1920, Provincetown Landscape

1920, The Hudson from Riverside Drive

1921, Aucassin and Nicolette

1921, New York Night, No. 2

1921, Provincetown House

1921, Provincetown House

1921, The Stairway

1921. Boats on Beach

1922, A Provincetown Street

1922, Bermuda

1923,  Roof Tops, New York

1923, Looking down Brittany

1923, Miss Whiting

1923, Reclining Figure

1923, The Mill Room

1923, Untitled (seated female figure)

1924 Sullivan Street, Abstraction

1924, Woman Reading in Bed

1925, From Brooklyn Heights

1926, Brooklyn Ice House

1927, View from Brooklyn

1928, Cat and Lamp

1929  Highland Light

1929, Mantel Composition

1930-33, Cobb's Barns and Distant Houses

1931, Driveway- Newark

1932, Hoboken Factory

1932, Hudson Street

1934, Cames House

1937, Autumn landscape

1937, Filling the Silo

1938, Anderson Farm

1938, Studio Interior

1940, August Night At Russell's Corners

1940, Autumn Hillside

1940, Bermuda Park

1941, January Full Moon

1942, Dawn in Pennsylvania

1943, Black Night at Russell's Corners

1944, Daylight at Russell's Corners

1944, Vegetables

1945, Brook in the Mountains

1945, New Moon, New York

1945, Nude And Torso

1945, Sculpture On A Roof

1946, Bright Light at Russell’s Corners

1947, Manhattan Mosaic

City Sunset

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