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

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.