Agee provides a biographical essay on Crawford's peripatetic life, examining in particular the relation between the 'Torn Signs' and 'Semana Santa' bodies of work and the artist's later decades, after the Second World War, when Crawford was interested less in the life-affirming view of modernity associated with
Precisionism, and more in giving expression to disillusion and decay.
artists produced compositions with a 'machined' quality--incorporating smooth surfaces and geometric forms--which conveyed the beauty, coldness, and impersonality of this mechanized world." These artists' style took on the term "
Precisionism."
However improbable--given the bleak current national mood--the self-congratulatory strain of American modernist painting known as
Precisionism is again in vogue.
A contrast is set up between the Regionalism of artists such as Wood and Thomas Hart Benton, who painted the wheat-harvest states in a traditionally figurative style, and the modernism of urban artists, in its various forms:
Precisionism, Park Avenue Cubism, Harlem Renaissance.
"Cartoon Vision: UPA,
Precisionism and American Modernism." An 10.2 (2015): 82-101.
Drawn from the work of watercolorist Raoul Dufy (Autumn), sculptor Naum Gabo (Construct), portrait painter Han Holbein the Younger (Holbein) and the
Precisionism movement (Precision) — among many others, Brentano's new contract textiles perform with eco-conscious finishing and contents.
Workers likewise rarely appeared in images of industry by Precisionist painters like Sheeler, Dumuth, and Lozowick, as noted by Fraser in "Hands off the Machine" and Sharon Corwin in "Picturing Efficiency:
Precisionism, Scientific Management, and the Effacement of Labor," Representations, 84 (November 2003), 139-165.