Ralston Crawford, Drawings & Photographs @Zabriskie

JTF (just the facts): A total of 24 works, alternately framed in brown and black wood and matted, and hung in the main gallery and the back viewing room. The 10 photographs are all vintage gelatin silver prints, made between 1940 and 1965. The 1940s prints range in size from 4x5 to 7x9; the 1960s prints are somewhat larger, ranging from 11x11 to 14x17. The 14 drawings are mostly ink on paper, and were made between 1940 and 1964. (Installation shots at right.)

Comments/Context: Ralston Crawford's drawings and photographs of American architecture and industry are elegant exercises in the simplicity of carfeully constructed found abstraction. We've written about Crawford before (here, from 2008), so we'll dispense with the usual broad historical background and photographic context in this review, and head straight to a closer look at the works on view in this particular show.

Crawford's photographs are rooted in realism, with fragments of bridges, grain elevators, buildings, ships and trains providing the raw material for his explorations into geometric patterning. New York Door, 1961, depicts the thick black and white panels of a high contrast painted wooden door, bisected by a slashing black shadow. Box Car, 1949, juxtaposes undulating corrugated steel with the strict lines of bubbly seams and the rungs of a ladder, creating a composition with layers of interrelated textures. Grain Elevators, 1949, starts with a cluster of tubular white silos, and adds long diagonals, horizontal braces, and vertical vents striped like shutters. All of these works begin with something familiar, and transform it into a pared down visual experiment with spare, building block forms.

Crawford's drawings and sketches seem to explore many of these same ideas in a slightly looser, more expressive way. Given his choice of medium, these works are very line heavy, with intersections and cross hatching used to create darkness and light. The remnants of a girder or a door frame are still evident if you look closely, but the lines have been boiled down to such an extent that very little representation is left behind. Reality has been reduced to flat, elemental shapes and planes, which have then become the starting point for further (and more radical) explorations in abstraction.

I suppose what I most would most like to see is a deep, scholarly retrospective of Crawford's photographic work. But until that mythical show happens, exhibits like this one, which intermittently bring out a handful of unseen images from the storage boxes in the back room, will likely have to be the substitute.

Collector's POV: The photographs in this show are priced between $7500 and $16000, with the 1960s images all priced below $10000. The drawings range in price between $6500 and $16500. Crawford's photographs are scarce at auction, so it's quite difficult to develop any reliable price pattern from so few lots. Overall, his photographic work remains on the short list of artists we would like to add to the city/industrial genre of our collection.

Rating: * (one star) GOOD (rating system described here)

Transit Hub:

• Reviews: NY Times, 1985 (here), NY Times, 1991 (here)

Ralston Crawford, Drawings & Photographs
Through May 15th

Zabriskie Gallery

41 East 57th Street

New York, NY 10022

Ralston Crawford @Zabriskie

JTF (just the facts): A total of 25 works of art: 4 paintings, 4 drawings/watercolors, and 17 photographs, shown through the main gallery and back room. Crawford died in 1978 and most of the work in this show is from his later life (i.e the 1960s and 1970s) although there are a handful of earlier pieces mixed in as well. (Installation image at right.)

Comments/Context: Ralston Crawford is best known as a 1930s/1940s painter of pared down and often abstracted views of American vernacular architecture: industrial buildings, docks, factories and the like. He is often lumped in with Charles Sheeler and Charles Demuth as a Precisionist, or more loosely associated with artists like Stuart Davis or movements with titles like Geometric Abstraction or Synthetic Cubism. He made crisp, flat, simplified images of recognizable objects, where detail was eliminated and the relationships between form, line, color, and space were carefully selected and balanced. With the arrival of the wild, emotional excesses of Abstract Expressionism in the early 1950s, he was largely marginalized and forgotten.
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What is less known about Crawford is that he was also a photographer. Starting in the late 1930s, he used a 35mm camera as a kind of sketch pad, where he would capture images he found out in the world, to later be reworked and synthesized down for his paintings. As the years passed, he began to see the some of the photographs not as intermediate steps but as works of art in and of themselves, and in his later life, his activity as a photographer was much more pronounced.
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One of the neat things about this show is that Crawford's photographs, drawings and oils of the same subject have been hung together, so you can really see how his mind was working through the problems of picture making. The installation shot above (not easy to see I realize) shows 4 different iterations of the same anchor, and how he carefully chose his elements and then amplified and distorted them to get the effects he wanted.

I think Crawford is under appreciated in terms of his place in the history of photography. Prior to the late-1930s, abstraction in photography was still in its infant stages. Many artists both in America and Europe were experimenting with pared down industrial forms and Modernist simplification, but most of the objects are still clearly recognizable. Crawford's early photographs provide an interesting bridge to Callahan and particularly Siskind, who both came along in the late 1940s and 1950s and really started to break things down further. Crawford's later photographs continue along the same path, exploring forms and shapes, light and dark, while still adhering to his consistent and original point of view.

Collector's POV: In the past five years, there have been a total of two (2) Ralston Crawford photographs available in the auction market (one sold for just under $5000 and the other was bought in), so his work is scarce. (There is also one nice, albeit small Crawford available in the upcoming sale at Rago, preview here.) The photographs in this show are priced between $7500 and $15000, and are generally 8x10, 11x14 or slightly larger. The oil paintings are priced between $140000 and $200000, although a few are NFS (not for sale). As collectors of city and industrial imagery, we are absolutely on the look out for a Crawford photograph to add to our collection. Even if you're not in the market for a Crawford, the show is worth seeing, especially to consider the interplay of photography and painting in the history of American Art.
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By the way, there was a nice retrospective catalog on Crawford put out by the Whitney in 1986, if you are looking for some background on Crawford for your library.

Rating: * (1 star) GOOD (rating system defined here)

Ralston Crawford
Through November 29th

Zabriskie Gallery
41 East 57th Street
New York, NY 10022

Auction: Photographs, Featuring Works from the Estate of Dan Berley, November 21, 2008 @Rago

It's easy to get lulled into thinking that the only photography auctions worth following are those of the top two (or four, or however many) houses that are household names. The fact is, if you are as crazy as we are, there are lots of sales at smaller auction houses all over the world that have interesting photography up for sale (often at lower prices) that are worth checking out.

A terrific example of this is the upcoming sale at Rago (just outside Trenton, NJ). Dan Berley was a long time collector of photography (beginning in the 1960s) who partnered with gallery owner Lee Witkin to publish a number of photography portfolios in the days when photography galleries were few and far between. His collection spans all types and styles of photography, and this sale offers a wide range of excellent prints, particularly the portfolios, which are available from many artists (there are also quite a few complete Camera Work issues). There are a total of 301 lots up for sale, with a total high estimate of $1453600.

Here's the breakdown:

Total Low Lots (high estimate below $10000): 277
Total Low Estimate (sum of high estimates of Low lots): $857600

Total Mid Lots (high estimate between $10000 and $50000): 22

Total Mid Estimate: $476000

Total High Lots (high estimate above $50000): 2
Total High Estimate: $120000

Here are some of the lots we find of interest:

• 1032 Dr. Dain Tasker, Fuschia - Upright Type, 1930s
• 1042 Karl Struss, Cables, Singer Building, 1912
• 1080 Imogen Cunningham, Two Callas, 1929/1970
• 1084 Imogen Cunningham, Triangles, 1928/Later
• 1137 Edward Steichen, The George Washington Bridge, 1931 (image at right, top)
• 1146 Ralston Crawford, Interior View of Station, Newark, 1942 (image at right, bottom)
• 1254 Aaron Siskind, Chicago, 1952

There is some high quality work in this sale, well worth taking a look, even if you've never bought from Rago.

Photographs, Featuring Works from the Estate of Dan Berley

November 21st

Rago Arts and Auction Center

333 North Main Street

Lambertville, NJ 08530