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Ralston Crawford

Steel Foundry, Coatesville, Pa.
1936–1937

Not on view

Date
1936–1937

Classification
Paintings

Medium
Oil on canvas

Dimensions
Overall: 32 1/8 × 40in. (81.6 × 101.6 cm)

Accession number
37.10

Credit line
Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; purchase

Rights and reproductions
© Ralston Crawford Estate / Licensed by VAGA at Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

API
artworks/2274

During the Depression, Ralston Crawford’s paintings of highways, grain elevators, and steel foundries captured America’s enduring optimism about technology and progress. Like the work of his Precisionist contemporaries, such as Elsie Driggs and Charles Sheeler, Steel Foundry, Coatesville, Pa. depicts the functional architecture of commerce and industry using bold geometric forms and crisp lines. In Crawford’s portrayal, the foundry becomes a looming silhouette devoid of human presence, its architecture reduced to an arrangement of flat, monochromatic planes. Two fences act as barriers that close off the structure from the street. Crawford exaggerates the size and severity of the building by contrasting it sharply with the flattened fences and telephone poles in the foreground, as well as the background of wispy clouds.