Icons of Industrial Expansion:
American Precisionist Prints, 1925-1941
At Baruch's Mishkin Gallery

March 18 -April 22, 1999

Celebrating the technological advances of the early part of the twentieth century, American Precisionist printmakers created sleek Machine-Age images of skyscrapers, bridges, and factories. These artists used a machine-the printing press-to "manufacture" works of art with cool, crisp lines and hard-edge shapes that conveyed the same type of efficiency reflected in Ford's assembly lines. While Precisionist paintings and works on paper have been the subject of previous exhibitions, Icons of Industrial Expansion: American Precisionist Prints, 1925-1941 is the first to focus exclusively on Precisionist prints.

The exhibition, which features etchings, engravings, lithographs, woodcuts, and serigraphs, opens at Baruch College's Mishkin Gallery on March 18 and continues through April 22, 1999. Guest curator Dr. Marilyn Kushner, Curator of Prints and Drawings at the Brooklyn Museum of Art, has assembled a broad range of work by fourteen artists, including such well-known twentieth-century figures as Stuart Davis, Charles Sheeler, and Louis Lozowick. Also represented in the exhibition are prints by James Allen, Howard Cook, Ernest Fiene, Gerald K. Geerlings, Victoria Ebbels Hutson Huntley, Armin Landeck, Edward Landon, Martin Lewis, Jan Matulka, Arnold Ronnebeck, and Benton Spruance.

As skyscrapers reached new heights and bridges spanned greater distances, the American Precisionists captured the spirit of industrial expansion in the 1920s and 1930s. First called Immaculate Art and later known as Precisionism, this movement is defined by the absence of human figures, the dominance of architecture, and the glorification of the technology that transformed the skyline of New York from a view of small, brick buildings to a vista of mammoth towers of concrete and steel.

Though Cubist influences are evident in some of the Precisionists' work, their art is essentially indigenous-the skyscraper and the automobile assembly line were wholly American inventions. The titles of many of the prints, among them Manhattan Canyon, Delmonico Building, Brooklyn Bridge, Edison Plant, Sixth Avenue El, and Chrysler Building, provide abundant evidence of how these artists were drawn to the towering cityscapes of the new America. Collectively these works celebrate the power, energy, and optimism of a nation newly emerging as an industrial titan.
Opening Reception: Wednesday, March 17,5-7 p.m.

Gallery Talk: Dr. Kushner will give a gallery talk on Wednesday, March 17 at immediately preceding the opening reception.

The Sidney Mishkin Gallery is located at 135 East 22 Street, New York City. Gallery hours are:
Monday-Friday, 12 noon-5 p.m.
Thursdays, 12 noon-7 p.m.
Free and Open to the Public.

© 1999 Sidney Mishkin Gallery, Baruch College

Zane Berzins (news office)
(212) 802-2881
zberzins@newton.baruch.cuny.edu