George Ault in Trenton

You’ve been given a rare opportunity at the State Museum in Trenton (until June 11, 1989) to see the work of the most neglected of the American Precisionists, George C. Ault (1891-1948). I’ve been picking up on this obscure figure for the past 20 years—a canvas at the DeYoung in San Francisco, another at the Sheldon Memorial Gallery at the University of Nebraska, one at the Walker in Minneapolis, one at the Newark.
I grew inordinately fond of Ault—dribs here, drabs there. So I was thrilled to learn that a satellite of the Whitney had, without fanfare, been circulating a substantial gathering of his canvases and drawings for display in New York, Memphis, Omaha and now, and finally, Trenton.

Because so many are from private collections, this may be the last time in our generation that we can get a good look at Ault’s strangely different brand of Precisionism.

His sad life history, neatly interleaved with excellent criticism in a bargain of a catalog ($19), accounts for those differences. He was born into a wealthy Cleveland family, and his bent for the arts led him to the Slade School when his father moved the family to London.

In 1911, his father moved the family back to New Jersey to set up a plant for making printer’s ink, and for a time he tried to persuade George to go into the business.

His pressuring George had the perverse effect of transforming the stiff British version of impressionism he had picked up at the Slade into an interest in the industrial shapes that were to attract Futurists and Cubists in Europe and the Precisionists in America.

But George’s quirkiness skewed him more toward De Chirico for bleak urban landscapes and Albert Pinkham Ryder for his spooky moonscapes. One of the evident achievements of the Trenton exhibition is that it captures Ault teetering back and forth from the received agenda of Precisionism to his own idiosyncratic style.

“Dory Abstractions” reminds you of Lionel Feininger, “Smoke Stacks” of Demuth, “Shipboard” of Sheeler. Sometimes he seems off on a different track entirely, as in “Festus Yayple and His Oxen,” a weird blend of John Kane and Lauren Harris. Or “Provincetown #1,” which could be a Stuart Davis. And “Early America” is 90% Grant Wood. The volatility of his life is echoed in the vagaries of his oeuvre.

My, what a mess that became. When his father’s business failed in the Depression, George’s brothers committed suicide. His mother died in a mental institution. During the ‘20s he had gloried in the friendships and ambience of Greenwich Village. At the disappearance of parental stipends, however, he declined into alcoholism, moved to Woodstock, and at the age of 57 died an apparent suicide, drowning in a creek by his house.

Out of this torment nonetheless emerged the night paintings—mysterious nightscapes centering on Russell’s Corners in Woodstock. A suite of four of them will please the discerning eye, and a handful more make Ault our lunar laureate: “Construction Night,” “January Full Moon,” New Moon, New York,” even “Factory Chimney” form the Philadelphia Museum of Art.

The most stunning piece in the show, itself worth a trek to Trenton, is the sweetly minimalist “The Pianist,” in which we view the back of the performer’s head, front-lit by the lamp on her music stand. It’s a resonant masterpiece.

The exhibit contains a score of tasty daylight architectural studies of the kind we associate with Niles Spencer and Ralston Crawford. But Ault really satisfies us in his darkest moods. Occasionally, this love of the dark tempts him into engaging abstract compositions in which intense colors in the nightscape literally and symbolically illumine the scene.

“Sullivan Street Abstraction” and “New Moon, New York” are the most successful. “Greenwich Village Nocturne” is the most experimental, playing around with an analytical cubism in reflective planes. It doesn’t quite do it for my eye, but it makes you rue the grief that hobbled Ault as he tried to express his idiosyncratic vision.

As I schmoozed with curator Paula Foley, she proudly announced that the following exhibit—on Oscar Bluemner—had already arrived from the Amon Carter Museum in Fort Worth.

Not a bad showing for the undervalued State Museum: Retrieving two substantial New Jersey modernists in one season. Bluemner, like Ault, fled what he came to regard as the hothouse of New York for more bucolic precincts.

But more of that in August. Now’s the time not to miss Ault.
 
Reprinted from Welcomat: After Dark, Hazard-at-Large, June 7, 1989