The decades following World War I witnessed the rise of two defining American-born movements: Precisionism and Magic Realism, which developed, respectively, at the height of US industrial power in the 1920s and into the Great Depression era. Both genres are considered a distinct American synthesis derived from European experiments. Informed by Cubism, Futurism, Purism and New Objectivity, Precisionism was part of a classicizing call to order in response to what many saw as the overly emotional excesses of German and Austrian Expressionism’s reaction to World War I.

In contrast, artists in the US began to articulate a cool detachment with a focus on formal concerns of structure, surface, and composition in depictions of America’s factories and industry as well as urban infrastructure. While drawing on many of the same aesthetic considerations as Precisionism, Magic Realism offered uncanny, dreamlike scenes often in response to the strangeness—and estrangement—of modern life. Among the strengths of the O’Brien Art Foundation and The Marty O’Brien Collection of American Art, these areas are represented by a variety of media with a particular focus on printmaking and watercolor.

Precisionism developed organically along the East Coast as artists focused on urban metropolises with their soaring skyscrapers and expansive bridges, burgeoning factories employing the latest technologies for assembly line manufacturing and imposing machinery that dwarfed—and even obviated—its human operators. Informed by streamlined Art Deco design aesthetics and the use of the camera as a compositional tool, Precisionist artists cropped, simplified, and edited subjects down to their “essence.”

Printmaking techniques were well suited for the Precisionist aesthetic for the ability to render rakish angles and sharp, clearly defined lines. This style is especially pronounced in Louis Lozowick’s Derricks and Men (1939), which features a heroic upward diagonal composition with the support wires of construction derricks forming the basis of ray lines—a technique drawn from Cubism and Futurism and favored by the Precisionists for depicting light. 

In addition to Lozowick, many printmakers worked in black and white to emphasize line, light, and shadow (key Precisionist strategies) to glorify, and later question, the industrial creations of humanity. Some examples include Howard Cook’s Queensboro Bridge (1930), Victoria Huntley’s Kopper’s Coke (1932), and Abe Ajay’s Heavy Industry (1935 –1943).

With the stock market crash in November 1929, the world grappled with the Great Depression. In this context, a younger, more geographically dispersed generation of Precisionists came of age. Older artists within the movement also reassessed their views as Precisionism expanded to include a greater number of rural scenes and still life compositions drawn from American folk traditions. Watercolors by second generation Precisionists, such as Edmund Lewandowski’s Industrial Plant (1938) and Edgar Corbridge’s Coal Yard on Harbor (c. 1940s) demonstrate the geographic diversity of the movement, its variation in subject matter, and the stylistic interface that occurred when American Scene subject matter was explored in depth by artists who created across multiple genres.

Importantly, Precisionism was surrounded, and often overshadowed, by more dominant styles, including Regionalism, Social Realism, Surrealism and its American cousin, Magic Realism. Lincoln Kirstein, in his introduction to the catalog for the Museum of Modern Art’s groundbreaking 1943 exhibition, American Realists and Magic Realists, described the artists’ aim: 

[…] to create images capable of instantaneous identification. By a combination of crisp hard edges, tightly indicated forms and the counterfeiting of material surfaces […] our eyes are deceived into believing in the reality of what is rendered, whether factual or imaginary. […] Magic realists try to convince us that extraordinary things are possible simply by painting them as if they existed. 

Kirstein’s words outlined how many aspects of Magic Realism applied equally to the works of the Precisionists, particularly by the late 1930s and 1940s. Many of these examples merging the two movements were included in the MoMA exhibition.

Francis Criss, Allan Gould, Charles Gouller, and Henry Koerner are among several artists in the collection who combined Precisionist techniques and conventions with Magic Realism. Goeller’s Dream of Fair Women (1941) was squarely placed in the Magic Realist canon when it was exhibited in 1952 at the Montclair Art Museum’s exhibition, The Illusion of Reality, an exhibition which mirrored MoMA’s American Realists and Magic Realists (1943). Years later, scholar Gail Stavitsky also contextualized Goeller’s 1940s works in the Magic Realist rubric when she noted, “The affinities of mood and technique between Goeller’s paintings and the work of Criss, [Peter] Blume, [Stefan] Hirsch, and particularly George Ault, reflect the differing directions Precisionism took from the 1930s onwards, particularly towards Surrealism and Magic Realism.”

Although painted a decade before the MoMA exhibition and two decades before The Illusion of Reality, Gould’s Sawmill (1932) and Criss’s Americana (1933) are Precisionist icons that presage their later Magic Realist works. The flattened planes of bright colors, careful rendering, rakish angles, and focus on the built environment exemplified by Americana are classic Precisionist tropes, while the work’s subject veered in a narrative direction unusual for the movement. In this work, an assortment of equipment on the street and a wooden figure based on stereotyped images of Native Americans are seemingly engaged in conversation with the machined and nearly faceless figures, adding a sense of ambiguity that makes the picture seem simultaneously real and unreal.

Koerner’s The River (1949) is similarly characterized by meticulous rendering, sleek forms, and unusually clear but off-kilter perspectives, all positioned around a sturdy bridge with its solid support structures, speaking to Kirstein’s observation that Magic Realism was a “frank, cool art” in which artists created an alternate reality simply by depicting it as if it existed. Zoltan Sepeshy’s Suntan (1941) depicts a fantastical landscape with figures lying on a promenade. The scene is unexpectedly framed by the painter’s outsized hands, centering the role of the artist in creating an alternate view of the visible world.