American and nocturnal precisionism of Woodstock

Discover George Ault, American painter of precisionism, author of silent and nocturnal architectures where clean lines, electric light and anxiety transform the ordinary landscape.

George Copeland Ault was born in Cleveland in 1891 and grew up partly in London, where he studied at the Slade School of Fine Art and then at St John's Wood School of Art. Returning to the United States during the First World War, he settled in New York and exhibited watercolors, drawings and paintings devoted to streets, bridges, factories and buildings. His work is often linked to precisionism, an American movement which translates the industrial age into clean shapes, smooth surfaces and rigorous geometry. Ault shares with Charles Sheeler or Ralston Crawford the attention paid to architecture, but his vision remains more solitary and unstable. Closed facades, posts, wires electrics and deep shadows build familiar places that seem suspended outside of time. Family, economic and personal difficulties marked his life. In 1937, he left New York with Louise Jonas, whom he married, and settled near Woodstock in New York State. The countryside did not dissipate the tension of his images; it gives it a new central motif. At Russell's Corners, a banal crossroads becomes, in several nocturnal versions, an architecture of light. A lamp suddenly illuminates barn, road and post while the night absorbs all human presence. Ault works slowly, carefully prepares his drawings and produces relatively little. Several works have been lost or destroyed, making his corpus difficult to reconstruct. He died in 1948 after a drowning, the circumstances of which were probably considered voluntary. Rediscovered since then, his landscapes are among the most singular visions of American modernity. The "George Ault" selection offers its own journey on this subject. The "George Ault" selection offers its own journey on this subject. His reading favors composition.

At Ault, precision is not reassuring: it makes each line, each shadow and each light more intensely mysterious.