Ralston Crawford

Ralston Crawford is best known for his Precisionist abstract paintings suggestive of urban landscapes and industrial spaces. Influenced by Charles Sheeler and Charles Demuth, Crawford painted industrial architecture, meandering lines, and fractured forms evoking either machine or the body, all in colorful compositions. In 1946, he was famously commissioned by Fortune magazine to document the atomic bomb tests at Bikini Atoll in a series of abstract, angular paintings. Crawford was also an accomplished printmaker and urban documentary photographer.