Precisionism Painting. Precisionism was the first indigenous modern art movement in the United States and an early American contribution to the rise of Modernism. The Precisionist style, which first emerged after World War I and was at the height of its popularity during the 1920s and early 1930s, celebrated the new American landscape of skyscrapers, bridges, and factories in a form that has also been called Cubist-Realism. The term Precisionism was first coined in the mid-1920s, possibly by Museum of Modern Art director Alfred H. Barr although according to Amy Dempsey the term Precisionism was coined by Charles Sheeler. Painters working in this style were also known as the Immaculates, which was the more commonly used term at the time. The stiffness of both art-historical labels suggests the difficulties contemporary critics had in attempting to characterize these artists. Influenced by Cubism and Futurism, Precisionism took for its main themes industrialisation and the modernization of the American landscape, the structures of which were depicted in precise, sharply defined geometrical forms. Precisionist artists considered themselves strictly American and some were reluctant to acknowledge their European artistic influences. Yet it was readily apparent at the time that the fracturing of planes in many Precisionist paintings originates in the Cubism of Picasso and Leger; similarly, Precisionist renderings of shafts of light as rigidly drawn lines of force is a clear borrowing from Futurism. In the end, Precisionism was less about pure originality of expression and more about an energetic American use and amalgamation of certain European modernist techniques. Part of precisionism's originality is found in its subject matter and outlook. There is a degree of reverence for the industrial age in the movement, but social commentary was not fundamental to the style. Like Pop Art, Precisionism has on occasion been interpreted as a criticism of the de-natured society it portrays, though its artists did not often feel comfortable with this reading of their work. Elsie Driggs' Pittsburgh illustrates this gap in perception. A painting of black and gray steel-mill smokestacks, thick piping, and crisscrossing wires, with only clouds of smoke to relieve the severity of the image, viewers have been tempted to see this dark painting as a statement of environmental concern. To the contrary, Driggs always claimed that she intended an ironic beauty in the image and referred to it as my El Greco. Upon seeing the painting, Charles Daniel dubbed her one of the new classicists. More often than not, Precisionism implicitly celebrated man-made dynamism and new technologies. Possible exceptions to this statement are some of the darker, more claustrophobic city paintings of Louis Lozowick and the comic anti-capitalist satires of Preston Dickinson. As might be expected, varying degrees of abstraction are found in Precisionist works. The Figure 5 in Gold by Charles Demuth, a clamorous hommage to William Carlos Williams' imagist poem about a fire truck is abstract and stylized, while the paintings of Charles Sheeler sometimes verge on a form of photorealism. The majority of Precisionist paintings and drawings, however, present no obstacles in identifying their imagery. Some Precisionist work tended toward a highly controlled approach to technique and form as well as an application of hard-edged style to long-familiar American scenes. Precisionist artists aimed to convey the geometric and psychological essence of a scene or a structure but intended that essence to be almost immediately accessible. Most Precisionist imagery is urban: office towers, apartment houses, bridges, tunnels, subway platforms, streets, the skyline and grid of the modern city. Other artists, however, such as Charles Demuth, Niles Spencer, Ralston Crawford, Sanford Ross, and Charles Sheeler, applied the same approach to more pastoral settings and painted starkly geometric renderings of barns, cottages, country roads, and farm houses. Artists such as Stuart Davis and Gerald Murphy painted Precisionist still lifes as well. Many American artists worked in a Precisionist style over a twenty-year period. George Ault, Ralston Crawford, Francis Criss, Stuart Davis, Charles Demuth, Preston Dickinson, Elsie Driggs, Louis Lozowick, Gerald Murphy, Charles Sheeler, Niles Spencer, Morton Schamberg and Joseph Stella, were among the most prominent Precisionists. Examples of their work can be found in most major American museum collections.