Woodstock Landscape

1938

Active in the modernist art circles of New York City during the 1920s and 1930s, George Ault moved upstate to Woodstock in 1937 for health reasons. He transferred his Precisionist idiom—with its simplified geometric forms and flat planes of color—from its usual urban industrial subjects to the rural landscape. In contrast to the cool objectivity of images by his Precisionist colleagues such as Charles Sheeler and Charles Demuth, Ault’s works often resonate with melancholic emotion, evident here in the dead trees, barren field, and moody sky.