Precisionism

Influenced by Cubism, Purism, and Futurism, Precisionist artists reduced subjects to their essential geometric shapes, eliminated detail, and often used planes of light to create a sense of crisp focus and suggest the sleekness and sheen of machine forms.

While influenced by European modernist artistic movements like Cubism, Purism, and Futurism, Precisionism focused on the themes of industrialization and modernization in the American landscape, using precise, sharply defined geometrical forms.

(In addition to his meticulously detailed paintings like River Rouge Plant and American Landscape, Sheeler, like his friend Paul Strand, also created sharply focused photographs of factories and public buildings.

[9] Precisionist artists often focused on urban imagery: office towers, apartment houses, bridges, tunnels, subway platforms, streets, the skyline and grid of the modern city.

American artists whose work has been labeled as reflective of Precisionism include: Anna Held Audette,[10] George Ault, Ralston Crawford, Francis Criss, Stuart Davis, Charles Demuth, Georgia O'Keeffe, Preston Dickinson, Elsie Driggs, Louis Lozowick, Gerald Murphy, Charles Sheeler, Niles Spencer, Morton Schamberg, Joseph Stella,[11] Charles Rosen, Dale Nichols, Millard Sheets,[12]Edward Hopper, Virginia Berresford, Henry Billings, Peter Blume, Stefan Hirsch, Edmund Lewandowski, John Storrs, Miklos Suba, Sandor Bernath, Herman Trunk, Arnold Wiltz, Clarence Holbrook Carter, Edgar Corbridge and the photographers Paul Strand and Lewis Hine.

Georgia O'Keeffe's husband, photographer and art dealer Alfred Stieglitz, was a highly regarded mentor for the group and was especially supportive of Paul Strand.