George Ault

Infobox Artist
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name = George Ault


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caption = "Bright Light at Russell's Corners" (1946)
birthname =
birthdate = birth date |1891|10|11|
location = Cleveland, Ohio
deathdate = death date and age |1948|12|30|1891|10|11|
deathplace = Woodstock, New York
nationality = American
field = Painting
training =
movement = Precisionism
works =
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George Copeland Ault (October 11, 1891 – December 30, 1948) was an American painter. He was loosely grouped with the Precisionist movement and, though influenced by Cubism and Surrealism, his most lasting work is of a realist nature.

Ault was born in Cleveland, Ohio into a wealthy family and spent his youth in London, England, where he studied at the Slade School of Art and St. John's Wood School of Art. Returning to the United States in 1911, he spent the rest of his life in New York and New Jersey. His personal life henceforth was very troubled. He became alcoholic during the 1920s, after the death of his mother in a mental institution. Each of his three brothers committed suicide, two after the loss of the family fortune in the 1929 stock market crash. In 1937, Ault moved to Woodstock, New York and tried to put his difficulties in the past. Depending on his wife for income, he created some of his finest paintings during this time, but had difficulty selling them. In 1948, he apparently committed suicide by drowning. In his lifetime, his works were displayed at the Whitney Museum of American Art and the Addison Gallery of American Art (in Andover, Massachusetts), among others.

Ault worked in oil, watercolor, and pencil. He is often grouped with Precisionist painters such as Charles Sheeler and Ralston Crawford because of his unadorned representations of architecture and urban landscapes. However, the ideological aspects of Precisionism and the unabashed modernism of his influences are not so apparent in his work—for instance, he once referred to skyscrapers as the "tombstones of capitalism" and considered the industrialized American city "the Inferno without the fire" (Fryd, 57). Ault painted what he saw around him, simplifying detail slightly into flat shapes and planes, and portraying the underlying geometric patterns of structures. An analytical painter and ultimately a realist, he was especially noted for his realistic portrayal of light—especially the light of darkness—for he commonly painted nighttime scenes. Of his later paintings, such as "January, Full Moon"; "Black Night"; "August Night"; and "Bright Light at Russell's Corners" (pictured), "The New York Times" wrote:

References

* Fryd, Vivien Green (2003). "Art and the Crisis of Marriage: Edward Hopper and Georgia O'Keeffe." University of Chicago Press. ISBN 0-2262-6654-0I [For quotations only.]
* "What's New in Art". "New York Times", December 16, 1973.
* Smith, Roberta. " [http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=940DE7D6143DF93AA15757C0A96E948260 Review/Art; George Ault's Sad, Everyday Beauty in Stillness] ." "New York Times", April 29, 1988.

External links

* [http://americanart.si.edu/search/artist_bio.cfm?StartRow=1&ID=171 Short Biography] and [http://americanart.si.edu/search/search_artworks1.cfm?StartRow=1&ConID=171&format=short works] at the Smithsonian American Art Museum