Cutting Edge: Connecticut Artists Explore Precisionism

In the 1920s, the United States entered the Machine Age. As cities and household interiors embraced new technology and became sleek and modern, a group of artists developed a style that captured the zeitgeist: Precisionism. This exhibition explores the little-known artistic movement by focusing on the work of Connecticut artists who employed fine art and design to speak to these technological and social changes.

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New technologies developed and disseminated in the 1920s fundamentally transformed American life. American artists responded to this change with the development of a modernist artistic style called “Precisionism,” which grew alongside this urban and mechanical expansion. Marked by clean, sharply defined edges, flat, streamlined fields of color, and the presence of few or no people, the Precisionist style reflected the values and aesthetics of the Machine Age. As a fundamentally American modernist movement, Precisionism provides a window into this moment in American history.

Image Credit: Yvonne Pène Du Bois, 3rd Avenue Elevated, 1945, oil on canvas. New Britain Museum of American Art, 1948.16, Harriet Russell Stanley Fund.