Precisionism
プレシジョニズム / 1910s–1940s / Style / American Modern Art
Paints factories, silos, cities and machines reduced to clear contour, simple geometry and smooth planes.
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At a glance
Visual cues
- Sharp contours
- Industrial landscapes
- Geometric simplification
- Smooth surfaces
Best used for
- Rendering factories and warehouses as ordered and quiet images
- Showing industrial structure as form, with no people in the frame
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Dictionary entry
- Type
- Keep only the lettering already on the building and add none
- Composition
- Build on horizontals and verticals, split planes with hard diagonal shadows
- Material
- Smooth paint with no visible stroke, grey to white tones, hard light
- Caution
- Cleaning up contours without deciding where the light comes from leaves the planes unexplained, and the picture flattens into a technical drawing.
- Further study
- Charles Sheeler / Charles Demuth / Georgia O'Keeffe
Related entries
- Streamline Moderne (ストリームライン・モダン)Editorially linked for a useful contrast.Compare Precisionism and Streamline Moderne
- Modernism (モダニズム)Shared effects: Trust / Calm.Compare Precisionism and Modernism
Often confused with
More from American Modern Art
Continue through styles in the same American Modern Art family, prioritised by shared effects.
- Luminism (ルミニズム)Shared effects: Calm.
- Tonalism (トーナリズム)Shared effects: Calm.
- American Regionalism (アメリカン・リージョナリズム)Shared effects: Trust.
Browse all American Modern Art entries
Cite this entry
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- Link
- https://indexstyle.org/styles/precisionism
- Markdown
- [Precisionism — IndexStyle](https://indexstyle.org/styles/precisionism)
- HTML
- <a href="https://indexstyle.org/styles/precisionism">Precisionism — IndexStyle</a>