Ralston Crawford

(American, 1906–1978)

new york city buildings, 1930s by ralston crawford

Ralston Crawford

New York City Buildings, 1930s, 1930–1939

Price on Request

Biography

Timeline

1910 - 1926
Moves to Buffalo, New York; works various jobs, including employment as an architectural draftsman; during vacations he travels with his father, a ship’s captain, around the Great Lakes
1926 - 1927
Works as sailor on steamships to Central America, California, and the Caribbean; studies in Los Angeles at Otis Art Institute, 1927; employed as illustrator in Walt Disney’s studio, 1927
1927 - 1930
Studies at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in Philadelphia (under Hugh Breckenridge), and at the Barnes Foundation in Merion, Pennsylvania
1930 - 1932
Moves to New York to paint; summers in Gloucester, Massachusetts; receives good reviews by Edward Alden Jewell of The New York Times
1932 - 1933
Travels to Paris, Spain and Italy; returns to New York to study at Columbia University
1935 - 1939
Lives and paints in Chadds Ford and Exton, Pennsylvania; subjects of paintings are mostly local barns and industrial images; experiments with photography, which remains a lifetime interest; continues to receive favorable reviews in The New York Times and in the New York Sun
1940 - 1941
Participates in group exhibition A New Realism: Crawford, Demuth, Sheeler, Spencer at the Cincinnati Art Museum; produces paintings, book jackets and book illustrations in New York
1943 - 1945
Serves as master sergeant, chief of the Visual Presentation Unit of the Weather Division in the Army Air Force; assigned to the China-Burma and India theatre; visits Curtiss-Wright aircraft plant in Buffalo, and in ensuing years makes paintings relating to his photographs of the assemblage of airplane wings at the plant; solo exhibition at Downtown Gallery, New York, 1944
1947 - 1950
Teaches and paints in Honolulu, Brooklyn, Cincinnati, Minneapolis and Baton Rouge; solo show at Downtown Gallery, New York, 1950
1951 - 1957
Travels in Europe and returns to New York, 1951-52; teaches at New School for Social Research, New York, 1952-57

Exhibitions

1937
Boyer Gallery, Philadelphia, PA (first solo show)