Shipboard

Depicting a cluster of smokestacks, ducts, and pipes on an ocean liner, this drawing features the kinds of mechanical and industrial imagery embraced by Precisionist artists as icons of modern America. A style that arose in the 1920s, Precisionism was characterized by simplified geometric forms and an absence of human beings. Here George Copeland Ault cropped the view of the ship’s machinery in order to focus attention on the aesthetic potential of his subject—the play of rounded and linear shapes and dark and light tones—rather than its practical function.