Ralston crawford biography of michaels

Ralston Crawford
American, born Canada
(St. Catharines, Ontario, Canada , 1906 – 1978, Houston, Texas)

The simple, reductive early compositions of painter/photographer Ralston Crawford demonstrate his significance as an abstractionist of the early twentieth century.

A full generation younger than the pioneering abstract painters associated with Alfred Stieglitz, such as John Marin and Arthur Dove, Crawford preserved their dedication to the basic purity of formal composition and the legacy of European Modernism.

While many of his American contemporaries felt compelled by political and economic pressures to adopt polemical, figurative subject matter, Crawford embraced the real by abstracting it. As Barbara Haskell has written, ”In pursuing a geometric abstraction which was both expressive and rational he sustained an important current in twentieth-century American modernism.” (1)

Crawford was raised in Buffalo, New York.

His father, a former captain of a cargo vess