Washington, DC - An important yet overlooked modernist, Francis Criss made a significant contribution to American art from 1928 to 1939. Restructured Reality: The 1930s Paintings of Francis Criss is the first exhibition since the early 1930s to examine the painter’s most creative years. The 20 paintings on view, many of which have never been exhibited before, showcase Criss at the height of his career and restore him to his rightful place among the important American painters of the 1930s and 1940s. Restructured Reality: The 1930s Paintings of Francis Criss opens at the Corcoran Gallery of Art on August 4 and remains on view through October 14, 2001. Following its presentation at the Corcoran, the exhibition will travel to Florida and Philadelphia.
Though critically esteemed during the period of his greatest achievement in the 1930s, audiences today know little about this modernist painter. Francis Criss was born in 1901 into a Jewish family of Russian descent. He studied at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, the Barnes Foundation, the Art Students League, and as a Cresson fellow in Europe. He also received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1934 for study in Italy. Francis Criss began to exhibit his paintings in 1931 and his provocative cityscapes and portraits increasingly drew attention for their clean lines, simplified forms and flat color. His first significant achievement was his inclusion in the inaugural Whitney Biennial Exhibition in 1932, from which the museum purchased his Astor Place (1932) for its permanent collection. Criss’ style has defied categorization since the 1930s, but he is often linked with such Precisionists as George Ault, Charles Demuth and Charles Sheeler.
Restructured Reality examines Criss’ most ambitious cityscapes and portraits from the 1930s. The exhibition highlights his provocative style, a distinctive blend of
Precisionism and Surrealism, combining figuration, abstraction and fantasy. Criss often painted in a series, two of which are on view in the exhibition. Revealing his working method, these paintings collectively illustrate how Criss began with complicated designs and slowly reduced them to the bare essentials of lines, shapes and color.
Throughout the 1930s and early 1940s, Criss’ work continued to be featured in prestigious exhibitions, including the Carnegie Exhibitions and six Corcoran Biennials. In 1935, making his first appearance in the Corcoran Biennial, Criss exhibited Morning in Florence. Completed during his studies in Europe, the work showcases his signature compactness of design, preference for architectural clarity and smoothly brushed forms of unmodulated color.
A charter member of the American Artists’ Congress, organized in 1936, Criss was also a founding member of the "American Group" which included Philip Evergood, Jack Levine, and William Gropper. In 1938, Criss participated in the first exhibition of the World Alliance for Yiddish Culture along with Stuart Davis and Chaim Gross. He was also involved with the Works Progress Administration (WPA) and throughout the 1930s participated in major exhibitions of young artists and won prestigious scholarships. In the 1940s, however, he became less prolific as his time was spent in commercial art and teaching in order to support his family. As a result, Criss painted infrequently for the remainder of his life and his reputation declined significantly. He died in 1973.
"This exhibition brings Criss and his early work into view once again," says exhibition curator Linda Lichtenberg Kaplan, "and provides the opportunity to assess the artist’s most ambitious paintings. Seeing them together should assure him a place in the history of American modernism alongside his more celebrated peers."
The exhibition is guest curated by Linda Lichtenberg Kaplan and is coordinated at the Corcoran by Dorothy Moss, Assistant Curator of American Art. After its presentation at the Corcoran, Restructured Reality: The 1930s Paintings of Francis Criss will travel to the Samuel P. Harn Museum at the University of Florida, Gainesville, and the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts in Philadelphia.
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