My agenda in reading this exhibition catalogue was to get a better sense of how "Precisionism" related to other art movements. Considering how much its practitioners were influenced by Dada (Marcel Duchamp was a direct influence since he was residing in New York at the time) and Futurism, you could write the Precisionists off as a down-market expression of European trends, except that the argument is also made that while World War II destroyed the more benign beliefs in the supremacy of the machine, the movement still contributed to Minimalism and Pop Art, among other American artistic genres. That it was demonstrated that this art was not merely some sort of dead end was what I was looking for.

There is also something of an irony in this book, in as the assorted essayists want to link Precisionism, with its fascination with the high technology of the time, with contemporary obsessions relating to digital technology, these people are now caught like insects in amber, as the COVID epidemic, and the Russo-Ukrainian war, basically broke the globalist economy, putting a severe dent in those enthusiasms.

Also, granted that the contributors are mostly concerned about the relationship between art and technology, it does seem that there was an opportunity to write about Precisionism in relation to other American schools of epic landscape painting.

Finally, as a last word, I particularly like the observation taken from Georgia O'Keefe on the New York cultural scene of the the 1920s, and how while the denizens of the salons talked about creating the "Great American Novel," or the "Great American Play," no one was talking about creating the "Great American Painting." If that isn't a declaration of "challenge accepted," I don't know what is. ( )