Ralston Crawford
American, born Canada, 1906 - 1978Overseas Highway, 1940
Not on view
Color lithograph on paper
Dimensions12 5/8 × 19 in. (32.1 × 48.3 cm)
Image: 10 × 16 in. (25.4 × 40.6 cm)
Gift of Mrs. R. S. Bishop, 1943.1
The subject of this lithograph is a bridge across the Key West highway in Florida, newly built at the time Crawford saw it. This image was printed in 1940 and is allied to two oil paintings of the same subject. The public response to the motif was such that the paintings were immediately sold and the edition of twenty-five proofs was exhausted. The artist had evidently touched a sympathetic chord with his subject, though he had painted many pictures of bridges and other industrial constructions typical of the twentieth century.
In “Overseas Highway.” Crawford’s simplified forms send the eye traveling down the pristine pavement, culminating in a pleasantly clouded destination. The artist’s streamlined visual language conveys this message without hinting at sentimentality. He once wrote: “It is clear to me that the forms of the Italian Renaissance as well as the Victorian viewpoint, for example, are not adequate for modern visual comment.” Crawford masterfully uses the rules of linear perspective, a system developed in the early Renaissance to represent three-dimensional objects on a two-dimensional surface in order to create the illusion of space.
