More than twenty years ago—in the fall of 1960—Martin L. Friedman organized an exhibition at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis that significantly altered our perspective on American art between the two World Wars. It was called “The Precisionist View in American Art,” and it consisted of paintings by, among others, George Ault, Ralston Crawford, Stuart Davis, Charles Demuth, Elsie Driggs, Louis Guglielmi, Louis Lozowick, Georgia O’Keeffe, Morton L. Schamberg, Charles Sheeler, and Niles Spencer. Some of these artists had long been highly regarded, of course. A few were established classics. Others—George Ault and Elsie Driggs, for example—Mr. Friedman had rescued from an undeserved obscurity. Whatever their degree of fame or obscurity, however, most of the painters represented in the “Precisionist View” exhibition were no longer very much discussed by critics, curators, and historians caught up in the more immediate excitements of the New York School. Avant-garde opinion tended to dismiss them as irrelevant, and academic opinion in those days paid scant attention to any aspect of American modernist art that could not be regarded as part of the direct ancestry of the New York School. Mr. Friedman had thus performed an important service in restoring these painters to our attention, and in reminding us of their special qualities—qualities that contrasted sharply not only with the tastes and practices then dominating the contemporary art scene but with the spirit that governed it as well.

Precisionist painting was not, for one thing, a mode of abstraction. It was deeply