Still Life in Interior

Preston DickinsonWW-1920-022194

1920·Oil on canvas·71.1 × 50.8 cm (28 × 20 in.)

<p>Preston Dickinson studied in Paris between 1911 and 1914, and, influenced by avant-garde movements, began experimenting with form and color in his own work. In <em>Still Life in Interior</em>, he depicted a variety of everyday items, including magazines, a sake bottle, a tea canister painted with Japanese figures, and a cup and saucer, adopting an exaggerated perspective from above to create the perception of overlapping, flattened shapes in space. He was also careful to use complementary colors, particularly yellow and blue, which create a sense of rhythmic movement through the composition. Dickinson achieved great critical success in the 1920s with works like this one, but died of pneumonia at the age of 41.</p>

Catalogue

Year: 1920
Medium: Oil on canvas
Dimensions: 71.1 × 50.8 cm (28 × 20 in.)
Collection: Art Institute of Chicago
Artist: Preston Dickinson

Artist

Preston Dickinson

Painting

Preston Dickinson was an American painter and printmaker working in the early modernist idiom, known for precisionist still lifes and industrial landscapes executed in oil and watercolor. Active in New York during the 1920s, he developed a distinctive approach to geometric abstraction rooted in observed reality, particularly the architecture of factories, bridges, and domestic interiors. His work bridges American Precisionism and European modernism, employing flattened planes and sharp-edged forms to distill complex spatial relationships into a formal language of clarity and restraint.

New York, NY, USA

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