Francis Hyman Criss (1901 – 1973) was an American painter. Criss’s style is allied with the American Precisionists in imitation of Charles Demuth and his friend Charles Sheeler.
Criss was born in London and immigrated considering his relatives at age four. He attended the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts from 1917 to 1921 on a scholarship, and progressive the Art Students League of New York and the Barnes Foundation, and he took private classes behind Jan Matulka. In addition to doing performance for the U.S. Government below the New Deal, and contributing a mural for the Williamsburg Housing Project in Brooklyn for the Federal Art Project, Criss taught at the leftist American Artists School in the 1930s. His pupils there included Ad Reinhardt. He as well as held teaching positions at numerous other institutions, including the Albright Museum School, Buffalo; the Art Students League; the New School for Social Research; and the School of Visual Arts. Criss was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1934.
The decree from his best-known years, the 1930s and 1940s, is characterized by imagery of the urban environment, such as elevated subway tracks, skyscrapers, streets, and bridges. Criss rendered these subjects past a streamlined, abstracted style, devoid of human figures, that led him to be joined with the Precisionism movement. With untouched perspectives and dream-like juxtapositions, as in Jefferson Market Courthouse (1935), these empty cityscapes also recommend the influence of Surrealism.
A slant towards more commercial produce an effect later in his career—including a November 1942 lid for Fortune Magazine—led to a halt in his reputation.
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