Who is George Ault?

George Copeland Ault (October 11, 1891 – December 30, 1948) was an American painter. He was loosely grouped in imitation of the Precisionist doings and, though influenced by Cubism and Surrealism, his most lasting doing is of a realist nature.

Ault was born in Cleveland, Ohio, USA, into a rich family and spent his teenage years in London, England, where he studied at the Slade School of Art and St John’s Wood School of Art. Returning to the United States in 1911, he spent the settle of his enthusiasm in New York and New Jersey. His personal activity henceforth was troubled. He became alcoholic during the 1920s, after the death of his mommy in a mental institution. Each of his three brothers operating suicide, two after the loss of the family fortune in the 1929 amassing market crash.

Although he had exhibited his works subsequent to some success, by the early 1930s his neurotic tricks and reclusiveness had alienated him from the gallery world. In 1937, Ault moved to Woodstock, New York subsequent to Louise Jonas, who would become his second wife, and tried to put his difficulties in the past. In Woodstock the couple lived a penurious existence in a small rented cottage that had no electricity or indoor plumbing. Depending upon Louise for income, Ault created some of his finest paintings during this time, but had difficulty selling them. In 1948, Ault was discovered dead five days after drowning in the Sawkill Brook on December 30, when he had taken a single-handedly walk in stormy and dark weather. The death was deemed a suicide by the coroner. In his lifetime, his works were displayed at the Whitney Museum of American Art and the Addison Gallery of American Art (in Andover, Massachusetts), among others.

Ault worked in oil, watercolor and pencil. He is often grouped with Precisionist painters such as Charles Sheeler and Ralston Crawford because of his unadorned representations of architecture and urban landscapes. However, the ideological aspects of Precisionism and the unabashed modernism of its influences are not correspondingly apparent in his work—for instance, he once referred to skyscrapers as the “tombstones of capitalism” and considered the industrialized American city “the Inferno without the fire”. Ault painted what he saw going on for him, simplifying detail slightly into flat shapes and planes, and portraying the underlying geometric patterns of structures. In his wife’s words, painting for him was a means of “creating order out of chaos.” An systematic painter and ultimately a realist, Ault is noted for his viable portrayal of light—especially the lively of darkness—for he commonly painted nighttime scenes. Of his higher paintings, such as January, Full Moon; Black Night; August Night; and Bright Light at Russell’s Corners (pictured), Roberta Smith of The New York Times wrote:

In 2011 the Smithsonian American Art Museum organized a major exhibition going on for Ault’s work, which traveled to the Georgia Museum of Art.