GEORGE AULT 1891-1948
Sculpture on a Roof, 1945
Oil on board, 16 X 12" (40.64 x 30.48 cm.)
Unsigned
Gift of Mrs. George Ault, 961-0-131

Born in Cleveland, Ohio, George Ault spent most of his childhood in London, where his father was engaged in ink manufacture. He received art training at the Slade School of Art and St. John's Wood School of Art, London, returning to the United States in 1911. Ault's early works were urban vistas similar to those of Joseph Pennell, although quite early in his career he became interested in night effects, a major theme in many of his later works.
In the early 1920s, as he gradually incorporated ideas from Cubism, Surrealism, and American folk art, Ault began to develop a modern style. His subject matter remained similar to that of his early work, but he deliberately employed flat shapes, strong geometric patterns, odd viewpoints and slightly skewed perspective effects. Ault also favored slightly unreal colors-teals, mauves, olive greens, oranges, and a cool sky blue-like those used in Art Deco decor. During this period, he established relationships with a number of progressive dealers and began to develop an artistic reputation. Although Ault is often grouped with Precisionists Ralston Crawford and Charles Sheeler, he did not idealize modern life as they generally did. Rather, his urban landscapes, filled with a sense of disquiet and psychic distress, echo both Giorgio de Chirico, the Italian Surrealist, and Albert Pinkham Ryder, the American romantic visionary.
By the mid-1920s, personal problems began to interfere with Ault's artistic progress. The home in which he had grown up was emotionally troubled; his mother died in a mental institution and three of his brothers committed suicide. By the time of his father's death in 1929, the family fortune was largely dissipated. These unfortunate circumstances may explain the increasing turbulence and unhappiness of Ault's personal life. Whatever the exact cause, during the 1920s, Ault grew neurotic and reclusive. He developed a severe case of alcoholism, almost blinding himself drinking poisonous bathtub gin. His behavior became so strange that his artist and dealer friends began to avoid him.

In 1937, hoping to create a new life and escape his alcoholism, Ault moved to Woodstock, New York. There he lived in a series of rented buildings, depending for income mainly on his wife, who worked for small town newspapers in the region. In this period Ault created his most haunting and powerful works. Though these were his finest works, he had difficulty selling his paintings and gradually slipped into ever greater emotional despair. On December 50, 1948, Ault committed suicide in Woodstock at the age of fifty-seven.
Sculpture on a Roof, a striking example of the flat, precise geometric compositions for which Ault is celebrated, is a continuation of a series of rooftop paintings which Ault began in 1931.1 These images were all based on the roof of his building in New York City at 50 Commerce Street, where in 1935, Ault met his future wife, Louise Jonas, sunbathing. It seems likely that the fragments of classical sculpture-a headless female torso, the lower half of a male figure, and a disembodied head-serve to evoke this meeting, but in a manner which combines a hint of eroticism with a feeling of impotence. The female torso is based on a marble Aphrodite that Ault's father had purchased in London, and thus refers not only to his meeting with Louise but to his childhood. The earlier canvases of this series were painted in New York, but Sculpture on A Roof was executed from memory in Woodstock in 1945. The arched windows and the fragments of classical sculpture allude to the work of de Chirico, although the small scale of these elements, the large area taken up by the empty sky, and the general coolness of the colors, endow the painting with an ominous coldness which is more northern and less Mediterranean in spirit, than are de Chirico's canvases. In its curious mix of eroticism and inhibition, modernism and nostalgia, the painting exemplifies the most fascinating qualities of Ault's work.

HENRY ADAMS