Francis Criss (1901-1973) United States "portrait Of A Woman" Pastel

"Portrait of a Woman" pastel, signed lower left and upper dim: 70 x 50 cm.

Francis Hyman Criss (1901 - 1973) was an American painter. Criss's style is associated with the American Precisionists like Charles Demuth and his friend Charles Sheeler.
"Francis Criss". John Simon Guggenheim Foundation. Retrieved 3 September 2021.
The work 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 with a streamlined, abstracted style, devoid of human figures, that led him to be associated with the Precisionism movement. With distorted perspectives and dream-like juxtapositions, as in Jefferson Market Courthouse (1935), these empty cityscapes also suggest the influence of Surrealism.^{[citation needed]}
A turn towards more commercial work later in his career—including a November 1942 cover for Fortune Magazine—led to a decline in his reputation.^{[citation needed]} Criss died in 1973 in New York City.^[1]
His work is in the collections of the Brooklyn Museum,^[2] the Detroit Institute of Arts,^[3] the Philadelphia Museum of Art,^[4] the Smithsonian American Art Museum,^[1] and the Whitney Museum of American Art.^[5]
In 2021 Criss' painting Alma Sewing was featured in an essay by the art critic Sebastian Smee in the Washington Post. Smee considers Alma Sewing to be Criss' finest work.^[6] The painting in the collection of the High Museum of Art in Atlanta, Georgia.^[7]
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