Francis Criss

Francis Hyman Criss (1901 - 1973) was an American painter. Criss's style is joined with the American Precisionists in the same way as Charles Demuth and his friend Charles Sheeler.

Criss was born in 1901 in London and immigrated when his relations at age four. He attended the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts from 1917 to 1921 upon a scholarship, and far ahead the Art Students League of New York and the Barnes Foundation, and he took private classes next Jan Matulka. In addition to doing doing 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 after that 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 affect 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 when a streamlined, abstracted style, devoid of human figures, that led him to be united with the Precisionism movement. With misused perspectives and dream-like juxtapositions, as in Jefferson Market Courthouse (1935), these blank cityscapes also suggest the disturb of Surrealism.^{[citation needed]}

A outlook towards more commercial perform later in his career—including a November 1942 cover for Fortune Magazine—led to a stop in his reputation.^{[citation needed]} Criss died in 1973 in New York City.

HIs function is in the collections of the Brooklyn Museum, the Detroit Institute of Arts, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Smithsonian American Art Museum, and the Whitney Museum of American Art.

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. The painting in the deposit of the High Museum of Art in Atlanta, Georgia.