A descendant of French Huguenots and ancestors of the American Revolution, George Copeland Ault was born in Cleveland, Ohio, in 1891. When he was eight, Ault's family moved to London, England, where his father opened a printing company and thus introduced American printing techniques and American inks to Britain. Interested in art, Ault undertook a comprehensive study of drawing and painting at a variety of London's creative institutions, including University College, the Slade School, London University, and St. John's Wood Art School. He supplemented this formal training with visits to art museums in London and Paris where he could copy the work of recognized masters. In 1911, at the age of twenty, Ault returned to the States. He moved around New York and New Jersey until 1937, when he finally settled in the rural community of Woodstock, New York. He remained there until his accidental death by drowning in 1948.

Throughout his life, Ault devoted himself to artistic production in oil, watercolor, and drawing. Preferring familiar subjects from the local landscape, Ault's work firmly roots itself in the American scene. However, his Cubist-Realist technique of portraying the natural world according to the underlying geometry of its forms shows an influence of European Modernism.

Ault's early pictures were first exhibited at St. John's Wood Art School in 1908. The first American showing of his mature work occurred in New York in 1920, where the artist's individual approach earned positive attention. This trend continued, and the following year, he was honored by the Society of Independent Artists, who selected his work A New York Skyline for their show entitled "Our Choice of Independents." In his review of the exhibition, critic C. Lewis Hind commented that participating artists "promised that there was a future of American art away from the stereotype of the moribund academic productions of the day."1

Provincetown Waterfront depicts familiar elements from Ault's life in the summer community of Massachusetts. But rather than merely replicating an observation of houses along the shore, this watercolor reduces the scene to its primary elements, presenting only "the simple forms of which it was composed [and] leaving out all unessential detail."2

1. Quoted in a two-page typed information sheet given to the Frick Library by Milch Gallery on November 30, 1967, p. 1.
2. George C. Ault, quoted in a one-page information sheet, A Retrospective Exhibition: George C. Ault, Charlotte, N.C., The Mint Museum of Art, October 15 - November 15, 1950.

Biography courtesy of The Caldwell Gallery, www.antiquesandfineart.com/caldwell

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

Biography courtesy of Roughton Galleries, www.antiquesandfineart.com/roughton