George Copeland Ault was born in Cleveland, OH in 1891 to a wealthy family. Ault spent much of his childhood in London, and studied art at the University College School in London, the Slade School of Fine Art, and St. John's Wood School of Art.
In the 1920s, Ault returned to New York and focused primarily on painting the city’s urban environment and architecture. Today, Ault is most associated with the Precisionist movement, though his work was also heavily influenced by Cubism and Surrealism. Ault’s commitment to geometric forms, sharp lines, and the American landscape can be seen echoed in fellow Precisionist’s work like artists Charles Sheeler, Charles Demuth, and Ralston Crawford.
Working primarily in oil, watercolor, and pencil, Ault’s created sparse, modernist depictions of urban landscapes that would later come to define his work. Like other fellow Precisionists, his work often depicts New York City’s industrial and commercial districts, such as New York Night, No. 2 (1921) and View from Brooklyn (1927). Ault’s compositions of factories and skyscrapers celebrated the beauty of modern technology while critiquing the rapidly changing landscape, using a sharp focus and unexpected viewpoints and angles to create dynamic compositions.
George Copeland Ault’s life was marked by personal misfortune, having lost most of his family under tragic circumstances. After his mother passed away in a mental institution, Ault became an alcoholic and much of his life was influenced by illness, poverty, and addiction. His family lost most of their wealth during the Great Depression, with his father passing away from cancer soon after, and all three of his brothers committed suicide. Perhaps, his attempts to create order in his works might be a direct result of the chaos defining his personal life.
In the early 1930s, Ault worked on several New Deal art projects, gradually severing most of his ties with the art market and New York gallery scene. In 1937, Ault moved to Woodstock, NY with his wife Louise and continued to create art in isolation. Though there was a thriving art community in the area, Ault, still struggling with depression and alcoholism, rented a small house without indoor plumbing or electricity. It was during this time that his work took on a more surrealist approach. While still creating city landscapes, his work began to focus on quiet streets, churches, and deserted buildings in what has been referred to as a stylized or “poetic realism”. Pervasive throughout his work is a dedication to depicting the meticulous order of his surroundings, while managing to capture a sense of disquiet by manipulating light and shadow. His use of geometry, precise lines, and empty spaces highlights a sense of emptiness that Ault himself felt. Ault’s wife, Louise, said that after becoming upset or feeling a sense of unease at some event, he could find peace, she wrote later, only “at his easel again, creating formal harmony—on his canvas bringing order out of chaos”.
By the late 1940s, Ault had failed to reestablish himself as an artist and passed away from apparent suicide at the age of fifty-seven. Though Ault achieved some early recognition for his work, Ault was largely a recluse at the end of his life.
Today his work is a celebrated part of the Precisionist movement. His work is held in the collections of some of the world’s most prominent institutions, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Brooklyn Museum, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Museum of Modern Art, the Art Institute of Chicago, and the Smithsonian American Art Museum. In 2011, the Smithsonian American Art Museum organized the celebrated exhibition To Make a World: George Ault and 1940s America (March 11 – September 4, 2011), which traveled to the Georgia Museum of Art (February 18 – April 16, 2012), featuring 46 paintings and drawings by the Artist and his contemporaries created between 1943 and 1948.