Why did Ralston Crawford return to study ships' masts at the end of his career, having seemingly exhausted the topic forty years prior?

His career was a steady trajectory-- beginning with what was inevitably lumped in with Precisionism and exploring the integration of the picture plane with a deepening disregard for depiction. He toyed with a lot of the issues of symbolic representation and the destabilization of purely symbolic forms -- stuff that Stuart Davis is known for -- by working and reworking anchors and boats and boxcars throughout his career.But the ships' masts weren't Picasso-by-way-of-Davis post-cubisms, nor were they precisionist by any standard. Apart from his lifelong devotion to the sea as a place of meditative calm, what more did he expect to wrench from this theme?

Barbara Haskell--whom I was apparently sitting near at the Mandarin Hotel a few nights ago--pointed out how differently Ralston's use of the the sky became after WWII. While he previously used it as a natural, vast flatness, there was always something a little phoned-in, as if the sky, a natural surface, could be activated merely by painting the canvas blue. Sometimes he daubed a little graceless, non-committal cloud over a highway to spruce things up-- but I don't think he really got it, the full activation of the plane, until...Bikini Atoll.

I don't know what pact he might've made with the almighty as Ralston watched the mushroom cloud spread over the Pacific, but I do know this: from that day forward, his skies had a presence in his paintings.

Witness Masts & Riggings of '72, up now at the gallery. Rather than trying to fill the space with brooding little thunderhead, he allows the asymmetric divisions of the sky to ring out as positive spaces, the lines and mast spider-webbing out like a broken windshield.