Cubistic Interior, c. 1924

Preston Dickinson, 1891-1943

Oil on canvas, 36 1/8 by 23 5/8 inches

Georgia Museum of Art, The University of Georgia

The Eva Underhill Holbrook Memorial Collection of American Art

Gift of Alfred H. Holbrook, 1945

William Preston Dickinson was born in Greenwich Village to parents of British ancestry and attended public schools in New York. By his late teens, his drawing ability had attracted the attention of a supporter who paid Dickinson’s way to the Art Students League of New York, where he studied for four years.

Following formal schooling, Dickinson studied in Europe, like many young American artists during the decade before the first World War. He was interested in new trends in art, and after rejecting Impressionism, he turned to the examples of Cezanne and of Cubism and Futurism that he had found while he was a student in Paris between 1911 and 1914.

Especially stimulated by his studies in various European museums, Dickinson eventually returned to New York, where he found a small but supportive artistic community centered around a handful of galleries showing modern work. Among these were Alfred Stieglitz’s "291" Gallery and the galleries of Stephan Bourgeois and Charles Daniel.

Dickinson was best known for his association with the "Precisionists," a group of artists of whom Daniel became the champion. Precisionists’ works were characterized by precise technique, simplification of form, a mixture of realistic and abstract design, and frequent reliance on industrial and urban themes and indigenous American subjects.