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Lot Essay
George Ault’s hauntingly precise The Plough and The Moon encapsulates the surrealist aesthetic he embraced at the culmination of his career. Ault and his wife Louise moved to Woodstock, New York in 1937 where they lived in isolation with few financial resources or modern comforts. At night, Ault traversed the Upstate town in solitude and created a series of “desert landscape” paintings inspired by these walks. Ault said of the series, "I like deserts, with nothing in them but monuments, because all is peaceful and quiet. There are no human beings to disturb and annoy; only art is left - the freedom to make it. The desert picture becomes a peaceful world in which to work." (as quoted in George Ault, exhibition catalogue, New York, 1988, pp. 34-35).
Susan Lubowsky writes on Ault’s desert landscapes and the present work, "Ault's forays into the uncharted realm of the unconscious were more adventurous when he took up non-urban themes, as in the series of 'desert landscapes' painted from imagination. The perplexing imagery of The Plough and the Moon again affirms de Chirico's influence and the disparate artistic genres to which Ault continuously referred - Precisionism, romanticism, and folk art. Under a full moon, an arched tower and gracefully rendered plow rise from a vast plain of clouds." (George Ault, exhibition catalogue, New York, 1988, pp. 33, 35)
Scholar Michael Lawrence Vetter also compares Ault’s surrealist vision to de Chirico: “The plough, abandoned in a desolate field, is a totem of an earlier agricultural history in which farmers worked the land with animals and their own physical strength, rather than machinery. In contrast, the factory implies a modernity that seems out of place in this otherwise rustic location, but it too has been left to crumble and decay…In placing these signifiers of history into an alien and indecipherable world, Ault calls upon the viewer to approach them with a new eye and to recognize the latent associations that are contained within them. What emerges is a palpable aura of heightened meaning and an acknowledgement of the world’s incomprehensibility that is in line with the Nietzschean experiments of de Chirico and his contemporaries.” (“To Make a (Metaphysical World: The ‘Return to Order’ in George Ault’s Late Paintings,” M.A. thesis, University of Maryland, 2012, pp. 61-62) Indeed, striking in form, execution and detail, The Plough and Moon is a high point of the artist’s surrealist output.
Susan Lubowsky writes on Ault’s desert landscapes and the present work, "Ault's forays into the uncharted realm of the unconscious were more adventurous when he took up non-urban themes, as in the series of 'desert landscapes' painted from imagination. The perplexing imagery of The Plough and the Moon again affirms de Chirico's influence and the disparate artistic genres to which Ault continuously referred - Precisionism, romanticism, and folk art. Under a full moon, an arched tower and gracefully rendered plow rise from a vast plain of clouds." (George Ault, exhibition catalogue, New York, 1988, pp. 33, 35)
Scholar Michael Lawrence Vetter also compares Ault’s surrealist vision to de Chirico: “The plough, abandoned in a desolate field, is a totem of an earlier agricultural history in which farmers worked the land with animals and their own physical strength, rather than machinery. In contrast, the factory implies a modernity that seems out of place in this otherwise rustic location, but it too has been left to crumble and decay…In placing these signifiers of history into an alien and indecipherable world, Ault calls upon the viewer to approach them with a new eye and to recognize the latent associations that are contained within them. What emerges is a palpable aura of heightened meaning and an acknowledgement of the world’s incomprehensibility that is in line with the Nietzschean experiments of de Chirico and his contemporaries.” (“To Make a (Metaphysical World: The ‘Return to Order’ in George Ault’s Late Paintings,” M.A. thesis, University of Maryland, 2012, pp. 61-62) Indeed, striking in form, execution and detail, The Plough and Moon is a high point of the artist’s surrealist output.