William Steiger: Elevated, 2013, oil on linen, 30 by 45 inches. Courtesy Margaret Thatcher Projects.
Clearly influenced by the Precisionism of Charles Sheeler, Charles Demuth and Ralston Crawford, the Yale-educated painter William Steiger adds to their American modernism a strange mix of nostalgia and existential angst. His images of water towers, grain elevators, railroad cars, bridges, windmills and roller-coaster structures evoke a time when the machine aesthetic promised social progress. But he depicts these shadowless, stylized structures amid a white void, facing nothing.