Column on Stairs

1934 was significant for Ralston Crawford, marking the artist's first one man show, as well as the year he began a long series of work devoted to the study of coal and grain elevators. The present work pre-dates the artist's masterwork of 1937, Buffalo Grain Elevators (National Collection of Fine Arts, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C.) and Coal Elevators of 1938 (The St. Louis Art Museum). James J. Sweeney comments: "In all of Crawford's best work we have this provision of subtle, delicate tensions. From the homely material from which he derives the suggestions for his pictures, we are led to expect a banal and lifeless effect; and we are always surprised by the atmosphere of unfamiliarity he gives the eventual outcome through his understatement, this elimination of certain details--this selection." (exhibition catalogue, Louisiana State University, Baton Rouge, Louisiana, 1950)