Sold at Auction: Francis H. Criss

A painter known for his combining of precisionism and surrealism, Francis Criss was a student from 1917 to 1921 at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts and later of Jan Matulka at the Art Students League in New York. He received his first significant attention at the 1932 Whitney Museum's First Biennial Exhibition of Contemporary American Painting. In 1934, supported by Charles Sheeler, he earned a Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation fellowship and traveled to Europe, where he created "Fascism," one of his best-known works.From 1935 to 1939, he was a teacher and muralist in New York for the Federal Art Project of the Works Progress Administration and was one of the artists who worked on the mural painting for the Williamsburg Housing Project in Brooklyn. During the 1940s, he did much commercial illustration, and then returned to fine art in the 1950s and 60s, experimenting with Pointillism and a series of collages.