Elsie Driggs

Elsie Driggs (1898–1992) was an American painter closely associated with Precisionism, the interwar movement that brought a clear, architectural order to industrial subjects. Trained at the Art Students League in New York, she emerged in the 1920s through the Daniel Gallery circle and is best known for Pittsburgh (1927), a taut view of mills and smokestacks that remains a defining image of the period. Driggs’s paintings of machinery, bridges, and urban structures combine simplified geometry with a muted, atmospheric restraint, distinguishing her work from more celebratory depictions of the machine age. She exhibited in Whitney annuals and was included in The Precisionist View in American Art (1960). Her work is represented in collections including the Whitney Museum of American Art, The Phillips Collection, Dallas Museum of Art, National Gallery of Art, and Carnegie Museum of Art.