With its sharply delineated geometric forms, Theatre Roof marks Ralston Crawford as a practitioner of Precisionism. This energetic American movement of the 1920s and early 1930s adapted modernist strategies from European cubism and futurism to subjects drawn from the American industrial landscape. A contemporary of Charles Sheeler, whose image of a Manchester textile factory hangs nearby, Crawford used flat unarticulated planes of smoothly painted color to capture steel foundries, water towers, machinery, and other symbols of American industry. His precisionist pictures gained fame during the 1930s. Crawford held his first one-artist exhibition at Baltimore’s Maryland Institute of Art (now MICA) in 1934, shortly before he painted Theatre Roof.