Charles Demuth

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(b Lancaster, PA, 8 Nov 1883; d Lancaster, 23 Oct 1935). American painter and illustrator. He was deeply attached to Lancaster, where his family had run a tobacco shop since 1770. Although not a Regionalist, Demuth maintained a strongly localized sense of place, and Lancaster provided him with much of the characteristic subject-matter of both his early and later work. He trained in Philadelphia at the Drexel Institute of Art, Science and Industry (1901-5) and at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts (1905-11), where his teachers included Thomas Anshutz, Henry McCarter (1864-1942), Hugh Breckenridge (1870-1937) and William Merritt Chase. While still a student, he participated in a show at the Academy (1907), exhibiting his work publicly for the first time.

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American painter Charles Demuth (1883-1935), distinguished for intimate watercolors and geometrized urban scenes, was one of the leading artists of precisionism, an American idiom of cubism in the 1920s.

Charles Demuth was born in Lancaster, Pa., on Nov. 8, 1883. A childhood leg injury left him lame, and at an early age he began to draw and paint. After studying at the School of Industrial Art in Philadelphia, he entered the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts in 1905 and took classes with William Merritt Chase and Thomas Anschutz.

In 1907 Demuth went to Paris, where Fauve painting with its expressive form and color affected his early work. Studio Interior (ca. 1907), one of the few surviving works of this period, is a watercolor whose roughly outlined, loosely painted figures are reminiscent of those of Henri Matisse and Georges Rouault. It foreshadows the illustrational style Demuth employed, in refined form, later. He continued his studies at the Pennsylvania Academy (1908-1910), and his interest in figure drawing increased. As he refined his focus, the personages depicted became vehicles for acute psychological expression. In Paris again in 1912, he attended classes at the academies Julian, Colarossi, and Moderne. One of the few American artists of the period with firsthand understanding of the new European movements of cubism and Dada, Demuth evolved an art that transcended their literal and localized themes. In fact, he always remained receptive to a wide range of influences, and various styles found intelligent transmutation in his work.

Demuth's early watercolors, shown at the Pennsylvania Academy in 1912 and 1913, revealed a fragile, understated style; his landscapes, executed in delicate washes, evoked a gamut of European associations. Fauve references remained, but a new ***concern with formalism was evident, and there are parallels to Paul Cézanne's prismatic vistas in such paintings as New Hope, Pennsylvania (1911/1912). But even when Demuth employed the analytic approach of Cézanne or the cubist planes of Pablo Picasso, his art remained concerned with surface quality, not internal structure.

By 1915 Demuth was established as a major American artist through his landscapes, flower studies, and smallscale paintings of cabaret and circus performers. His figures have a weightless and phantomlike quality; in Two Acrobats (1918), entertainers dressed in tuxedoes float surrealistically through a vague landscape. Demuth's sensitive linear style was eminently suited to illustrating plays and novels such as Émile Zola's Nana, Henry James's The Turn of the Screw, Frank Wedekind's Pandora's Box, and Edgar Allan Poe's The Mask of the Red Death. These illustrations, not meant for publication, reflect Demuth's taste for the psychologically distorted and depict sexual conflict and social decadence.

In White Architecture (1917) Demuth used the cubist technique with delicacy and individuality and employed color sparingly to modify a complex of overlaid and intersecting structural planes derived from the building itself. He developed this style in his paintings of factories and industrial sites, beginning in 1918, and thus was a pioneer of the precisionist movement.

Demuth did a unique group of "poster portraits" (symbolic still-life paintings) that reflected the interests and attributes of friends, including painters Georgia O'Keeffe, Marsden Hartley, and Arthur Dove and poet William Carlos Williams. The best-known of these, I Saw the Figure 5 in Gold (1928), a "portrait" of Williams, whose title derives from a Williams poem, is a direct ancestor of pop art, using the numeral 5 in a repeated abstract arrangement. Demuth died in Lancaster on Oct. 25, 1935.

Further Reading

The life and artistic development of Demuth are covered in A. C. Ritchie, Charles Demuth (1950), and Emily Farnham, Charles Demuth: Behind a Laughing Mask (1971). There is an essay on Demuth by Martin Friedman in the Walker Art Center Catalog The Precisionist View in American Art (1960). Older monographs include A. E. Gallatin, Charles Demuth (1927), and William Murrell, Charles Demuth (1931).

Additional Sources

Eiseman, Alvord L., Charles Demuth, New York: Watson-Guptill Publications, 1982.

Charles Demuth
I Saw the Figure 5 in Gold (1928)
Born	November 8, 1883(1883-11-08)
Died	October 23, 1935 (aged 51)
Nationality	American
Field	Watercolor, Painting
Movement	Precisionism

Charles Demuth (November 8, 1883 - October 23, 1935) was an American watercolorist who turned to oils late in his career, developing a style of painting known as Precisionism.

"Search the history of American art," wrote Ken Johnson in the New York Times, "and you will discover few watercolors more beautiful than those of Charles Demuth. Combining exacting botanical observation and loosely Cubist abstraction, his watercolors of flowers, fruit and vegetables have a magical liveliness and an almost shocking sensuousness."

Demuth was a lifelong resident of Lancaster, Pennsylvania. The home he shared with his mother is now the Demuth Museum, which showcases his work. He graduated from Franklin & Marshall Academy before studying at Drexel University and at Philadelphia's Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts. While he was a student at PAFA, he met William Carlos Williams at his boarding house. The two were fast friends and remained close for the rest of their lives.

He later studied at Académie Colarossi and Académie Julian in Paris, where he became a part of the avant garde art scene. The Parisian artistic community was accepting of Demuth's homosexuality.

Contents 1 Career 2 Personal life 3 Selected works 4 Footnotes 5 Further reading 6 External links

Career

While he was in Paris he met Marsden Hartley by walking up to a table of American artists and asking if he could join them. He had a great sense of humor, rich in double entendres, and they asked him to be a regular member of their group. Through Hartley he met Alfred Stieglitz and became a member of the Stieglitz group. In 1926, he had a one-man show at the Anderson Galleries and another at Intimate Gallery the New York gallery run by his friend Alfred Stieglitz.^[1]

His most famous painting, I Saw the Figure Five in Gold, was inspired by his friend William Carlos Williams's poem The Great Figure. Roberta Smith described the work in the New York Times: "Demuth's famous visionary accounting of Williams, I Saw the Figure Five in Gold, [is] a painting whose title and medallion-like arrangement of angled forms were both inspired by a verse the poet wrote after watching a fire engine streak past him on a rainy Manhattan street while waiting for Marsden Hartley, whose studio he was visiting, to answer his door." ^[2] This is one of nine poster portraits Demuth created to honor his creative friends. The others were devoted to artists Georgia O'Keeffe, Arthur Dove, Charles Duncan, Marsden Hartley, John Marin, and writers Gertrude Stein, Eugene O'Neill, and Wallace Stevens.

In 1927, Demuth started a series of seven panel paintings depicting factory buildings in his hometown. He finished the last of the seven, After All in 1933 and died two years later. Six of those paintings are highlighted in Chimneys and Towers: Charles Demuth’s Late Paintings of Lancaster, a 2007 Amon Carter Museum retrospective of his work, displayed in 2008 at the Whitney Museum of American Art.

According to the exhibit notes from the Amon Carter show, Demuth's will left many of his paintings to Georgia O'Keeffe. Her strategic decisions regarding which museums received these works cemented his reputation as a major painter of the Precisionist school.

Personal life

Demuth suffered either an injury when he was four years old or may have had polio or tuberculosis of the hip that left him with a marked limp and required him to use a cane. He later developed diabetes and was one of the first people in the United States to receive insulin. He spent most of his life in frail health, and he died in Lancaster at the age 51 of complications from diabetes.

Charles used the Lafayette Baths as his favorite haunt. His 1918 homoerotic self-portrait set in a Turkish bathhouse was likely set there.^[3]

Demuth is distantly related to Christopher DeMuth, the former president of the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank.

Selected works

The Jazz Singer (1916)	Trees and Barns Bermuda (1917)	Turkish Bath with Self Portrait (1918)	The Boat Ride from Sorrento (1919)[4]
Wild Orchids (1920)	Spring (1921)	Incense of a New Church (1921)	Aucassiu and Nicolette (1921)

Footnotes

1. ^ History of 291, written by the U.S. National Gallery of Art (with an emphasis towards the 291's role in painting rather than photography, see bottom of page for Demuth and Anderson and Intimate galleries)
2. ^ The New York Times, Roberta Smith, ART VIEW; Precisionism and a Few of Its Friends retrieved October 26, 2008
3. ^ Miller, Neil (1995). Out of the Past, Gay and Lesbian history from 1869 to the present. Vintage. pp. 143. ISBN 0-09-957691-0. 
4. ^ The Boat Ride from Sorrento: Charles Demuth By Museum of Modern Art (New York, N.Y.), 1950, Andrew Carnduff Ritchie Charles Demuth, Andrew Carnduff Ritchie, Charles Demuth

Further reading

• Eiseman, A.L. (1982). Charles Demuth. New York: Watson-Guptill Publications.
• Fahlman, B. (1983). Pennsylvania modern : Charles Demuth of Lancaster. Philadelphia: Philadelphia Museum of Art.
• Fahlman, B. (2007). Chimneys and towers : Charles Demuth's late paintings of Lancaster. Fort Worth, TX: Amon Carter Museum.
• Farnham, E. (1971). Charles Demuth; behind a laughing mask. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press.
• Frank, R.J. (1994). Charles Demuth poster portraits, 1923-1929. New Haven: Yale University Art Gallery.
• Harnsberger, R.S. (1992). Ten precisionist artists : annotated bibliographies [Art Reference Collection no. 14]. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press.
• Haskell, B. (1987). Charles Demuth. New York: Whitney Museum of American Art.
• Kellner, B., ed. (2000). Letters of Charles Demuth, American artist, 1883-1935. Philadelphia, Temple University Press.
• Lampe, A.M. (2007). Demuth : out of the chateau : works from the Demuth Museum. Lancaster, PA: Demuth Museum.
• Weinberg, J. (1993). Speaking for vice : homosexuality in the art of Charles Demuth, Marsden Hartley, and the first American avante-garde. New Haven: Yale University Press.

External links

Wikimedia Commons has media related to: Charles Demuth

• Demuth Foundation

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