Charles Henry Demuth
Charles Demuth (1883-1935)
Charles Demuth was born in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, where he spent most of his life and painted most of his works. One of America's leading modernist artists, he derived an enduring source of creative inspiration and personal stability from this historic southeastern Pennsylvania city, and his strong regional orientation was as significant to his art as were his connections to the New York avant-garde. Demuth pursued art study in Philadelphia, first at the Drexel Institute of Art (1903-5) and then at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts (1905-1911), where he made his exhibition debut in 1907. His teachers there included Thomas Anshutz, Hugh Breckenridge, Henry McCarter, and William Merritt Chase. While still a student, Demuth established a lifelong friendship with the poet William Carlos Williams, who was in medical school. In 1907 Demuth made his first trip abroad, spending about five months in Paris. More significant was his second visit to the French capital, where he remained from December 1912 until the spring of 1914, pursuing classes at the Moderne, Colarossi, and Julian academies. This period marks his most extended contact with European modernism, including the adventurous coloration of the Post-Impressionists. During this time he became acquainted with Gertrude Stein, Jo Davidson, Ezra Pound, Marsden Hartley, and Arnold Rönnebeck. His first serious exploration of Cubism came during the winter of 1916-17, which he spent in Bermuda with Hartley and the French painter Albert Gleizes. Demuth made a third trip--his last--to Paris between August and November 1921. During this visit the artist experienced the first symptoms of diabetes. Throughout the 1920s his health deteriorated, and despite insulin treatment he suffered periodic debilitating complications from the disease until his death in Lancaster in 1935.
New York City, easily accessible by train from Lancaster, was the center of the American avant-garde. During his regular visits to the city, Demuth socialized in the most advanced circles, participating in a lively bohemian life and homosexual subculture based in Greenwich Village. He was closely associated with the coterie around Alfred Stieglitz and maintained lifelong friendships with Hartley and Georgia O'Keeffe. Also important to him were the French artist Marcel Duchamp, the Dadaist group that gathered in the apartment of Walter and Louise Arensberg, and the artistic milieu of playwright Eugene O'Neill.
Demuth’s earliest independent works reflect the strong impact of his teacher Chase in their realistic treatment, dark coloration, and visible brushwork. His palette gradually lightened, and visits to nearby towns popular with artists, including New Hope, Pennsylvania, and Lambertville, New Jersey (1908, 1911, 1912), inspired a loosely brushed late Impressionism. By 1912 the influence of French artist Auguste Rodin is evident in a series of figural works inspired by vaudeville, including “Acrobats”, a 1916 watercolor in the New Britain Museum. These paintings, characterized by bright colors, fluid lines, and luminous washes, mark his mature style. Demuth’s first solo exhibition was at the Daniel Gallery in New York in 1914. During the late teens he began to paint still lifes of fruits, vegetables, and flowers, a subject he would continue to explore for much of his career.
By 1919 Demuth had embarked on a series of Cubist-Realist architectural paintings of industrial subjects inspired by the buildings of Lancaster that established his reputation as a major Precisionist. These works signal a shift in medium, as the artist increasingly employed oil and tempera. Between 1923 and 1929 he painted a series of poster portraits, emblematic visual homages to Georgia O'Keeffe, William Carlos Williams, John Marin, Arthur Dove, and others. He returned to the figure in the early 1930s in a series of overtly homoerotic works, and his last pieces were figural watercolors inspired by Provincetown, where he spent the late summer and early fall of 1934.
“Daisies”, 1925
Watercolor and graphite on paper, 12 x 15 in. (30.5 x 38.1 cm)
Signed and dated (lower center): C. Demuth. 1925--; (lower left): C. D. / 1925
Harriet Russell Stanley Fund (1947.14)
Still-life subjects had long been a staple of traditional Pennsylvania German fraktur painting, and Demuth’s grandmother Caroline and aunt Louisa were among the many amateur women theorem and watercolor painters in the region. As a child, Demuth painted flowers on teacups and made botanical studies in his sketchbooks. He executed his first mature still lifes in the mid-teens, inspired by the produce available at local markets and by flowers he picked himself. Demuth and his mother, Augusta, enjoyed gardening, and the plain colonial facade of their home on East King Street concealed lush plantings in the back, which he could see from his studio window. As critic Henry McBride observed: "The proper place for a Demuth flower, I sometimes think, is in the hands of an educated gardener--one who knows what a flower is and what an artist is." (1)
The discipline of the modernist still life fascinated Demuth and other Precisionists, including O'Keeffe, Charles Sheeler, and Louis Lozowick. He carefully considered his compositions, quickly sketching his subjects on paper with pencil before adding watercolor washes. The result was a luminous surface achieved through a range of techniques, including blotting to increase the painterly effect and stiff pieces of paper to channel the paint into crisp lines. The bright colors and fluid lines of Daisies are typical of his mature work. Demuth's still lifes sold well throughout his career, and their purchase by leading collectors secured his reputation as one of America's most skilled modern watercolorists.
BF
Bibliography:
Emily Farnham, Charles Demuth: “Behind a Laughing Mask” (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1971); Thomas E. Norton, ed., “Homage to Charles Demuth: Still Life Painter of Lancaster” (Ephrata, Pa.: Science Press, 1978); Betsy Fahlman, “Pennsylvania Modern: Charles Demuth of Lancaster,” exhib. cat. (Philadelphia: Philadelphia Museum of Art, 1983); Barbara Haskell, “Charles Demuth,” exhib. cat. (New York: Whitney Museum of American Art, 1987); Wanda M. Corn, “In the American Grain: The Billboard Poetics of Charles Demuth” Poughkeepsie: Vassar College,1991).
Notes:
1. Henry McBride, "Charles Demuth, Artist," Magazine of Art 31 (January 1938): 21. For the larger context of Demuth’s flower still lifes, see Ella M. Foshay, Reflections of Nature; Flowers in American Art (New York: Knopf , 1984).
