Charles+Demuth

"Paintings must be looked at and looked at and looked at... No writing, no talking, no singing, no dancing will explain them." - Charles Demuth


 * Charles Demuth** was a precisionist painter whose body of work, 900 paintings in total, are still admired today. Amidst a changing industrial world, Demuth and many other artists of the time wished to paint freely and create "art for art's sake". Demuth's and William Carlos Williams offered inspiration between each other, as seen in Demuth's painting "The Figure Five in Gold", inspired by the William's poem "The Great Figure". Posthumously Demuth is best known as an American still life painter. However, his works extended also to landscape, floral, and illustrative works.

=Biography=

  ‍Charles Demuth was born November 8, 1883 in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. He was the only child of Ferdinand and Augusta Demuth. In 1887, he experienced a leg injury which made him permanently disabled, however his comfortable class status made his condition easy to handle. As a child, Demuth was encouraged to pursue his artistic talents and at age thirteen, painted his first formal work. In 1907 during his first extended visit to Paris, France, Demuth's artwork was first publicly exhibited in the 8th Annual Exhibition of the Fellowship of the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. After returning to Lancaster in 1911, Demuth began working on floral watercolors inspired by his mother's garden, this study would span his career.

 Demuth's career peaked from 1915-1920, in which he honored his friends with poster portraits and used watercolors to create his best still life fruit scenes. From 1915-1916 Demuth spent significant time in Princetown, Massachusetts with fellow painters, and Princetown houses can be found in his paintings from the time. He traveled to Bermuda in 1917 where he experimented with modernist techniques of Cezanne and Cubists as well as the elements that would be later developed in his own Precisionist works. September 1921, Demuth was treated for diabetes in the American Hospital during his final trip to Europe. He became one of the first people in the United States to begin taking insulin injection treatments in 1922. Demuth made his final visit to Provincetown where he created some of his last works of figurative beach scenes in pencil and watercolor in the summer of 1934. He died at age 51 on October 23, 1935 in his Lancaster home from the effects of his diabetes.

 Demuth, along with many other artists of his time, struggled to bring acceptance to what is now called modern art. Demuth wanted "art for art's sake", opposed to the oppressive expectations from the previous (19th) century that art was naturally shifting away from with the rapid social and economic change happening during the time. Many themes and motifs of modern art stem from the rush of industrial expansion, though early critics found modern art to be outrageous and to "vulgarize any traditional taste for the arts". Despite the critical reception of such controversial works, the modernist determination to paint as they pleased no matter the economic or social consequences created a lasting movement in an ever-changing artistic world.

 Demuth created a remarkable 900 works of art during his life. His paintings give more insight to his largely unknown personal life. Demuth has been described as a "shadowy character" because of his illusive nature during the middle of his lifetime, as he shut himself off from the outside world; little was known of him except through the paintings he produced.

=Demuth's Works=

  Demuth was known as a precisionist painter. The Precisionist Movement was an early 20th-century movement in painting characterized by flat colors, clear lines, simplicity, and non-human subjects (although Demuth often painted people as well). Common precisionist works depicted industry or architecture. Precisionism, more specifically, dealt with the industrialization and modernization of America; this phenomena was captured by sharp geometric shapes architectural structures, though Demuth did not limit himself to these subjects alone. Precisionism, as its name suggests, often focused on clear sharply defined subjects, and required "precision." Demuth's work often took a more muted and blurry ill-defined quality. There is a clear divide between Demuth's industrial scenes, and scenes dealing with his personal life. The picture to the left, which depicts human subjects, is less clearly defined and precise, while the picture to the right is geometric and exact. 

 Watercolor was Demuth's favorite medium, as it "fitted his exquisite taste, and with it he expressed with extraordinary precision and delicacy of perception the things that interested him most". Flowers were among his most devoted interests, which stemmed from his upbringing around the luxurious Victorian gardens of his mother and grandmother.

  Another common theme of his artwork was his homosexuality. Demuth was gay, and his artwork often depicted objects of male desire. For example, pictured to the left is Demuth's "Turkish Bath with Self Portrait." Demuth here is pictured among naked men.

=Demuth with Other Artists =

  //"I always enjoyed [Charles Demuth]. I though him more fun than the other artists. He was a better friend with me than any of the other artists."// —**Georgia O'Keefe** (Interview, //Lancaster New Era//, 1986)

<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif; font-size: 10pt;"> Charles Demuth was good friends with many other artists of his time, and he was also greatly influenced by these artists as well. Demuth wrote letters to artists just as Georgia O'Keefe, Eugene O'Neill, John Reed, Gertrude Stein, Alfred Stieglitz, Carl Van Vechten, and William Carlos Williams, among others. Hints of the Charles Demuthse artists can be seen in many of his works. For example, pictured to the right is a portrait of Demuth with Marcel Duchamp, another influential artist of the Modernist movement.

<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif; font-size: 10pt;"> William Carlos Williams and Demuth attended the University of Pennsylvania and gained inspiration from each other as well as the larger pool of writers and artists that were contributing to and feeding off the new wave of energy that was becoming modern art. "The Great Figure" by William Carlos Williams served as the inspiration behind one of Demuth's most well-known pieces "The Figure Five in Gold." The poem's usage of color and onomatopoetic expressions served as visual and auditory guides in the construction of the portrait.

<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif; font-size: 10pt;"> __"The Great Figure" by William Carlos Williams__ <span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif; font-size: 10pt;"> Among the rain <span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif; font-size: 10pt;"> and lights <span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif; font-size: 10pt;"> I saw the figure 5 <span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif; font-size: 10pt;"> in gold <span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif; font-size: 10pt;"> on a red <span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif; font-size: 10pt;"> fire truck <span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif; font-size: 10pt;"> moving <span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif; font-size: 10pt;"> tense <span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif; font-size: 10pt;"> unheeded <span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif; font-size: 10pt;"> to gong clangs <span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif; font-size: 10pt;"> siren howls <span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif; font-size: 10pt;"> and wheels rumbling <span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif; font-size: 10pt;"> through the dark city

<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif; font-size: 10pt;"> This painting was actually one in a series of eight portraits of his friends. Demuth's portraits were inspired by Stein's word-portraits, so although they don't resemble actual people, they resemble images that he associated with each artists, like Williams' poem. If you look at the bottom of the painting you can see the initials, "W.C.W." The painting is an abstract portrayal of the poem. The 5 continually getting smaller is the truck moving further away. It's red like the fire truck, and the diagonal lines are the rain. His paintings, though abstract, are still representational.

=<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">External Links =

<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif; font-size: 10pt;"> @http://www.wisdomportal.com/Christmas/Figure5InGold.html <span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif; font-size: 10pt;"> @http://www.artchive.com/artchive/D/demuth.html <span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif; font-size: 10pt;"> @http://www.metmuseum.org/toah/works-of-art/49.59.1 <span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif; font-size: 10pt;"> @http://www.artnet.com/artists/charles-demuth/ <span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif; font-size: 10pt;"> An overview of the Precisionist movement: <span style="font-family: Verdana,Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif; font-size: 10pt;">Friendship Illustrated: Figure 5 in Gold

=<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">References =

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