Charles Demuth 1883-1935
Charles Demuth is one of the unique forces of Modern Art whose distinctive style, passion and creativity have left an indelible mark on America’s art and culture. He was born in Lancaster, Pennsylvania and spent most of his childhood indoors as an invalid due to a hip illness later identified as Perthes, which ultimately left him lame. Rather than spending his youthful, formative years outdoors with playmates, he remained indoors and engaged in more quiet, indoor, feminine activities, such as painting. As a result he developed an identity as somewhat of an outsider, and found his creative outlet in art.
Demuth went to Drexel University before transferring to the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts where he studied with Thomas Anshutz. Demuth was inspired by a variety of movements resounding throughout America at the turn of the century including the Ashcan School and American Realism, but “[e]motionally, however, his loyalties were to a fin-de-siecle cultivation of decadence and indifference.” Thus it was the work of James McNeill Whistler and the Aesthetic Movement with which Demuth identified. It was in 1907 that he made his first pilgrimage to Paris – routine for American painters at the time – and there he was exposed to the flourishing modern art community of both European and American artists. (During his second Parisian sojourn in 1912, he befriended Marsden Hartley who in turn introduced him to Gertrude Stein and her influential circle of modern artists). It was then that Demuth truly took on the characteristics of a true flâneur, an identity which suited this young artist since it defines someone who was “in the crowd, but not part of it,” a common attitude among the Aesthetes and particular to Demuth, who had spent his formative years as an outsider in many ways.
When he returned to the United States, specifically to New York, Demuth visited the Stieglitz Gallery which had become a haven for both American and European modernists. In 1911 Stieglitz hosted exhibitions of the watercolors of John Marin and Paul Cezanne, two artists who greatly inspired Demuth and perhaps prompted him to begin adapting his style to more “modernist tendencies…. He replaced individual brushstrokes with washes of color that formed into modulated but discrete zones which adhered to the picture plane as patterns. These zones dominated the surface so that representational forms, while retaining imagistic authority, did not take precedence over the atmospheres of color that surrounded them.” Barbara Haskell’s rather technical description of Demuth’s style implies merely that without entirely abstracting the subject matter, the artist gave precedence to color and pattern. Demuth returned to Paris in 1912 where he attended drawing sessions at the Académie Moderne led by Rodin’s assistant, Antoine Bourdelle. Demuth had already been exposed to Rodin’s drawings and watercolors at Stieglitz’s gallery in 1910, and by 1912, through the instruction of Bourdelle, he had begun to adopt and adapt Rodin’s “technique of lightly draping washes over skeletal pencil lines.”
It was around 1916 that Demuth merged his myriad artistic influences and fluid style with Precisionism, moving toward a unique painting style that created a “conjunction between the organic and geometric." Precisionism grew out of the traditions of Cubism and Futurism, its main themes including industrialization and the modernization of the American landscape, depicted in precise, sharply defined, geometrical forms. This still life obviously does not depict industrialization, however, the style and technique applied reflects Demuth’s interest in that particular movement of Modernism.