Charles Demuth

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. □

Demuth, Charles (1883–1935). American painter and illustrator. He was born in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, and had his main training at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia, under Anshutz, 1904–11. He made visits to Europe in 1907–8, 1912–14, and 1921, staying mainly in Paris, and during the second of these visits he became seriously interested in avant-garde art, particularly Cubism. Its influence was felt in his paintings of architectural subjects from about 1916 and he became one of the leading exponents of Precisionism. His distinctive output also included sinister and sexually morbid illustrations to books such as Zola's Nana and Henry James's The Turn of the Screw (these were done not on commission, but for his own enjoyment—he came from a wealthy family and could afford to indulge himself). His most personal paintings are what he called ‘poster portraits’ (pictures composed of words and objects associated with the person ‘represented') The most famous example is I Saw the Figure Five in Gold (Metropolitan Museum, New York, 1928), a tribute to the poet William Carlos Williams and named after one of his poems.

Demuth was lame from childhood and in the last decade of his life was debilitated by diabetes. Often he worked on a small scale in watercolour, rather than in more physically demanding media. The fastidious taste and concentrated energy of his work is suggested by his comment: ‘ John Marin [another great American watercolourist] and I drew our inspiration from the same source, French modernism. He brought his up in buckets and spilt much along the way. I dipped mine out with a teaspoon, but I never spilled a drop.’ Echoing this, Sam Hunter writes of Demuth: ‘He was an artist of restricted sensibility … but for continuous creative impulse and for his distinction as a stylist he must stand in the first rank of the pioneers of twentieth-century American art’ ( Milton W. Brown, Sam Hunter et al., American Art, 1979).

Demuth, Charles (b Lancaster, Pa., 8 Nov. 1883; d Lancaster, 23 Oct. 1935). American painter and illustrator, a pioneer of modern art in his country. He visited Europe in 1904, 1907–8, and 1912–14, staying mainly in Paris, and during the last of these visits he became seriously interested in avant-garde art, particularly Cubism. From about 1916 its influence is evident in his paintings of architectural subjects, with which he became one of the leading exponents of Precisionism. His most personal paintings are what he called ‘poster portraits’ (pictures composed of words and objects associated with the person ‘represented’). The most famous example is I Saw the Figure Five in Gold (1928, Met. Mus., New York), a tribute to the poet William Carlos Williams and named after one of his poems. Demuth was lame from childhood and in the last decade of his life was debilitated by diabetes. Often he worked on a small scale in watercolour, rather than in more physically demanding media. The fastidious taste and concentrated energy of his work are suggested by his comment: ‘ John Marin [another great American watercolourist] and I drew our inspiration from the same source, French modernism. He brought his up in buckets and spilt much along the way. I dipped mine out with a teaspoon, but I never spilled a drop.’

Demuth, Charles (1883–1935). American painter and illustrator, a pioneer of modern art in his country. He visited Europe in 1904, 1907–8, and 1912–14, staying mainly in Paris, and during the last of these visits he became seriously interested in avant-garde art, particularly Cubism. From about 1916 its influence is evident in his paintings of architectural subjects, with which he became one of the leading exponents of Precisionism. His most personal paintings are what he called ‘poster portraits’ (pictures composed of words and objects associated with the person ‘represented’). The most famous example is I Saw the Figure Five in Gold (1928, Met. Mus., New York), a tribute to the poet William Carlos Williams and named after one of his poems. Demuth was lame from childhood and in the last decade of his life was debilitated by diabetes. Often he worked on a small scale in watercolour, rather than in more physically demanding media. The fastidious taste and concentrated energy of his work are suggested by his comment: ‘John Marin [another great American watercolourist] and I drew our inspiration from the same source, French modernism. He brought his up in buckets and spilt much along the way. I dipped mine out with a teaspoon, but I never spilled a drop.’

Charles Demuth , 1883-1935, American watercolor painter, b. Lancaster, Pa. At the age of 20 he began his art study under William Chase at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. In 1907 and again in 1912, Demuth visited Europe. On returning to the United States he began a series of line-and-wash illustrations for works of Zola, Poe, and Henry James and made drawings of vaudeville performers. He is perhaps best known for his beautiful translucent flower and fruit studies in watercolor. Demuth was one of the first painters to draw inspiration from the geometric shapes of machines and modern technology. There are several works by him in the Art Institute, Chicago, and many in the Columbus Gallery of Fine Arts, Ohio.

Bibliography: See biography by E. Farnham (1971) and A. L. Eiseman (1986).