Charles Demuth
(1883–1935), was an American
Precisionist
artist. “Deem” as friends and other artists called him,
was born in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, in 1883. A versatile artist,
Charles Demuth was acclaimed for his cubist-derived paintings of
American cityscapes as well as his sensuous, richly colored
watercolors of still lifes and figure groups. Demuth studied at the
Drexel Institute of Art and later at the Pennsylvania Institute of
Art and Academy of Fine Arts in Philadelphia. From 1907 to 1908
Demuth was in Paris, viewing many of the emerging avant-garde
styles; during his second trip there from 1912 to 1914, he took
courses at the Académie Julian, Académie Moderne, and
Académie Colarossi. During his last year in Paris, Demuth met
fellow American artist
Marsden Hartley,
who became a close friend and mentor.
After his return to
the United States, Demuth divided his time between Lancaster and
New York and spent many summers in Provincetown, Mass. In New York
he became closely associated with Alfred Stieglitz's circle of
American modernists. Charles Daniel became his dealer and gave him
his first one-person show in 1914. In 1917 Demuth and Hartley spent
time in Bermuda with the French cubist painter
Albert Gleizes.
Demuth's precisionist style emerged soon thereafter in
watercolor, tempera, and oil depictions of his architectural and
industrial surroundings.
Duncan Phillips
described Demuth as “A virtuoso with water color of the most
delicious clarity and the subtlest nuance of pearly tones …
Demuth, long ago, turned to
Cubism.
Its use of planes, describing
boundaries and direction of forms in space, gave him his chance to
make out of geometry and its meaning for art something personal, by
combining its austerity of ruled lines, its interpenetrating planes
and angles, with his own special gift for flowing fascinating
color. He knows also the value of suggestion and isolates fragments
which suggest how the rest of the big world could be seen after the
same fashion.”