Charles Henry Buckius Demuth was among the most important early American modernists. He was equally adept as a painter in watercolor and oil and is considered one of the twentieth century’s preeminent watercolorists. Demuth studied in Philadelphia at Drexel Institute from 1901 to 1905 and from 1905 to 1911 at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts with Thomas P. Anshutz (1851-1912), Henry McCarter (1866-1942), and HUGH H. BRECKENRIDGE. Between 1904 and 1921 he made several visits to Europe, where he met and associated with major figures of the avant-garde. During his stay in Paris from 1912 to 1914 he enrolled in various art academies and met Gertrude and Leo Stein and MARSDEN HARTLEY. Demuth had hoped to pursue a literary career, and in 1914 wrote a one-act play, The Azure Adder. His first solo exhibition was held in 1914 at Daniel Gallery in New York, where he maintained a studio (while frequently commuting between the city and his hometown of Lancaster in rural Pennsylvania). He was often invited to the soirees held in the apartment of collector Walter Arensberg, meeting Marcel Duchamp (18871968), Francis Picabia (1879-1953), and other European and American modernists there. By 1915 Demuth had become enamored of New York café society and vaudeville and began depicting them. In the late 1910s for his own enjoyment he began making watercolors inspired by literary works such as Emil Zola’s Nana and Henry James’s Turn of the Screw.
By the 1920s he developed an aesthetic of precisionism out of the series of cubistinfluenced architectural views he had painted in Provincetown and Bermuda during the late 1910s. In addition to painting oils of Lancaster buildings, Demuth devoted considerable time during the last decade of his life to watercolor still lifes and floral studies. In the latter he combined the control and precision of his architectural images with the richness and organic quality of the line and color in his vaudeville watercolors, adding to his art a greater sensuosity than previously seen. During the twenties he became a close friend of Georgia O’Keeffe (1887-1986) and Alfred Stieglitz (1864-1946), and when Stieglitz opened his Intimate Gallery, Demuth became one of the regular exhibitors. Always neglecting his health for his art -- he was a diabetic -- Demuth died at the height of his career in 1935.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Albert E. Gallatin, Charles Demuth (New York: Rudge, 1927) § Emily Farnham, Charles Demuth: Behind a Laughing Mask (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1971), with chronology, bibliography § Alvord L. Eiseman, "A Study of the Development of an Artist: Charles Demuth," 2 vols., Ph.D. diss., New York University, 1975, with bibliography § Thomas E. Norton, ed., Homage to Charles Demuth: Still Life Painter of Lancaster, with essays by Norton, Alvord L. Eiseman, Sherman Lee, and others (Ephrata, Pa.: Science Press, 1978) § New York, Whitney Museum of American Art, and others, Charles Demuth, exh. cat., 1987 (copublished with Harry N. Abrams, New York), by Barbara Haskell, with exhibition history and bibliography by Marilyn Kushner.
