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Charles DemuthTwo Women and a Child on the Beach at Provincetownc. 1934
c. 1934
About the Item
Two Women and a Child on the Beach at Provincetown
Unsigned.
Watercolor on paper, c. 1934
A beautiful Provincetown beach scene, included in the catalogue raisonne.
Please see Babcock Gallery's scholarship (included in photos)
This watercolor show's the artist's mature precisionist technique and artful omission of detail.
Condition: excellent
Image size: 8 1/2 x 10 1/2 inches
Frame size: 16 x 18 inches
Housed in a 22K White Gold frame with conservation glass
Provenance:
James Maroney, Inc. (label)
Sid Deutsch Gallery (label)
Hirschl & Adler Galleries (label)
Babcock Galleries (label)
Zabriskie Gallery (label)
Exhibitions:
Little Rock, AR, Arkansas Art Center, December 3, 2004 - February 6, 2005: "2004 Collector's Show and Sale,"
"When he was asked to provide a brief autobiography, Demuth responded, “I was born November 8th 1883, studied at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts under William M. Chase and Thomas Ancheus. I went to Paris in 1907 for the first time and afterwards returned to it in 1912 and 1921, living there and in London during these visits—about four years in all. I have exhibited at the Pennsylvania Academy and the Daniel Gallery in New York City. I think that is the limit of my knowledge about myself. I suppose you will reply, “Know thyself, young man.”
Demuth has an almost Forrest-Gump-like quality of being in the right place at the right time. He was in Paris before the war, in Gertrude Stein’s salon with Picasso and later with Hemingway. He was in New York as a member of Alfred Stieglitz’s circle as the early modernist movement is taking place and the Stieglitz group struggles with creating a market for modern art in America and, at the same time, defining an American style of art. He was close with Marcel Duchamp, Marsden Hartley, Georgia O’Keeffe, and Alfred Stieglitz. Georgia would visit him in Lancaster and the two would paint in his mother’s garden. " Demuth web site
"While he was in Paris he met Marsden Hartley by walking up to a table of American artists and asking if he could join them. He had a great sense of humor, rich in double entendres, and they asked him to be a regular member of their group. Through Hartley, he met Alfred Stieglitz and became a member of the Stieglitz group. In 1926, he had a one-man show at the Anderson Galleries and another at Intimate Gallery, the New York gallery run by Stieglitz. Demuth was introduced to modernism during trips to Europe between 1907 and 1921. On frequent trips to New York City, he encountered avant-garde styles and ideas, most notably Cubism, the influence of which is reflected in many of his works.
In Vaudeville (Dancer with Chorus), 1918, in the Philadelphia Museum of Art
His most famous painting, I Saw the Figure 5 in Gold, was inspired by his friend William Carlos Williams's poem "The Great Figure". Roberta Smith described the work in The New York Times: "Demuth's famous visionary accounting of Williams, I Saw the Figure Five in Gold, [is] a painting whose title and medallion-like arrangement of angled forms were both inspired by a verse the poet wrote after watching a fire engine streak past him on a rainy Manhattan street while waiting for Marsden Hartley, whose studio he was visiting, to answer his door.” Describing its importance, Judith H. Dobrzynski in The Wall Street Journal wrote: "It's the best work in a genre Demuth created, the 'poster portrait'. It's a witty homage to his close friend, the poet William Carlos Williams, and a transliteration into paint of his poem, 'The Great Figure'. It's a decidedly American work made at a time when U.S. artists were just moving beyond European influences. It's a reference to the intertwined relationships among the arts in the 1920s, a moment of cross-pollination that led to American Modernism. And it anticipates pop art."
Demuth's home in Lancaster, where he died, now the Demuth Museum
The work is one of 10 poster portraits Demuth intended to create to honor his creative friends. The six completed ones were in homage to Williams plus Georgia O'Keeffe, Arthur Dove, Charles Duncan, John Marin and Bert Savoy. The others were planned for Marsden Hartley, Gertrude Stein, Eugene O'Neill and Wallace Stevens. Painted during a period of recovery from illness, these paintings portray their respective painters and writers and performers through referential objects and language, as opposed to literal depictions. These works proved to be a challenge for critics. One reviewer described the works as having been made in “a code for which we have not the key.”
Demuth, along with Georgia O'Keeffe and Charles Sheeler, was a major contributor to the Precisionist art movement, which began to evolve in America around 1915. Demuth's works often depicted a specific range of forms in a quasi-Cubist, sharply defined manner, a characteristic of Precisionism. Frequently occurring scenes within Demuth's works are urban and rural landscapes, often consisting of industrial features such as bridges, smoke stacks, and skyscrapers. Demuth's "Aucassin and Nicolette," which can be viewed below, is an exemplary work of Precisionist art. Notable features include the highly structured scene lacking figures, depiction of an industrial setting, and sharp linearity created by geometric figures with no hint of abstraction. Demuth's works of this nature have been perceived as ironic and pessimistic in light of their subject matter.
Demuth began a series of paintings in 1919, inspired by the architecture of Lancaster. In creating these works, Demuth opted not to use watercolors, instead created the works in oil and tempera. Additionally, these works are larger than many of his others. They possess a balance between realism and abstraction. In 1927, Demuth started a series of seven panel paintings depicting factory buildings in his hometown. He finished the last of the seven, After All in 1933. Six of the paintings were highlighted in Chimneys and Towers: Charles Demuth’s Late Paintings of Lancaster, a 2007 Amon Carter Museum retrospective of his work, displayed in 2008 at the Whitney Museum of American Art. According to the exhibit notes from the Amon Carter show, Demuth's will left many of his paintings to Georgia O'Keeffe. Her strategic decisions regarding which museums received these works cemented his reputation as a major painter of the Precisionist school.
Later years and death
Demuth, a gay artist, was a regular patron at the Lafayette Baths. His sexual exploits there are the subject of watercolors, including his 1918 homoerotic self-portrait set in a Turkish bathhouse.
Demuth spent most of his life in frail health. By 1920, the effects of diabetes had begun to severely drain Demuth of artistic energy. He died at his residence in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania at the age 51 of complications from diabetes. He is buried at the Lancaster Cemetery." Courtesy of Wikipedia
- Creator:Charles Demuth (1883-1935, American)
- Creation Year:c. 1934
- Dimensions:Height: 8.5 in (21.59 cm)Width: 10.5 in (26.67 cm)
- Medium:
- Movement & Style:
- Period:
- Condition:Original.
- Gallery Location:Fairlawn, OH
- Reference Number:Seller: FA45201stDibs: LU14014082812
Charles Demuth
Acclaimed for his lively Impressionistic watercolors — as well as for his important role in Precisionism, a movement that emphasized geometry and shared commonalities with Cubism and Futurism — American painter Charles Demuth created some of his most recognized works on borrowed time. In the final decade of his life, plagued by ailing health, Demuth painted his renowned Precisionist works like I Saw the Figure 5 in Gold and My Egypt. With each painting, Demuth filled up a life bookended by illness — maladies that both ignited his art career and, ultimately, snuffed it out.
Born in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, Demuth was bedridden at a young age, around four or five, from what would come to be known as Perthes, which affected his mobility and forced him to spend much of his youth at home. Fortunately, his mother provided him with an ample amount of art supplies and nurtured a passion for painting that he sustained over the course of his life.
While Demuth relied on a cane for much of his life, he was well enough to attend Franklin and Marshall College and study art at both Drexel University and the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. He completed his first oil self-portrait in 1907 and met the first of what would become a string of influential friends in American artist William Merritt Chase and American painter and arts administrator Thomas Anshutz.
Shifting his focus from oil paintings to watercolors after concluding his studies, Demuth created works that depicted Harlem Renaissance-era jazz clubs and chronicled taboo gay subculture in New York City. The artist was openly gay, and works of this type, even as they were not intended for public exhibition at the time, influenced artists such as Andy Warhol in the decades that followed. His network grew to include artists Alfred Maurer, Patrick Henry Bruce, John Marin and photographer Edward Steichen. American photographer Alfred Stieglitz and modernist painter Georgia O’Keeffe proved to be among the most artistically influential on Demuth. Stieglitz’s famed art gallery in New York, 291, became a spot that the Pennsylvania painter frequented and a location at which he developed an interest in Auguste Rodin’s watercolors and O’Keeffe’s Precisionism.
Demuth also befriended wealthy pharmacist Dr. Albert Barnes in 1905. After the artist received his diabetes diagnosis, a death sentence at the time, Barnes requested Demuth consult with Dr. Frederick Allen, then the leading expert on diabetes in America. Barnes helped with funding Demuth’s insulin treatment — the painter was among the first patients to receive insulin in the United States. Demuth turned largely to painting still lifes of flowers and produce that his mother brought into the house. He died in 1935.
Today, the Barnes Foundation holds the largest collection of Demuth’s artwork. His paintings are also held in the collections of the Philadelphia Museum of Art and the Demuth Museum, which is located in Demuth’s former studio and home and merged with the Lancaster Museum of Art in 2014.
On 1stDibs, find a collection of Charles Demuth drawings and watercolor paintings.
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