Charles Demuth Museum: I Saw the Figure 25 in Silver

By MaryAlice Bitts
Sunday News (Lancaster, PA)
October 22, 2006

Charles Demuth came of age in an exciting era of American innovation and industrialization. He saw the Wright Brothers fly the first successful airplane, and Ford introduce the Model T. Women were granted the right to vote; the Allies won World War I; and Charlie Chaplin, talkie films, plastics, the Titanic and the discovery of King Tut's tomb captured the public's imagination.

Naturally, the art world picked up on this electric atmosphere and ran with it. As Picasso introduced the world to cubist ideas, expatriates gathered in Paris to discuss and create daring new art, literature and music - works that sparked an artistic revolution across Europe and America. And Demuth, "Deem" to his friends, was a part of it.

A leading force in the modernist movement whose works arguably set the stage for pop art decades later, Demuth traveled to artistic hot spots in America and abroad. He hung out in jazz clubs and cafes in New York and Paris, befriended some of the cultural elite and generally soaked up avant-garde artistic inspiration. Then he returned to his downtown Lancaster home and poured that inspiration into interesting new works that ranged from delicate floral pieces to the industrial age landscapes for which he is best known.

This month, the Demuth Foundation and Museum will celebrate Demuth's Nov. 8 birthday with Cheers to Charlie, a jazz-soaked celebration with international flair that foundation director Anne Lampe believes would have appealed to Lancaster's famously fun-loving, jet-setting artist.

To be held Nov. 10 in the museum's new space at the 1770 Demuth Tobacco Shop, 116 E. King St., the celebration will feature period jazz by the Ruth Benns-Suter trio, hors d'oeuvres by Log Cabin Restaurant, a cash bar and decorations that include birthday greetings from Demuth's sparkling international circle of friends and contemporaries.

"There will be valet parking, we'll have a red carpet and we've set up the third floor to be like an old jazz nightclub," Lampe said. "I think Charles would have felt right at home."

The fete is part of a yearlong celebration of Demuth Foundation's 25th anniversary, which also includes the "25 Years of the Demuth: Homage and Hurrah!" exhibit, which spans each phase of the artist's career.

"People in Lancaster know his tulip paintings, but they don't know the whole breadth of his works. What I really tried to do in this exhibit was bring pieces back that haven't been in Lancaster since Charlie was alive," said Lampe, who imported 40 pieces from collections across the East Coast for the show, which runs through Nov. 30. "I really hunted down pieces that were unusual to him and his oeuvre, to give people a new idea of Charles' art."

These include a drawing of a nude woman thought to have been created in Auguste Rodin's Paris studio, and a travel piece titled "Review in Paris," which has not been shown here in 50 years. Portraits, landscapes, architecturals, nightclub/vaudeville scenes, early childhood and student works and a progression of floral watercolors dating from 1915 to 1922 round out the exhibit.

"The floral paintings show the evolution of his style," Lampe said. "In the beginning, he's doing watercolor florals with an all-over washed or toned background. Then he starts experimenting with a very actively colored background, drawing the eye more to the background than the subject matter of flowers, which is something that the impressionists and early modernists in avant-garde Paris were playing with. And then we have his first tempera piece."

Lampe explained that Demuth, a skilled watercolorist who had long mastered that form's washing, blotting and layered, short-stroke techniques, first tried using watercolor methods with dryer, chalkier tempera paint, to lukewarm effect. She believes that his experimentation with this new material eventually led to his later renditions of Lancaster buildings, granaries and other machinery, works that came late in his career for which he has become internationally known.

"There are lots of straight lines and smooth brushwork in the architectural works, and so the tempera really works for him," Lampe said. By 1922, she said, the artist had applied his fully mature, precisionist style to his still lifes and other works, as well. Although the still lifes' subject matter is conventional, she said, the artworks are nothing short of radical.

"At first blush, you can say, 'I know what that is. It's a pear.' And you feel very comfortable with it. But when you start looking at that pear, you see he's really challenging your concept of what a pear looks like," Lampe said. "He's really trying some of the cutting-edge, avant-garde ideas that were going around the Paris scene."

Lampe hopes the exhibit will help shine a light on the place Demuth holds in modern art history.

"I think he was by far more intellectual in his approach to his artwork than anyone might have thought. He was really pushing limits," she said. "I think, had his life gone on longer, he would have had a greater impact, like his very good friend Georgia O'Keefe.

"He was trying to see where we could go as Americans: What can we create that is our own? He really was among the important, leading artists of the day."