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Charles Demuth
1883–1935
BirthplaceLancaster, Pennsylvania, United States of America
Death placeLancaster, Pennsylvania, United States of America
BiographyA man of great cultivation and complexity, Charles Demuth was one of America’s most important early American modernists. From a well-to-do family in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, he studied art in Philadelphia at the Drexel Institute of Art and later the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. He divided his early artistic endeavors between painting and writing. Almost thirty years old when he arrived in Paris for an extended stay, he sought little formal training but eagerly absorbed the varied expressions of modern art—cubism, fauvism and futurism—while spending frequent evenings at the “salon” of American collector and writer Gertrude Stein, where he enjoyed the conversation of the artistic and literary avant-garde. Demuth returned to the United States in 1914 to champion the ideas and art associated with the New York dada circle around Walter and Louise Arensberg, collectors of European and American modernism.
During most of his career, Demuth divided his time between his studios in New York City; Provincetown, Massachusetts, where he summered until 1920; and his hometown of Lancaster, where he resided in an elegant old family home. Demuth formed a wide circle of friends who were the leading artists or collectors of the time. Yet it was through the support and promotional efforts of photographer and gallery owner Alfred Stieglitz (1864–1946) after 1921 that Demuth gained a public profile. Demuth’s command of watercolor technique and his innovative experiments in oil painting were equally lauded, and his nature studies complemented his geometric depictions of the city. In the late 1920s Alfred H. Barr, Jr., founding director of the Museum of Modern Art, referred to this latter work as “precisionist” for its sharp-edged style, geometric design, order and clarity, an aesthetic shared with such artist-colleagues as Georgia O’Keeffe, Charles Sheeler, and Preston Dickinson (1891–1930). Demuth's poor health—led by the advanced diabetes of which he died—along with his homosexuality positioned him on the edge of mainstream society at the time, but his art is at the heart of early American modernism.
During most of his career, Demuth divided his time between his studios in New York City; Provincetown, Massachusetts, where he summered until 1920; and his hometown of Lancaster, where he resided in an elegant old family home. Demuth formed a wide circle of friends who were the leading artists or collectors of the time. Yet it was through the support and promotional efforts of photographer and gallery owner Alfred Stieglitz (1864–1946) after 1921 that Demuth gained a public profile. Demuth’s command of watercolor technique and his innovative experiments in oil painting were equally lauded, and his nature studies complemented his geometric depictions of the city. In the late 1920s Alfred H. Barr, Jr., founding director of the Museum of Modern Art, referred to this latter work as “precisionist” for its sharp-edged style, geometric design, order and clarity, an aesthetic shared with such artist-colleagues as Georgia O’Keeffe, Charles Sheeler, and Preston Dickinson (1891–1930). Demuth's poor health—led by the advanced diabetes of which he died—along with his homosexuality positioned him on the edge of mainstream society at the time, but his art is at the heart of early American modernism.