Bernard Goldberg Fine Arts

Provenance:

The artist

By bequest to Robert Locher

Private collection, California, ca. 1940s

Private collection, New York

Exhibited:

Charles Demuth: The Later Years, The Demuth Foundation, Lancaster, Pennsylvania, June 1 – September 15, 2001.

Paintings must be looked at and looked at and looked at – they, I think, the good ones, like it…No writing, no talking, no singing, no dancing will explain them. They are the final, the ‘nth whoopee of sight….’Look at that!’ is all that can be said before a great painting, at least, by those who really see it.

-- Charles Demuth in “Across A Greco Is Written,” in Creative Art, September 1929.

Born in Lancaster, Pennsylvania in 1883, Charles Demuth is inarguably one of the greatest watercolorists that the United States has produced. By the time of his death in 1935, he left behind a distinctive and diverse body of work, including theater scenes, portraits, landscapes and still lifes.

His initial education was of a high level (including study with Thomas Anshutz at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts), but it was his travels to Europe and his education there that cemented his aesthetic. Demuth spent much of the second decade of the century in Paris, where he immersed himself in the avant-garde, and befriended such art world luminaries as Gertrude and Leo Stein, Marsden Hartley and John Marin. Upon his subsequent returns to the United States, he perfected his dandyish, aesthete persona and frequented the clubs and bars of Harlem and Greenwich Village with Marcel Duchamp and other Dadaists.

This floral still life from 1922 was executed after Demuth’s final trip to Europe (suffering from illness throughout his life, he was forced to return to America due to complications from diabetes in 1921). Demuth’s work is often categorized as Precisionist, and at other times as decorative, and while these terms may provide a superficial description of his aesthetic, they are, as with all great artists, too confined to describe the depth and wonder of his achievement. In addition to the precision of his work, there is most often a deeply emotive, even elegiac sense in his work. Precisionism implies a sense of the concrete, but this idea is antithetical to Demuth’s work, such that it is suffused with ambiguities in both feeling and content. This creates a specific tension in the work, which propels it above the merely decorative and into the realm of the sublimely beautiful.

Also of great importance is the amount of negative space the artist has allowed; the intimations of what exists around what is shown are limned in the most delicate of graphite lines. A mystery of what isn’t seen surrounds the composition, and makes that which is shown even stronger.

Finally, there is Demuth’s coloration and his brilliant application of it. The medium’s fluidity is apparent, but so is the artist’s ability to rein it in for his purposes. There are subtle shifts in the coloration throughout Floral Still Life: reds slowly move into pink, dark greens to bright yellow, reds to rust and orange. And behind the composition is the artist’s trademark, expert background; a carefully blotted, floating color field of blues and grays. It is a testament to Demuth’s greatness that even gray, a hue usually associated with gloom and heaviness, takes on the character of a beautiful, ethereal presence.