Biography from Owen Gallery:
| In Lancaster, Pennsylvania, the Demuth family name can be traced back to the 1700s. Charles Demuth was born in the town in 1883, and the site, depicted in many of his most important works, proved important to the artist's work for the remainder of his career.
Demuth exhibited an early interest in and aptitude for drawing and painting. He followed a traditional course of artistic training, studying at various artistic institutes at home and abroad. However, on his third European trip, during the years of 1912 to 1914, Demuth took his first decisive step toward the avant-garde, socializing with such personalities as Gertrude and Leo Stein, Alice Toklas, Marsden Hartley, and Arnolf Ronnenbeck.
Throughout the teens and 1920s, Demuth successfully exhibited with the Daniel Gallery in New York. However, in 1926, he enjoyed his first one-man show at Alfred Stieglitz's celebrated Intimate Gallery. Demuth had long since known Stieglitz, having first been introduced by Hartley in 1914, and had been involved in group shows organized by the dealer since the previous year.
Demuth lived a life riddled with chronic health problems; he was stricken lame at the age of four due to an injury to his hip, and suffered from diabetes for the last fifteen years of his life. After fourteen months of illness during which he was not able to paint, Demuth, later discovered by his mother, died quietly in his bed in Lancaster. |
Biography from Mark Borghi Fine Art Inc - New York:
| One of America's prominent modernists, Charles Demuth was born to a family of comfortable means in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. Although plagued by ill health for most of his life, (he suffered from diabetes and a club-foot), he traveled widely in his life. He became a leading proponent of Precisionism.
He pursued art studies at the Drexel Institute, the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts under Thomas Anschutz, and then spent several years studying art in Paris. While there, he became a frequent visitor to the salon of Gertrude and Leo Stein.
Demuth's health was frail; from an early age he suffered from lameness and as an adult from severe diabetes. Though plagued by illness all his life, he produced over a thousand works of art, including the well known "My Egypt," which was inspired by grain elevators in Lancaster.
During his lifetime he sold many of his works, enjoyed favorable reviews from art critics, and was part of Alfred Stieglitz's American Place Gallery in New York. Although he studied and painted in Philadelphia, New York, Provincetown, Paris and Bermuda, Demuth created most of his art in his home where he worked in a small second floor studio of the rear wing, overlooking the garden. The garden was tended by his mother Augusta and was the source of inspiration for many of Demuth's paintings |
Biography from AskART:
| A painter of allegorical figurative watercolors including a vaudeville
series and also contemporary floral studies, Charles Demuth was also a
major exponent of Precisionism as well as more poetic styles that
emphasized emotional response to art. Much of his work is rooted in
French modernism including Fauvism. He painted with oil and tempera as
well as watercolor and completed about 750 paintings and 350 drawings
during his lifetime.
Demuth was born in Lancaster, Pennsylvania
and kept close ties to his hometown, although he moved in highly
sophisticated circles in New York, Provincetown, and Paris and
delighted in the bohemian lifestyle he found in these places.
He had a childhood of much isolation and illness and throughout his life, had a sense of being an outsider.
He
first studied at the Drexel Institute in Philadelphia and after a trip
to Europe in 1904, became a student of Thomas Anschutz at the
Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts until 1911. Then he went to Paris for
two years and began his pursuit of modern art, becoming associated with
avant-garde literary persons including Gertrude and Leo Stein and
modernist painters Matisse, Braque, Derain, Dufy and Vlaminck. He
attended the Academie Julian, Academie Colarossi and Academie Moderne.
His
early paintings were simple floral and figure studies in watercolor
with shifting tonalities of color, and he also did watercolor
illustrations for books and plays including works by Henry James and
Emile Zola.
Returning to America in 1914, he became one of the
modernist artists associated with Alfred Stieglitz and was also among
the group of intellectuals around Marcel Duchamp and the Dada Movement.
He and Duchamp spent much time in Harlem jazz clubs and Greenwich
Village bars, and he loved the life of the big city libertine. A close
friend was Marsden Hartley, and they went to Bermuda together in 1916
and 1917.
From 1915, much of his effort was devoted to
figurative subjects, and a recurring theme was acrobatic figures, which
reflected an early 20th century American interest. His art reputation
was established with his New York solo exhibition in 1915 at the George
Daniel Gallery. Shortly after that he experimented with Cubism, and his
first Precisionist work was done in 1919. Much of his Precisionist
subject matter was the empty-seeming urban landscape, barren of human
emotion and reflective of post-World War I disillusionment.
During
the 1920s, his work became increasingly realistic and more focused on
line and shape and color. He suffered from diabetes and turned to
small-scale still lifes and floral studies that, unlike his urban
studies, were loaded with personal feeling. Between 1924 and 1929, he
did many portraits of friends with objects representing their lives.
Special friends were Georgia O'Keeffe, John Marin, and Marsden Hartley.
Sources include:
Michael David Zellman, 300 Years of American Art
Matthew Baigell, Dictionary of American Art
Peter Falk, Who Was Who in American Art
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Charles Demuth is also mentioned in these AskART essays:
Fauves/Fauvism
San Francisco Panama-Pacific Exhibition 1915
Modernism
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