Charles Demuth: Master Watercolorist/Pioneer Precisionist

Philadelphia, Penn. and West Palm Beach, Fla.

:A central figure in the group of early avant-garde artists who brought Modernism to America, Charles Demuth (1883–1935) is best known as a master watercolorist and pioneer Precisionist painter. He brought to his craft a sophistication, sensibility, wit and daring that were rare for his time.

A consummate watercolorist, Demuth handled the medium with deceptive casualness when it suited his purposes, and with virtuoso clarity when it fitted his subject matter. Detached and keenly observant, he painted things that interested him most: cafes, bars, vaudeville entertainers, beach scenes, passages from James, Poe or Zola, fruit and vegetables from the local farmer's market and flowers from the family garden.

An exacting and skilled formalist, Demuth applied rigorous control and an astute sense of composition to his crisp, precise oil paintings of factories, smokestacks, grain elevators and water towers of his hometown of Lancaster, Penn., and vernacular structures in rural Pennsylvania. In these meticulous images he managed to convey the beauty and strength of American industrial might and of utilitarian buildings.

Much of Demuth's life — and his subjects — was related to the fact that he was gay, lame and diabetic. Although he traveled a good deal, he was always drawn back to his home base, Lancaster, where his mother helped care for him during times of ill health. By all accounts elegant, amusing, frivolous, dandified, shy, kind and gentle, Demuth had many friends among his fellow artists.

Demuth's traits, and his achievements as a watercolorist and Precisionist, are showcased in two current exhibitions.

"Out of the Chateau: Works from the Demuth Museum" is the first touring exhibition of the permanent collection of the museum housed in Demuth's Lancaster home/studio. Curated by Anne M. Lampe, executive director of the Demuth Museum, and organized at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts by senior curator Lynn Marsden-Atlass, the show will be at the academy through December 9. Most of the 34 works demonstrate Demuth's ability to depict a variety of subjects in sumptuous watercolors. A catalog is in the works. A companion exhibition, "Demuth and Modernism," features works by Demuth and such fellow Modernists as Arthur Dove, Georgia O'Keeffe and Charles Sheeler from the academy's permanent collection.

"Chimneys and Towers: Charles Demuth's Late Paintings of Lancaster," organized by the Amon Carter Museum (where it opened last summer), is on view at the Norton Museum of Art through January 20. Focusing on a series of six industrial paintings, the show and excellent catalog explore how Demuth melded aspects of place, region, past and present to create strikingly precise canvases with powerful visual and symbolic meanings.