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CHARLES HENRY DEMUTH
(american 1883-1935)
TREES
Signed and dated 'C. Demuth 1916' bottom left, watercolor with traces of pencil, with a landscape verso
9 3/4 x 13 3/4 in. (24.8 x 34.9cm)
provenance:
Lawrence Meredith Clemson Smith, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.
Private Collection, Pennsylvania.
note:
"At the height of Demuth's involvement with watercolors of New York life and literary themes, he simultaneously began to produce a group of non-figurative watercolors, distinct in style no less than in subject. In these works lay the origins of Precisionist paintings that some scholars identify as his greatest achievement.
Demuth began taking the road toward Precisionism in the summer of 1916 in Provincetown under the influence of Hartley, who was there working on a series of Constructivist-derived geometries unified around sailboat motifs. He and Demuth spent a great deal of time in each other's company and Hartley's work-in-progress may have inspired the younger artist to explore a new direction. Demuth had begun the summer with a group of watercolors of sunbathers that duplicated the documentary impulses of his New York subjects. But by mid-September, Hartley reported that Demuth's current work "has taken on a less frivolous quality and now they are more dignified with more real aesthetic in them." Demuth's shift may, in part, have been motivated by the sentiments evident in Hartley's comments. The circle around Stieglitz had not yet come to take Demuth's work seriously. His ambition was to gain their approval.
The work of Demuth's to which Hartley referred approvingly was a series of tree-filled landscapes in which Demuth replaced his characteristic freely handled wash with more distinctly demarcated color areas that interlocked in a moderately shallow space. As before, Demuth manipulated the relationship between foreground and background, but here, since the subjects are inanimate, the effect is not of time passing. And, because color tones are more delicate and the structure tighter, the mood seems more restrained. The pebbly texture of the blotting technique which he introduced at this time joined with interweaving organic planes to animate the surface. In isolated works such as Trees and Rooftops , Demuth integrated curving tree forms with the angular shapes of buildings to create a conjunction between the organic and geometric that would soon become predominant in his work."
Origins of Precisionism 1916-1922. In Barbara Haskell's exhibition catalogue for Charles Demuth , Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, New York, 1987, pp. 121-122.