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Artist or Maker: Charles Demuth (1883-1935)
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Exhibited: New York, Andrew Crispo Gallery,
Pioneers of American Abstraction: Bluemner, Davis, Demuth, Dove, Marin, O'Keeffe, Stella, Weber
, October-November, 1973.
New York, Richard York Gallery,
The Natural Images: Plant Forms in American Modernism
, 1982, no. 10.
Lancaster, Pennsylvania, The Demuth Foundation and Museum,
25 Years of the Demuth: Homage and Hurrah!
, September 15-November 30, 2006.
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Notes: Property from the Collection of Bernard Heineman, Jr.
Charles Demuth's still life watercolors are the best known works of his career and Still Life with Pears and Red Apples, are examples of Demuth's mastery in the medium. Each executed circa 1929, Still Life with Pears and Red Apples were created when Demuth's creativity and output was at its height. The double-sided work is comprised of, on one side, a pair of pears on a table, while the other side is a representation of three vibrant red apples set against a stark white background. "By the late 1920s Charles Demuth can be said to have not only mastered the art of still life painting, but to have combined in these works delicacy and strength, formalism, evanescence and subtlety, with seeming fortuitousness." (T.E. Norton, Homage to Charles Demuth: Still Life Painter of Lancaster, Ephrata, Pennsylvania, 1978, p. 38)
To the everyday subject matter of fruit, Demuth applies an innovative technique, particularly in his later still life compositions, which often revolve around his use of "negative" space devoid of pigments. By the 1920s, Demuth began to more fully explore the spatial possibilities of his subjects, increasingly isolating fruit or flowers in his work against a white background. In this way Demuth creates a tension between painted and unpainted elements in his compositions. Each work is complete and yet many compositional elements are themselves unfinished.
In Still Life with Pears and Red Apples, Demuth uses the white of the paper as a forceful element in the painting. Emily Farnham discusses his experimentation with this new artistic device: "Still another factor in Demuth which seems to have affected the New Realism is his frequent use of a pristine, immaculate, antiseptic white ground. It was notably in his watercolor still lifes that he habitually placed exquisitely delineated positive objects (peaches, eggplant, striped kitchen towels) against a luminous unpainted ground. This device has reappeared during the sixties in the works of Californian [Wayne] Thiebaud, who employs pure white grounds behind relief-like human figures as means toward the psychological and technical isolation of his subjects." (Charles Demuth: Behind a Laughing Mask, Norman, Oklahoma, 1971, p. 185) Still Life with Pears and Red Apples exemplify Demuth's progressive method. In places he uses almost pure color which, in visual terms, were Demuth's chief aims, while effectively highlighting the vibrant fruit in the center of the composition.
In Still Life with Pears and Red Apples, as in all of his most successful watercolors, Demuth creates a picture of vivid beauty, captured with crisp draftsmanship and sure sense of color. Most effectively through his still life subjects, Charles Demuth developed a unique artistic vision that has transformed the recent history of American watercolor painting.
