Demuth’s Modern Industry

A new show at the Whitney Museum takes us back virtually to the inaugural moments of American modernism, through a small display of paintings by Charles Demuth. This relatively short-lived artist (1883–1935) was a friend of Alfred Stieglitz, Eugene O’Neill, Marsden Hartley, Stuart Davis, and William Carlos Williams, and was one of the first Americans to grasp modernism as a movement and to embrace it on its own terms. Unlike such earlier artists as Childe Hassam and the other American Impressionists, who obeyed the commandment to paint modern life, Demuth and his American contemporaries were so enraptured by the machine age that they made its aesthetic the defining attribute of their art.Never did Demuth accomplish this with greater vigor or precision than in the seven paintings that form the bulk of the Whitney’s diminutive exhibition “Chimneys and Towers: Charles Demuth’s Late Paintings of Lancaster.” He was a fairly well-traveled man, who spent a good deal of time in New York and made three trips to Paris. But “Chimneys and Towers” consists of a set of paintings from late in the artist’s career, around 1930, and they were conceived as an homage to his birthplace, Lancaster, Pa. Demuth is surely happy to romanticize the town, but never suppresses evidence of the heavy industry that abounded in what would eventually become the American Rust Belt. Nor does he try to find some equilibrium between the machine age and something more eternal and human in scale, as Monet succeeded in doing in his depictions of the Gare Saint-Lazare. No, Demuth voids his compositions of any trace of human inhabitants, even though human artifacts, manifested in billboard advertisements as well as in silos, chimneys, and forklifts, are so present in these works that nothing of nature dares rear its head against the gunmetal grays of the Lancastrian skies, marked and smudged with half a century of smelting, puddling, and refining.In the service of this vision, Demuth was one of the creators of a style that goes by the name of precisionism. Like so much of the art of the time, it invokes the rectilinear aesthetic of synthetic cubism in its general resistance to curves. And such curves as Demuth can tolerate are unnaturally precise (hence the movement’s name), perfectly formed geometric statements that acquire polemical force in their determination to oust from his diminutive canvases any of the winsome irregularities of the natural order of things.As though to accentuate the hard-bitten, unyielding Americanism of his vision, Demuth chose to call one of his Lancaster paintings “My Egypt.” His point was that in the heroic immensity of his depiction of a factory structure, whose brutal simplicity consists of little more than twinned pylons and a penthouse graced with steam pipes, a viewer could find a pharaonic grandeur comparable to the Pyramids of Egypt. To emphasize that hugeness, Demuth depicts the structure from below. The dominant chromatic register is one of bone-white and gray, with a touch of red along the right, a mud-colored base and an energetic smokestack to the side of the main structure.Meanwhile, “Chimney and Water Tower” is a depiction of exactly that, its only concessions to curvature being the schematic renderings of smoke from a large red chimney and of steam from a smaller pipe at the base. While most of these paintings are rigorously geometric and almost abstract, Demuth occasionally takes a holiday from that stricture. In “And the Home of the Brave,” everything is in accordance with his dominant aesthetic, except for an exquisitely painted street-lamp at the lower right-hand side of the painting. Here, quite unexpectedly, Demuth exhibits draftsmanly verve that seems at once alien and yet not out of place in the context of the Lancaster paintings.But in order to demonstrate that this flash of brilliance was not entirely foreign to Demuth’s art, the Whitney has included, together with the Lancaster paintings, a number of the artist’s drawings. Most of these are studies for the Lancaster paintings. But some, like his depictions of poppies and wild orchids, display a commitment to curvacity that comes not only as a surprise, but as a welcome relief from that powerful, awful machine aesthetic that, for Demuth, represented the essential truth of the modern world.Until April 27 (945 Madison Ave. at 75th Street, 212-570-3633).

Demuth’s Modern Industry

Demuth’s Modern Industry

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