“Water-colours By Charles Demuth” By Henry McBride

Ask almost anyone conversant with art conditions in America: “Who are our six outstanding artists?” and the answer is more than likely to include the name of Demuth - Charles Demuth. This opinion, on investigation, is found to rest upon his achievement in water-colours, and especially upon a series devoted to still-life and flower-pieces. There are some paintings in oil and some water-colours on architectural and figure themes (prized possessions of some special Demuth enthusiasts, though not generally known), but the reputation has been fixed by the cool, clear, sure, elegant studies of fruits, vegetables and flowers. That they are “modern”does not seem to disturb many who are usually afflicted by what is known as “modernity”; that they are clear and understandable does not offend the progressives. In other words, Demuth enjoys a genuine success with his contemporaries, a quiet, steady unsensational success. I have never heard of any riots produced by his exhibitions nor voices raised in criticism of them. In my little list of qualifying adjectives I employed purposely last the word “elegant,” wishing it to have the emphasis of a last word. I don't believe Demuth himself would disavow that his mind, from a strictly modern base, reaches out continually for eighteenth century refinements. In fact, I have heard him confess that Fragonard was, and had been, the maddest passion of his vie intellectuelle. Demuth's modernity is not something he has carved roughly from experience, but rather it is an accepted language of the day that he found waiting for him on the scene when he arrived. He adopted it easily and unconcernedly and without the sense of shame that attended the efforts of certain older men, such as Arthur B. Davies, Charles Rosen, etc., who changed in mid-career from the old style to the new. It is because of his own perfectly natural participation in contemporary through about nature that his flashing, geometrically arranged skies beating down upon disintegrated and recomposed Christopher Wren steeples escape the contumely that is heaped upon most modern art in America. When the flower pictures had already made Demuth known and it had become fashionable to own one, Mr. [Charles] Daniel, who was then Mr. Demuth's merchant, showed us all, surreptitiously, some figure drawings. They were not precisely shocking, but one or two of the drawings illustrated points in Zola's Nana, and just before the war we were still sufficiently Victorian to shudder at the thought of exposing pictures of reprehensible Nana on the walls of a public gallery. Times, of course, have greatly changed since then and now Nana, poor dear, can go anywhere she wants to, but by the time our collectors had realized that “Nanas” had become perfectly all right, and rather better company than most, the entire lot of Mr. Demuth's figure drawings had been swept into some especially well-hidden collection - and it was announced that the artist was not to do any more figures! This was a real blow. Most amateurs, now that Nana had definitely come and gone, had decided that in Demuth we had some one who could do for us what Toulouse-Lautrec had done for the French. But it was not to be. Demuth, they told us, was ill; so ill that his alarmed friends actually thought a “finis” had been written to the career. I put the question to Demuth after he was restored to apparent health, “why he didn't try some figure things?” and in a short reply, looking in another direction, he answered, “I no longer seem to have the energy.” And in the meantime the still-lifes and flower-pieces continue. The fuzzy bloom on the peach, the glittering polish of the aubergine, the controlled richness of the opulent zinnias, all these and other such splendours from the vegetable world inform the new Demuth water-colours with a style that it rejoices one to see appreciated. They appear to be the best things in that line that we have done.