Charles Demuth’s Letters To Be Published

Philadelphia’s Temple University Press will publish The Letters of Charles Demuth in June. Over 150 letters from the artist to Georgia O’Keeffe, Gertrude Stein, Eugene O’Neill, William Carlos Williams, and others have been edited by Bruce Kellner, member of the board of directors of the Demuth Foundation and editor of the Demuth Dialogue.

Also, the book will include assessments of Demuth’s work made during his lifetime, including the full text of art collector A.E. Gallatin’s essay published in his 1927 book of Demuth reproductions; and reviews and articles about Demuth’s work by art critic Henry McBride, 1914-1937; Willard Huntington Wright (better known as mystery writer S. S. Van Dyne who invented Philo Vance), 1918; novelist Carl Van Vechten, 1922; and Demuth’s companion at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Helen Henderson, who later became Philadelphia’s leading art critic.

Kellner amassed the letters over a period of three years, from various library and museum collections across the country. He is seeing the annotated edition into print with copious explanatory footnotes and a biographical introduction, but he hastens to acknowledge the strong support offered him during its preparation from three successive Foundation directors, the staff, and particularly the help of former board member Margaret C. Woodbridge.

Beginning with a valentine verse to a neighbor when Demuth was eleven, and concluding with a letter to his friend and advocate Alfred Stieglitz, the correspondence covers the artist’s entire career: his trips abroad, his connections with early collectors, the progress of his paintings, his health, the social milieus in which he participated, his strong affection for his mother, and his ambivalent attitude toward his hometown.

Moreover, the letters correct a number of errors that have been perpetuated over the years because of incomplete or unavailable information. The collection should prove valuable to art historians as well as to those interested in the lives of Demuth’s correspondents. Furthermore, they offer a good idea of how Demuth must have expressed himself — a "breathless exuberance," according to Kellner — when he was speaking.

The book will be published simultaneously in hardcover and in paperback. Members wishing to purchase copies are encouraged to do so through the museum shop, since all proceeds from sales in the museum shop go to the Demuth Foundation, but sales from other locations do not. — CB