Two New Books Include Demuth

Two substantial books — over 400 pages each, lavishly illustrated —have been recently published, both with extended considerations of the work of Charles Demuth, one by Wanda Corn, Professor of Art History at Stanford University, and the other by William R. Scott and Peter M. Rutkoff, Professors of History at Kenyon College.

Corn’s The Great American Thing – the title is a phrase from one of Demuth’s letters to Alfred Stieglitz – is a study of several artists including Georgia O’Keeffe, Joseph Stella, Marcel Duchamp, Paul Rosenfeld, Alfred Stieglitz, Gerald Murphy, Charles Sheeler, and Stuart Davis, in addition to Charles Demuth. Corn’s scrupulous eye and assessment firmly root Demuth’s work in "American Modernism and National Identity, 1915-1935" as her book is sub-titled.

At the 1997 National Preservation Conference in Santa Fe, New Mexico, Corn praised the Demuth Foundation as "a success story," and a year later she was scheduled to speak about "The Artist’s Work Place, An Endangered Species," calling special attention to the notable exception – in Lancaster.

New York Modern, the Scott-Rutkoff history of the development of American modernism, includes considerable information about Demuth and his work, not all of it accurate. Claiming that many of his precisionist cityscapes were of New York, the authors seem to be unaware that all of them (with one exception, Coatesville) were of Lancaster sites. Further, the authors refer to vaudeville scenes based on entertainments in New York, although Demuth’s friend Robert Locher claimed that all of them were based on acts at Lancaster’s Colonial Theater. Similarly – or contrarily – they refer to Demuth’s night club scenes in Paris, although all of them were based on saloons and restaurants in New York. The one painting he completed in Paris is a street scene. Elsewhere, the book suffers from inaccuracies of various kinds about other figures as well. Even so, it is gratifying to find Demuth given some attention, although his I Saw The Figure Five in Gold, reproduced only in black and white, is a further disappointment.