ANNUAL MEETING, 21 APRIL 2002
The annual meeting of the Demuth Foundation drew nearly ninety
members for an engaging evening with Michael Taylor, Assistant
Curator of Twentieth Century Art at the Philadelphia Museum
of Art.
Held at the Pressroom restaurant this year, the meeting began
with a cocktail party at 5.30.
Despite the bad manners of one of the slide projectors, Dr.
Taylor spoke with warm authority about Charles Demuth’s
development as an artist, about the coherence and integrity
of his various manners and mediums. The following reconstructed
excerpts are from his talk.
I keep coming back to the Foundation to see this 1907 [self-]
portrait. It really shows the ambition of Demuth, something
that is often forgotten in the writings on his life. He was
an intensely ambitious artist, right from the beginning.
• His work is elusive, his titles are deliberately provocative,
and I think it’s our challenge today to see if we can
come to some sort of agreement about his relationship with Cubism
and also [with] his friends. Marcel Duchamp, writing in 1949,
called Demuth “an artist worthy of the name, without the
pettiness which affects most of us,” whose work reflected
“his inner self, without the usual eagerness to be right.
Demuth was also one of the few artists whom all other artists
liked.”
• I think [Pablo] Picasso was pushing Demuth to explore
Cubism, and [Marcel] Duchamp was pushing Demuth to explore irony
and humor. . . . For American artists, the challenge was not
to be Cubist; it was to be Cubist in an American way. . . .
There’s an underlying structure here that he’s getting
at, and that’s where the Cubism comes in. Cubism, which
of course has been interpreted as being such a disruptive influence,
it really is quite a constructive one. Cubism is allowing Demuth
to paint what he sees and to understand it.
• The strange thing about Demuth is that it’s so
easy to compartmentalize his career and to put these works [his
cabaret and vaudeville scenes] in one pocket and still lifes
in another and the poster portraits in another and the Precisionist
paintings in another. But really what I love about this is that
I always see a certain continuity.
