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Name Dropping Exhibition Features Demuth’s Friends On March 22, the Foundation will open an exhibition of photographs and artifacts to account for some of Charles Demuth’s richest associations. From his early days in Philadelphia, where he met poet William Carlos Williams, who became a boon companion and life-long friend, Charles Demuth eventually counted among his acquaintances, friends, and intimates a remarkable roster of celebrated figures from twentieth century arts and letters. Through Williams he came to know poets Ezra Pound, “H.D.” (Hilda Doolittle), and Alfred Kreymborg, and photographer Man Ray. His Lancaster friend, commercial artist Robert Locher, and Locher’s wife Beatrice Howard were frequent companions, both on the continent and in later years on Staten Island where the Lochers had a large house, often overflowing with guests. Earlier, he was often part of an unholy crowd that misbehaved in Greenwich Village, during the Nineteen-Teens: poet Mina Loy and her boxer beau Arthur Craven, artist Beatrice Wood, dadaist Marcel Duchamp, and Marguerite and William Zorach, both of whom painted. Also at this time, he knew artist Abraham Walkowitz and art patrons Louise and Walter Arensberg. Just as often, he was in the company of various Village denizens, both anonymously at the homosexual Lafayette Baths and as a regular customer in black saloons like Marshall’s, where Florence Embry Jones entertained, inspiring Demuth to memorialize her in several watercolors. He hung out in white dives as well, like the Hell Hole, where he memorialized himself in a watercolor, drinking well into the night. Among other painters that he counted as friends was Georgia O’Keeffe. Probably she takes precedence in any Demuth roster of companions, for she considered him her greatest friend from the group of artists they both knew through photographer Alfred Stieglitz’s art galleries in New York at the time. John Marin and Arthur Dove were not close acquaintances, but they were nevertheless painters with whom Demuth felt a strong affinity. Another in Stieglitz’s stable was Marsden Hartley, whom Demuth had met in Paris in 1907 and with whom he was permanently in touch afterward. His “poster portraits” expanded to include sketches
of two others that he never completed: Wallace Stevens, whose
poems he admired and whom he knew through the Arensbergs; and
the playwright Eugene O’Neill, at the time of the founding
the Provincetown Players. Others in this group included journalist
Hutchins Hapgood and his novelist-wife, Neith Boyce, playwrights
George Cram Cook and Susan Glaspell, the Greenwich Village poet
John Reed, and Mabel Dodge (later Luhan), both on the Cape and
during her 23 Fifth Avenue salon days. The warm friendship between Demuth and eccentric art collector
Dr. Albert C. Barnes added yet another segment of the circle. These figures are represented in the current exhibition, which runs through May. |
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