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Stretching The Truth — Dispelling the Myth Charles Demuth was in love with Helene Iungerich and hoped to marry her. False. There is no factual evidence that Demuth ever contemplated marriage to anybody, or that he was ever involved in any long-term or short-term romantic alliance with anybody, male or female. He had “some queer kind of feeling,” and “a kind of crush” on Cape Cod artist Helene Iungerich, according to painter Stuart Davis. It seems, however, to have been an artistic infatuation rather than a romantic one, rather like his intense friendship with artist Georgia O’Keeffe. His name has also been linked romantically but vaguely with Polly Holladay (sometimes spelled Holiday) because of her crush on him. She owned a restaurant in Greenwich Village that Demuth frequented, but she was in a long-term love affair with her chef, the Russian anarchist Hippolyte Havel. Demuth seems genuinely to have enjoyed the social company of women: in addition to Georgia O’Keeffe; the three Stettheimer sisters (one artist, one novelist, and one dollhouse maker); his fellow students at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Helen Henderson and Rita Wellman; and Lancaster wives, Elsie Everts, Beatrice Howard Locher, and Blanche Steinman. Demuth painted the ceiling of the bell tower at Trinity Lutheran Church. Maybe. The art critic Henry McBride wrote to Florine Stettheimer, and the Philadelphia art patron Emily Clark Balch wrote to Carl Van Vechten, about 118 East King Street, after their visits to Lancaster to see Demuth in 1928. Both of them referred to Trinity Lutheran’s bell and the beauty of its cupola, describing it at some length, but neither of these good friends mentioned anything about the bell tower’s ceiling or its painter. In 1954, Demuth’s intimate friend Robert Locher, and Locher’s long-time companion Richard Weyand, claimed that Demuth had painted the ceiling between circa 1900-1910. There seems to be no mention of this attribution elsewhere. In her will, Demuth’s mother left $10,000 to Trinity Lutheran Church for a stained glass window in memory of her parents, to cost no more than $2,000, and the balance of the bequest to be used to paint the bell tower — every seven years, according to Locher. Demuth designed stage sets at the Fulton. Unlikely. Although the Fulton has circulated a time-line history of the theater, claiming Demuth’s participation backstage in 1931, there seems to be no basis in fact for this information. In 1930, Darrell Larsen came to Franklin and Marshall College to direct its drama program. The following year, when the Fulton ceased booking in road companies, a group of local actors founded Lancaster’s first theater group, called the “Drama Club,” and staged George Kelly’s The Torchbearers. Demuth’s name is not included on the program, so the rumor seems to have been founded on the fact that Larsen and Demuth were intimate friends. Demuth’s studio was hung with paintings and drawings by friends. Yes and No. His friend, artist George Biddle, could not remember that anything at all hung on the walls; his Lancaster friend, Elsie Everts, said “the walls were barren and white-washed or painted white; only art critic Henry McBride remembered a John Marin watercolor, an early Louis Bouché drawing, and two photo-portraits of Robert Locher and his wife by Man Ray there. But perhaps some times the walls held art and at other times they were barren. Demuth was an intimate friend of Gertrude Stein.
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