Charles Demuth

Charles Demuth, From the Garden of the Château, 1921 (reworked 1925)
Oil on canvas, 25 x 20 in. (63.5 x 50.8 cm). Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, Museum purchase, Roscoe and Margaret Oakes Income Fund, Ednah Root, and the Walter H. and Phyllis J. Shorenstein Foundation Fund, 1990.4

Charles Demuth was born in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, and lived in his family’s home until his death in 1935. After studying art in Paris, where he encountered European modernism, he fused the faceted planes of Cubism with the dynamic forces of Futurism to help forge Precisionism, the first American modernist art movement. Demuth’s rendering of modern industrial subjects included the painting Incense of a New Church (1921), which likened an industrial factory to a church or religion. From the Garden of the Château shows a view from Demuth’s studio in his eighteenth-century Lancaster home, looking across to the modern Lancaster Laundry building. The title, which ironically likens his American home to a French château, implicitly contrasts the provincial United States, considered a cultural wasteland for avant-garde art, to the sophisticated art capital of Paris. As he wrote to the art dealer and photographer Alfred Stieglitz, “What work I do will be done here; terrible as it is to work in this ‘our land of the free.’”