Three Pears

In contrast to Charles Demuth's floral still lifes from the mid-teens in which the artist was concerned with rendering an all-over patterning effect, his later still lifes have a spare quality. In focusing quite specifically on the fruit itself, Demuth's still lifes from the 1930s, such as Three Pears, take on a poetic quality. Barbara Haskell notes that "in all cases, Demuth captured the reflection of light as it played over the rounded surfaces of fruits and vegetables, thereby creating voluptuous three-dimensional shapes reminiscent of those in Cézanne's still lifes...Not surprisingly, such fruits and vegetables were often perceived as willful evocations of body parts. Demuth continued to blot the wet watercolor medium in order to create texture, but now he also became more inclined to allow pencil-drawn silhouettes remain free of color." (Charles Demuth, New York, 1988, p. 141)