.jpg?w=1)
.jpg?w=1)
.jpg?w=1)
.jpg?w=1)
Lot Essay
A member of Alfred Stieglitz’s circle of American Modernists and one of the most prominent Precisionists, Charles Demuth explored his diverse artistic inspirations with a keen attention to draftsmanship, line and color. In the 1920s, around the same time he was executing his famous architectural paintings, Demuth was also fascinated by the sensual, natural beauty to be found within the simplicity of flowers and fruit. Blue Plums is an example of Demuth’s mastery in the watercolor medium, notably acquired by Museum of Modern Art founder Abby Aldrich Rockefeller in 1931 and descending in her family until the present day. In the present work, Demuth creates a picture of vivid beauty, captured with crisp execution and a pure sense of color. During the 20s, he began to more fully explore spatial possibilities, increasingly isolating his still lifes against a white background. Blue Plums exemplifies these progressive methods with which Demuth would extract the essential essence of his subject. Using a wash-and-blotter technique, areas of the carefully delineated plums and peaches have been given texture that allows them to almost shimmer with light, adding a more natural element to the sharp-edged, Precisionist depiction.
Additionally, Demuth uses the white of the paper as a forceful element in the painting. Emily Farnham discusses his experimentation with this new artistic device: "Still another factor in Demuth which seems to have affected the New Realism is his frequent use of a pristine, immaculate, antiseptic white ground. It was notably in his watercolor still lifes that he habitually placed exquisitely delineated positive objects (peaches, eggplant, striped kitchen towels) against a luminous unpainted ground. This device has reappeared during the sixties in the works of Californian [Wayne] Thiebaud, who employs pure white grounds behind relief-like human figures as means toward the psychological and technical isolation of his subjects" (Charles Demuth: Behind a Laughing Mask, Norman, Oklahoma, 1971, p. 185).
As in his best works, in Blue Plums, Demuth employs his visual vocabulary to convey the nuances of color, atmosphere and the effects of light. As a result, his still-life paintings represent the most immediate and intimate body of his work, and moreover form one of the most important watercolor series of modern American art.
Additionally, Demuth uses the white of the paper as a forceful element in the painting. Emily Farnham discusses his experimentation with this new artistic device: "Still another factor in Demuth which seems to have affected the New Realism is his frequent use of a pristine, immaculate, antiseptic white ground. It was notably in his watercolor still lifes that he habitually placed exquisitely delineated positive objects (peaches, eggplant, striped kitchen towels) against a luminous unpainted ground. This device has reappeared during the sixties in the works of Californian [Wayne] Thiebaud, who employs pure white grounds behind relief-like human figures as means toward the psychological and technical isolation of his subjects" (Charles Demuth: Behind a Laughing Mask, Norman, Oklahoma, 1971, p. 185).
As in his best works, in Blue Plums, Demuth employs his visual vocabulary to convey the nuances of color, atmosphere and the effects of light. As a result, his still-life paintings represent the most immediate and intimate body of his work, and moreover form one of the most important watercolor series of modern American art.