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22/2/2008

Chimneys and Towers

Whitney Museum of American Art, New York

Chimneys and Towers: Charles Demuth’s Late Paintings of Lancaster, an intimate exhibition of an important body of work by one of America’s greatest modernists, goes on view at the Whitney Museum of American Art from February 23 through April 27, 2008. The exhibition is organized by the Amon Carter Museum, Fort Worth, Texas, where it made its debut. The New York installation, in the Sondra Gilman Gallery on the mezzanine off the Museum’s fifth floor, is being overseen by Whitney curatorial assistant Sasha Nicholas, in consultation with Whitney curator Barbara Haskell.

Between 1927 and 1933, Charles Demuth (1883–1935) made a dramatic series of paintings depicting industrial sites in his hometown of Lancaster, Pennsylvania. Today, this landmark body of work is recognized as a major artistic achievement. Created during an intense six-year period, Demuth’s late paintings of Lancaster ushered in a new period of American modernism. While these works drew upon compositional innovations that had been pioneered in Europe, they boldly asserted a new American artistic movement, Precisionism, in which architectural subjects were depicted with crisp geometric lines and flat, austere planes of color. These oils, the last in Demuth's career, represent the final creative surge of an artist who was progressively ill with diabetes, and reveal the importance of place to a painter who, along with others of his generation, reassessed what it meant to be an American artist.

Despite three journeys to Paris and frequent visits to New York City, where he was nurtured by avant-garde intellectual and artistic circles, Demuth's home was always the house he shared with his mother in Lancaster. Towards the end of his life, when his illness made traveling more difficult, Demuth turned to the town's local industrial sites as his subjects—the Armstrong Cork Company, grain elevators, and smokestacks. For Demuth, as for other Precisionist artists, depicting industrial structures, a product of the tremendous industrial growth following World War I, represented an opportunity to create a distinctly American aesthetic rooted in shared national experience. The six oil paintings featured in the exhibition include My Egypt (1927) and Buildings, Lancaster (1930), two of the most iconic works in the Whitney’s collection; Chimney and Water Tower (1931, Amon Carter Museum); Buildings (ca. 1931, Dallas Museum of Art); And the Home of the Brave (1931, Art Institute of Chicago); and the last oil the artist is known to have completed, the enigmatic After All (1933, Norton Museum of Art, West Palm Beach, Florida).

In addition to the six paintings, the exhibition features a group of the rapid graphite notations that Demuth made of the factory buildings in Lancaster, providing insight into the artist’s creative method. Also on view is a selection of Demuth's earlier work in watercolor, including rarely-seen works from the Whitney's collection, which illuminates the artist's favored subject matter and technical evolution prior to his final paintings of Lancaster's industrial architecture. Chimneys and Towers: Charles Demuth’s Late Paintings of Lancaster is accompanied by a publication that contains new scholarship about aspects of the artist’s life and work, including his attachment to Lancaster, his diabetes, and the disease’s effect on his career. Essayists are Betsy Fahlman, guest curator of the exhibition, and Claire Barry, the Amon Carter Museum’s chief paintings conservator.

Chimneys and Towers: Charles Demuth's Late Paintings of Lancaster is organized by the Amon Carter Museum, Fort Worth, Texas. The Texas presentation of the exhibition and the accompanying publication were made possible in part by a generous grant from The Henry Luce Foundation.

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