Small-town boy makes good

You’d think that Charles Demuth, an artistic vanguard and a celebrated carouser, must have felt like a stranger in his reserved hometown known for its Amish, not its art.

His paintings tell a different story, however: He might have felt trapped among the farms and factories of central Pennsylvania, but he understood that world intimately.

Persistent health problems always forced him home after brief stints in the bohemian Paris and New York enclaves where the painter reveled, leading Demuth to sarcastically write to fellow artists upon his return that he was “back in the province.” But by working with the world he knew and turning Lancaster’s smokestacks, church steeples and water towers into precisionist masterpieces, he proudly showed the 1920s art cognoscenti that modernism was not solely the bastion of big city America or avant-garde Europe.

Demuth’s love-hate relationship with the “province” is evident in the home and studio where he lived and worked -- now known as the Demuth Foundation, a museum housing about 30 works from his childhood until his death in 1935.

Though his most renowned paintings reside in large museums, the Demuth Foundation features versions of masterpieces including 1927’s “My Egypt.” The work depicts Lancaster grain silos with Cubist-inspired planes and suggests in its title that Demuth saw the city as his personal place of bondage. These hard-edged geometric compositions of factories and city rooftops share the small museum space with delicate floral watercolors inspired by the family garden.

The contradictory styles and subject matters weren’t the only elements of Demuth’s life seemingly at odds.

“He was always somewhat frail, but he also liked to party,” said D. Robert Fenninger, president of the museum board. “He was part of the New York nightclub scene, he was in Provincetown (Mass.) and Greenwich Village in the ‘20s.... I like to think this wasn’t necessarily a prison but more of a place where he could come to recharge after a period of craziness and focus on his work.”

What is clear is that Demuth’s art, nearly all of which was created in Lancaster, is directly drawn from his life and experiences to a greater degree than many of his contemporaries, museum curator Teri Trainer said. The industrial might and natural beauty that battled for Lancaster’s post-World War I landscape also battled for the artist’s attention and inspiration.

Artist as a young man

Born in 1883, Demuth suffered from a malformed hip that caused one leg to be shorter than the other. After taking his “cure” -- six weeks in traction and two years of bed rest -- he still walked with a limp and often used a cane.

The Demuth Tobacco Shop, the family business founded in 1770 and still a successful enterprise today, held no interest for the young artist, Trainer said.

“He was an artist, that was very clear from early on,” she said. “And he was supported (in his artistic pursuits) by his parents.”

After attending Drexel Institute of Art, Science and Industry (now Drexel University) and the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in Philadelphia, the man known to friends as “Deem” began traveling regularly to Europe, where he became friends with Dada artist Marcel Duchamp and American expatriate Gertrude Stein.

Though his work was widely respected by the intelligentsia during his lifetime -- he was part of the influential “Stieglitz Circle” that included Georgia O’Keeffe, Arthur Dove and Alfred Stieglitz -- he was scarcely noticed in his conservative hometown. Demuth only showed a single painting in Lancaster, a 1907 self-portrait.

He was diagnosed with diabetes in 1921 and returned home for good, with his mother as his caretaker. In the years that followed, he created his most sophisticated and best-known works, including 1928’s “The Figure 5 in Gold,” based on a poem by his friend, William Carlos Williams, and often called a foreshadowing of Pop Art. As he grew weaker, he turned to watercolors and often focused on fruit and flowers he could see from his studio window.

On a train bringing him home from a visit to New York in October 1935, Demuth collapsed in a diabetic coma. He died at his home at age 51.

“It’s interesting to wonder what he would have done if he didn’t suffer from health problems,” Fenninger said. “Would he have left Lancaster and lived in Paris or New York? Would he have made such spectacular watercolors? What would his art have been like?”