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Really good collection of the artist's work. Very good pictures.

This book goes into Demuth's literary interest : novels and plays.He wrote some of his own. He illustrated Wedekind and Henry James.It was Sam Hunter in his book on American Art that brought out the importance of Demuth's approach to the figure.This book has the largest selection of watercolors and oils illustrated in a book on Charles Demuth.The essays are just as extensive as the reproductions.They are higher quality than any other book on Deem. I have the A.E. Gallatin book, a Whitney Museum book, the Moma book by A.C. Ritchie. There is a lot of Demuth's pictures on Artcyclopedia but , there is more in this publication.If you are a fan of Charles Demuth you will be happier with this book than any other work on Demuth.The book is well worth the price.

Due to family ties, I came to regard Lancaster, Pennsylvania as my second "home city" (after Philadelphia). It was through the Lancaster connection that I became aware of the painter Charles Demuth (born in Lancaster in 1883, died there in 1935). Demuth, I learned, was the most noted person in the arts to hail from Lancaster. Yet Lancaster, long a rather conservative city, seemed to be ambivalent about Demuth -- he was a modernist; moreover, he was homosexual, as was patently obvious from several of his paintings. I purchased this book when it was published in 1987 because I wanted to know more about Demuth and to get a sense for whether he was simply a "regional" painter. Upon acquiring it I paged through the full-color plates, but I did not get around to reading the text until now, thirty years later.

Together with looking once again, more carefully, at Demuth's art, the text persuades me that Demuth certainly was more than a regional painter -- indeed, that he was one of the most accomplished and important American painters from the first half of the twentieth century. The book CHARLES DEMUTH makes for an excellent introduction to his life, his aesthetics, and his art. There are 116 full-color prints, mostly one per page, as well as scores of smaller black-and-white reproductions and photographs. In addition, author Haskell surveys his work and its significance in knowledgeable and readable fashion. She also interweaves an informative biographical profile. The text is neither cursory nor hopelessly recherché.

I was struck by Demuth's watercolors, especially the still lifes and paintings of flowers. As a whole, I prefer them to the more famous "precisionist" paintings in oil of water towers, smokestacks, grain elevators, and other buildings around Lancaster. My favorite Demuth work of all, however, remains "The Figure 5 in Gold", now at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. I learned that it was inspired by a poem by William Carlos Williams, and four references to Williams (including "Bill" and his initials) can be found in the painting. I also learned from the book that Williams was a long and close friend of Demuth's. Other good friends included Marsden Hartley, Georgia O'Keefe, and Eugene O'Neill. Far from being a yokel from the provinces, Charles Demuth interacted with, and even influenced, some of the most important American writers and painters of his time.

As an aside, in reading the book I experienced an eerie but amusing coincidence: Two weeks ago I read for the first time Eugene O'Neill's play "The Iceman Cometh". Written in 1939, it is set in a flophouse bar in the Village in the year 1919. In Plate 18 in this book, Demuth depicts himself and two friends in a dingy saloon patronized by writers, thugs, and petty thieves and known to its clientele as "The Hell-Hole". Haskell writes that The Hell-Hole was Eugene O'Neill's favorite Village haunt and that its patrons furnished models for most of the major characters in "The Iceman Cometh".

One of our stellar curators and art historians has produced a first rate study of Charles Demuth. Not a household name in his own time nor in ours, he has always deserved recognition for his creative sensitivity and mastery of color. While he ranks high as a watercolorist, among the best of the early Twentieth Century, he is best known for being one of the pioneers of what became known as Precisionism, a cubist-influenced vision, primarily of modern industrial society. His view, however, while incorporating the sharp, often squared edges of (then) modern buildings, never failed to provide expansion of time and space, never rested solely on the apparent simplicity of form. Haskell is quite good in helping us to see this phenomenon in his pictures as she is in dealing with the other aspects of his work. Beyond that, she deals well with the life of someone seemingly fated for an outsider role even in his chosen vocation by early illness and then, at what should have been the peak of his mature talent, by diabetes in an age when there was no cure (true today as well) but also no ameliorative treatment until too late to allow him the strength for major effort.
The illustrations offer an excellent representation of his watercolors and paintings, as well as his work for books. Most prominent, of course, are the flowers and precisionist views of the industrialized society. While most of the homosexual (as it was designated in his day) inclined efforts were privately distributed to friends, there are examples from the period later in life when he was open, almost to a dangerous point for a most private man. Most familiar and amusing is the museum scene of a small group viewing a most appropriate sculpture by Brancusi (Princess X). Throughout Haskell offers well-framed analyses of the pictures, with which you may or may not agree with. Whatever your degree of agreement, you will be stimulated to doing a bit of explanatory explanation yourself.
In all, though written more than 25 years ago, the book is not at all dated, and should be part of the reading program of anyone interested in American art, the Stieglitz circle, the 'outsider' in early 20th century America, or a good read for anyone concerned with aesthetic culture.

This book is very well done.There is a in-depth analysis of his life and how it relates to the area he lived in and the times he was part of.There are many color reproductions and the fairly large format of the book helps.This is the first real comprehensive work on this artist that I've ever seen.Very fine book.

Lovely book. Thank you for having it.

I have some books on Demuth, but this one has far more reproductions of his work than I'd seen before. Very thorough and an extensive chronicle of his life and the people in it. Excellent condition for a used book offer. Deserves the high rating.

This is a perfectly beautiful book full of many full-page color illustrations plus many smaller ones and Barbara Haskell's fascinating history of Demuth's life. I would recommend it to anyone who is interested in Demuth or to those who would like to know his work better. You won't be disappointed.