BIOGRAPHY
Charles Demuth studied at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, Philadelphia. In 1907 he traveled to Europe, and spent 1912 through 1914 in Paris. Although aware of contemporary European movements, Demuth's early work is traditional. He made money illustrating fiction, including Edgar Allan Poe, and painted vaudeville and circus subjects in watercolor, like Acrobats (1919). In 1917, Demuth holidayed in Bermuda with soon-to-be fellow Modernist Marsden Hartley, and over the next decade developed a precisionist style and iconography. He took industry and architecture as his subjects and, encouraged by Marcel Duchamp, embraced technology. Machinery (1920), is typically precisionist, spare, elegant, and objective. Industrial buildings with their essentially geometric shapes responded well to simplification into cubes, planes, cylinders, and 'lines of force’ (a concept from Futurism which intended to convey the directional tendencies of objects through space). Demuth incorporated these elements into works like My Egypt (1927; New York, Whitney Mus.), a powerful yet delicate symmetrical study of grain elevators. In the late 1920s he created ‘poster portraits’ synthesizing words, numbers, and objects associated with the subject. I saw the figure five in gold (1928), an evocation of the poet William Carlos Williams, is the best known.
REFERENCES

​Rodgers, David. "Demuth, Charles." The Oxford Companion to Western Art. Ed. Hugh Brigstocke. Oxford Art Online. Oxford University Press. Web. <http://www.oxfordartonline.com/subscriber/article/opr/t118/e717>.
Artwork behind title: Demuth's Houses (detail), Crystal Bridges Museum