Demuth's industrial paintings.(Books about antiques)

In 1927 the accomplished modernist painter Charles Demuth began a series of seven paintings of industrial sites in his native Lancaster, Pennsylvania, the last of which was executed in 1933, shortly before his untimely death from diabetes on the cusp of his fifty-second birthday. These important works are beautifully analyzed by Betsy Fahlman in a recently published monograph entitled Chimneys and Towers: Charles Demuth's Late Paintings of Lancaster. The book accompanies a traveling exhibition organized by the Amon Carter Museum in Fort Worth, Texas, an institution with a well-deserved reputation for mounting excellent, highly focused, smaller exhibitions based on masterworks in its permanent collection. Claire Barry, a paintings conservator for both the Amon Carter Museum and the Kimbell Art Museum, also in Fort Worth, has provided a fascinating essay about Demuth's working methods and materials.

Demuth was born and raised in Lancaster and, because of his acute health problems, continued to live there virtually all his life, cared for by his mother, Augusta, a widow whom William Carlos Williams called Demuth's "patron saint." He made three trips to Europe: in 1907 and 1908, between 1912 and 1914 (both times when experimental and quite radical movements such as cubism were taking hold), and again in 1921. He spent several summers in Provincetown and Gloucester, Massachusetts, in the company of a wide variety of artists. And he often traveled to New York City, where he encountered and made friends with such avant-garde artists as Marsden Hartley, Georgia O'Keeffe, Alfred Stieglitz, and Marcel Duchamp, and with other art-world figures, such as the collectors Duncan Phillips, Muriel Draper, and Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney, and the writers Carl van Vechten, William Carlos Williams, and Lincoln Kirstein. Closer to home, Albert Barnes of Merion, Pennsylvania, was one of Demuth's greatest friends and patrons.

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Between about 1915 and 1919 Demuth began painting the compelling watercolors of fruits, flowers, and vegetables, many from his and his mother's garden, that were to be his mainstay for the rest of his life. Around the same time he was captivated by vaudeville subjects, which he painted in brilliant saturated watercolors. In 1920 he was diagnosed with diabetes, for which there was no cure, and, indeed, at the time, not even a reliable long-term treatment. Through his friendship with Barnes, a physician, he learned about the ...