Charles Demuth: Self-Portrait, 1907, oil on canvas, 26 1/16 x 18 inches, The Demuth Museum, Lancaster, PA. 1907.
Charles Demuth (November 8, 1883 – October 23, 1935) was an American watercolorist who turned to oils late in his career, developing a style of painting known as Precisionism. This art movement was influenced strongly by Cubism and Futurism, its main themes included industrialization and the modernization of the American landscape, which were depicted in precise, sharply defined, geometrical forms. Demuth’s most famous painting, The Figure Five in Gold, was inspired by his friend William Carlos Williams‘s poem “The Great Figure“.
Charles Demuth – Figure 5, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City. Photograph taken: 2 May 2012. Wm M. Martin.
The Great Figure by William Carlos Williams
Among the rain
and lights
I saw the figure 5
in gold
on a red
firetruck
moving
tense
unheeded
to gong clangs
siren howls
and wheels rumbling
through the dark city
Published in Sour Grapes (1921), it inspired a painting by Charles Demuth