I Saw The Figure 5 In Gold Meaning

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Charles Demuth started art from a young age and was enabled to do so due to his family establishing the oldest continuing tobacco shop and snuff factory in America. Due to this success, Demuth was never required to obtain a job. However, despite the great success of his family, the illness that Charles Demuth experienced at a young age would create a dependency on his mother and family that would later become a basis for him in his career. Due to the chronic hip illness he experienced as a child, he remained close to his mother and received private art lessons from a tutor in still life and landscape painting. Much of his artistic techniques
Draper 3 and more feminine like painting was made due to the fact that he did spend so much time …show more content…
Williams himself contemplated the analogy between technology and art and said that there is nothing sentimental about a machine and a poem is just a large machine made out of words. Demuth created multiple pieces in which he dedicated to some of his closer friends. He completed eight abstract portraits between 1924 to 1929 as tributes to modern American performers and artists. Demuth created I Saw the Figure 5 in Gold (1928) again for his friend and poet William Carlos Williams, using icons from Williams’s poem The Great Figure (Fig. 7). The poem discusses the sounds and images of a fire engine racing down a street. The repeated crossing lines and the rounded forms of numbers come together with red fire engine to paint this work with a bright and vibrant energy.
Viewed together, Demuth’s late paintings of buildings form a body of work that are made all the more extraordinary by the force of will they exemplify due to an artist made ill with diabetes. His early diagnosis in the 1920s did come along with the treatment of insulin, but his health would continue to deteriorate until his death in 1953. The Chimneys and Towers: Charles Demuth’s Late Paintings of Lancaster exhibition show many aspects of Demuth’s life and …show more content…
In Haskell’s biography of Charles Demuth she quotes Demuth as saying "Europe was to us all nearer and dearer, — but, — well you know, what could any of us add to
Europe? Perhaps, I like to suffer, at times, I think that I do. It may never flower, — this our state, but, if it does I should like to feel from some star, or whatever, that my living added a bit; — for in this flower, if it does, I can imagine Rome in its glory looking very mild." Through this quote, Demuth refers to the fact that while he aware of his own native roots, he also took notice of the issue faced by all American artists. With his upbringing by his mother and family through his illness and his trips to Europe combined, Charles Demuth was able to make his way into the precisionist movement and make an everlasting mark and influence on art and artists to follow. American modernism bridged the gap between art and social audiences in America and the number of museums and galleries only grew to continue to increase the presence of modernism. New modernist paintings created a closer look at the emotional state of an audience, which was an important aspect to the American community identity. American modernism didn’t simply result in one style but resulted in the experimentation and the desire for a
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