Piano Mover’s Holiday
Charles Demuth
REMBRANDT, c.1668. OIL ON CANVAS.
A new world was being built, one defined by sleek lines, mass-production, factories that churned out repetitive perfection and removed the individual from the act of the creation. The shadows of skyscrapers hung heavy over the east coast, joined by the chimney stacks of manufacturing that blew white smoke into the air as if heralding the change to a modern age. While in Europe, artists were responding to this with obstruction that took the form of Cubism’s abstraction and Futurism’s dynamism, a group of American painters led by Charles Demuth developed a style known as Precisionism. Like the European movements that influenced it, it reduced the work to its simple geometric shapes but, unlike them, it did not attempt to obscure them but to celebrate the immaculate perfection of a machine-tooled world. Demuth’s intentionally obfuscating titles nod to the absurdist that seemed present but his sharp, cohesive and proud lines spoke to a pride with his American identity and laid the groundworks for Pop Art, that took celebration of American commerce to its logical extreme.