
The Metropolitan Museum of Art/Art Resource, NY
Charles Demuth
When Charles Demuth was 4 years old, a hip injury left him bedridden. His mother gave him crayons and watercolors for entertainment. Soon the little boy from Lancaster, Pennsylvania, knew he wanted to be an artist. “Deem,” as his friends called him, died two weeks before his 52nd birthday. But during his life, he became a leader among the Precisionist artists.
Demuth painted industrial and urban American subjects, hoping viewers would spend time decoding his paintings and thinking about what they could mean. “Paintings must be looked at and looked at,” he once said. “‘Look at that!’ is all that can be said before a great painting—at least by those who really see it.”