Charles Demuth (9 November 1883 - 25 October 1935), US painter.
Charles Demuth was born in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, where he would also die. He was the only child of a rather rich family, so he didn't have to work even for a single day in his whole life, having a steady income. He wasn't rich, but had the time and means to dedicate himself to art and to travel extensivelly. Unfortunatelly Demuth was a sickly child, and for the rest of his life had a severe form of diabetes, which in the end killed him.
At the age of 16 his parents enrolled him in a prestigious private school, Franklin and Marshall Academy, which he graduated in 1901. He remained at home for the next two years, then started studying at the Drexel Institute of Art, Science, and industry din Philadelphia. Demuth decided to become a full-time painter, so he enrolled at the Academy of Fine Arts in Pennsylvania, and among his teachers were Thomas Anshutz and William Merritt Chase, who were very impressed by the artist's talent. Demuth would often travel to Europe, to complete his studies and discover first hand the European art. He was a friend of several young artists, influenced by the works of Marcel Duchamp and Cubism. Later on, as his style changed and matured, he would step by step abandon illustrative art. He wasn't just a talented painter and draftsman, but also o vry cultivated person, a good writer and yet an insecure and recluded young man.
His first works were watercolors of flowers, circus and café scenes, which gained the attention and interest of Alfred Stieglitz, who organised an exhibition at his New York gallery. After 1920 Demuth began to paint his main theme, the industrial America, vast compositions presenting bleak and huge cities, with factory chimneys, crowded street and big advertising billboards. He was the most important Precisionist artist, an American reaction to the European avant-garde, which combined Cubism with the fascination for the machineries of the Italian Futurism.
He died just a few weeks before turning 51 of complications of diabetes.
