This year, the Columbus Museum of Art’s Women’s Board Decorators’ Show House celebrates its 20th year and does so in a fantastic 1922 Bexley home. The group will put on a preview party with a “Roaring Twenties” theme April 20.
I have always felt that the fuse that set off the Roaring Twenties was lit in the early part of the 20th Century. As seen in Woody Allen’s recent film homage Midnight in Paris, the City of Lights played a major part in giving the 1920s its roar.
Paris always had a special allure for artists, and painter Charles Demuth (1883-1935) was no exception. He first visited Paris in 1907 and was immediately attuned to the modernist tendencies he saw in the art there.
Subsequent visits brought him into contact with many important writers and artists. Gertrude Stein and Marsden Hartley are just two that come to mind.
Though Demuth suffered from frail health, he was said to be man of great humor with a distinctive wit. He also produced more than 1,000 works of art. Paquebot Paris from 1921-22 is a fine example of what Alfred Barr, the first director of New York’s Museum of Modern Art, would call “Precisionist.” You might think of the clean reductive design and dynamic lines as painting streamlined.
Certainly, there was a great appreciation of the clean and efficient design of industry, and factories and mills would themselves become subject matter in later Demuth works. The title has a bit of “Deem’s” (as he was known to his friends) wit in it. “Paquebot” refers to a mail boat, but the term was in wide use in his day by sailing passengers as it also refers to the stamp placed on all mail written at sea.
During his lifetime, Demuth sold many of his works, enjoyed favorable reviews from art critics and was part of Alfred Stieglitz’s American Place Gallery in New York. Ferdinand Howald, one of the founders of the Columbus Museum of Art, began collecting American Modernist pieces as early as 1913. Today, CMA boasts one of the very finest collections of early American modernist paintings in the world.
Nationally renowned local artist Michael McEwan teaches painting and drawing classes at his Clintonville area studio.
