Charles Demuth.
The Figure 5 in Gold.
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1928.
Oil on cardboard, 90.2 x 76.2 cm.
Alfred Stieglitz Collection.
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, USA.
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Demuth, a versatile artist, tailored his style to his subject matter. His delicate, loosely handled watercolors of fruits and flowers pulsate with subtle,
exquisitely balanced color. His paintings of the modern urban and industrial landscape, on the other hand, are tightly controlled, hard, and exact — in a
style aptly called Precisionism. Although these works show the influence of Cubism and Futurism, their sense of scale and directness of expression seem entirely American.
"The Figure 5 in Gold" is one of a series of eight abstract portraits of friends, inspired by Gertrude Stein's word-portraits that Demuth made between 1924 and 1929.
This painting pays homage to a poem by William Carlos Williams. William's poem "The Great Figure" describes the experience of seeing a red fire engine with the number
5 painted on it racing through the city streets. This portrait consists not of a physical likeness of the artist's friend but of an accumulation of images
associated with him - the poet's initials and the names "Bill" and "Carlos" that together form a portrait.
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