(2 of 2)
Around 1920 Demuth began with increasing confidence to explore what would become the major theme of his career: the face of industrial America. What he and other artists like Ralston Crawford and Sheeler made of this rich, untapped subject acquired the name precisionism. It must have seemed unlikely that Demuth, yearning for Paris, should have become obsessed with grain elevators, water towers and factory chimneys. But it was no more improbable than the fixation of a later dandy, Andy Warhol, on the coarse repetition of media images. And in fact there was an adumbrative whisper of Warholian values to come in a letter Demuth wrote to Alfred Stieglitz in 1927: "America doesn't really care -- still, if one is really an artist and at the same time an American, just this not caring, even though it drives one mad, can be artistic material." Precisionism was by no means just a provincial American response to the European avant-garde -- the splintering of planes from French cubism, the machine ethos from Italian futurism. Sheeler and Demuth were painting what was in front of them, a functional American landscape refracted through a deadpan "modernist" lingo that, in Demuth's case, picked up bits of Robert Delaunay and Lyonel Feininger while anticipating some of the essential subjects of pop art.
In her catalog essay Haskell does a fine job of unpicking the strands that wound into his precisionist masterpiece My Egypt, 1927, a veritable manifesto of a painting whose image must have seemed intolerably spare to "romantic" taste. It is a frontal view of a grain elevator in Lancaster, painted with such careful suppression of gesture that hardly a brushstroke can be seen. Demuth's title whimsically refers to the mania for Egyptology planted in American popular culture in 1922, when Howard Carter discovered Tutankhamen's tomb. In part it is quite sincere, since the almost threatening visual weight of those twin pale silo shafts and their pedimental cap does indeed suggest Karnak.
But as Haskell argues, Demuth had a deeper level of intent. His title connects to the story of the Exodus. Egypt "was at once a symbol of the Jews' oppression and the point of reference for their self-identity and emergence as a distinct people." An invalid in later life, Demuth was "exiled" in Lancaster, cut off from the intellectual ferment of Paris and the sexual- aesthetic comradeship of New York. Yet he was poignantly aware that the industrial America that gave him a rentier's income had also given him a great subject that would define him as a painter. From that tension, his finest work was born.