Chimneys and Towers: Charles Demuth's Late Paintings of Lancaster On View November 10, 2007 through January 20, 2008

West Palm Beach, Fl – Chimneys and Towers: Charles Demuth's Late Paintings of Lancaster is a focused exhibition examining a key group of paintings created towards the end of the artist's career. The exhibition and catalogue explore how Demuth combined elements of place, region and the past to produce paintings of unusual visual and symbolic meanings. Like others in the American avant-garde, he employed the "aesthetic of place" to create works that were at once historical and contemporary.

Marisa Pascucci, the Harold and Ann Berkley Smith Curator of American Art commented, “The Norton Museum of Art is thrilled to present Charles Demuth’s paintings to our visitors as his late Precisionist works are considered some of the most important in the history of American modernism. We are especially pleased since the Norton Museum owns the last work in this seminal series, which is also the last oil painting Demuth is known to have created. Demuth—along with Georgia O’Keeffe, and Marsden Hartley—is regarded as a one of America’s preeminent twentieth-century painters.”

The exhibition centers on a series of six industrial paintings that were inspired by Demuth’s hometown of Lancaster, Pennsylvania: specifically the Armstrong Cork Company, grain elevators and smokestacks. The series is comprised of My Egypt (1927, Whitney Museum of American Art); Buildings, Lancaster (1930, Whitney Museum of American Art); Chimney and Water Tower (1931, Amon Carter Museum, Fort Worth); And the Home of the Brave (1931, Art Institute of Chicago); Buildings (ca. 1931, Dallas Museum of Art); and the last oil the artist is known to have completed, the enigmatic After All… (1933), a masterpiece of the Norton’s American paintings collection. The imagery employed in all six paintings reflects how Demuth's intensely personal experiences played a large role in shaping his approach to modernism. 

Demuth typically sketched out the main details of his compositions ahead of time, and a number of these sketches are featured in the exhibition as well. Comparing the paintings with these loose and spontaneous studies, which were highly personal and not intended for exhibition, demonstrates how the artist formulated his ideas. To illuminate the principal stylistic themes in the paintings, the exhibition also features photographs of the Lancaster industrial sites portrayed in the paintings, and an exceptional section featuring conservation images will show the artist's as yet unseen technical methods.

Chimneys and Towers is accompanied by a publication of the same title that reveals new scholarship about many aspects of Demuth’s life and work, including his attachment to Lancaster, his diabetes and the disease’s effect on his career as researched by guest curator Betsy Fahlman, Professor of Art History at Arizona State University and a recognized authority on Demuth. Claire Barry, the Amon Carter’s chief paintings conservator, contributed the first published technical study of the six paintings providing an examination of the artist’s late painting technique, specifically the composition, individual forms, color and working method of the Lancaster paintings. Chimneys and Towers debuted at the Amon Carter in August 2007, after its display at the Norton Museum of Art it will travel to the Whitney Museum of American Art in 2008.

Chimneys and Towers: Charles Demuth’s Late Paintings of Lancaster is organized by the Amon Carter Museum, Fort Worth, Texas.

The exhibition and the accompanying publication have been made possible in part by grants from The Henry Luce Foundation and The National Endowment for the Arts. Local sponsorship of this exhibition is made possible in part through the generosity of the Mr. and Mrs. Hamish Maxwell Exhibition Endowment.

The Norton Museum of Art is open Monday–Saturday, 10 a.m. to 5 p.m., Sunday, 1 to 5 p.m. (Closed Mondays from May through October and on major holidays.) General admission is $8 for adults, $3 for visitors ages 13-21, and free for Members and children under 13.  West Palm Beach residents receive free admission to the Museum Collection every Saturday, with proof of residency. Palm Beach County residents receive free admission to the Museum Collection the first Saturday of each month, with proof of residency.  An additional charge may apply for special exhibitions. For general information, please call (561) 832-5196 or visit www.norton.org.