Charles Demuth

In 1927 Charles Demuth commenced a series of ambitious oil paintings that depict industrial architecture in his native Lancaster, Pennsylvania. In My Egypt he portrays the concrete grain elevator of the John W. Eshelman Feed Company, constructed in 1919. Composed using crisp lines and flat planes of color, the painting is an early example of the Precisionist style, which celebrated the expansion of American industry after World War I. The majestic structure, bathed in overlapping shafts of light, epitomizes American achievement—a modern-day equivalent, as the title suggests, of the pyramids of ancient Egypt. While linked to national themes, My Egypt is nonetheless infused with personal meaning. Ailing with diabetes, Demuth was increasingly confined to his family’s home in Lancaster— far from the sophisticated milieu he had frequently enjoyed in New York. By designating the image his Egypt, Demuth links Lancaster to the Biblical connotation of Egypt as a site of involuntary bondage, while also summoning the pyramid’s symbolic association with life after death.

Despite his success working in oil, watercolor was Demuth’s favored medium. His watercolors often suggest an underground sexual freedom and licentiousness, subjects that must have had particular resonance for the artist as a homosexual in a largely inhospitable culture. Distinguished Air, inspired by a short story by the American writer Robert McAlmon, portrays a woman in a provocative evening dress and two couples, one homosexual and the other heterosexual. All are at an art exhibition, viewing Constantin Brancusi’s famous sculpture Princess X (1915–16), whose phallic form the artist humorously accentuates.