20TH CENTURY ART
Lancaster Pennsylvania. No one would ever call it an inspiring city for artists, like Paris or New York. But Lancaster did inspire the work of the American artist Charles Demuth, especially his most famous work titled My Egypt, which he painted in 1927.
OUTDOOR AMBIENCE…LIGHT BIRDS…
Charles Demuth spent some time in Paris, New York, and Provincetown, but he lived most of his life on East King Street in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. That’s because he had severe health problems and illness throughout his life. So he mostly painted in a small second floor studio of his home, overlooking a garden which inspired many of his works
But the strongest source of inspiration in Lancaster was the massive grain elevators, complexes of buildings for storing grain and shipping it via via long railroad trains. My Egypt is a painting of one of these complexes, a real structure owned in the 1920s by John W. Eshelman & Sons.
HUM OF GRAIN ELEVATOR OPERATIONS
So you may be wondering: why was Demuth drawn to paint a grain elevator? And why did he call the painting My Egypt?
Demuth and some other artists in the early twentieth century were fascinated by the American industrial landscape, machines and architecture that were symbols of growth and prosperity.
Grain elevators were often over 100 feet tall. Demuth saw the grain elevators as American monuments, equivalent to the pyramids of ancient Egypt. Both structures combine great size and physical beauty. The pyramids of course were tombs. And their association with life after death might also have appealed to the ailing artist.
When he made this painting in 1927, Demuth was very ill with diabetes and he died 8 years later. He may have also chosen the title because only 5 years earlier archeologists had discovered the tomb of King Tut, and America was fascinated by anything related to Egypt.
Demuth and painters like him became became known as “the Precisionists” because they admired the fine craftsmanship and clean-edged forms of the Machine Age. They painted in a precise, abstract style and used smooth, even color across the canvas to produce a crisp painted surface.
And now here’s a verbal description of Demuth’s My Egypt.
It’s a painting done in oil and graphite on composition board. It’s 3 feet tall and 2 and a half feet wide.
Demuth painted the grain elevator as though you’re looking up at it from the ground. So it appears like a white monument rising high against a blue sky.
In the center are two tall, white, cylinder shapes – concrete towers that store the grain. They’re attached to a white building that’s behind the towers and rises above them. The building has a window in it. Behind and above this section you can see the top of an even bigger white building, with two windows in it and a horizontal roofline. From above the roof four air vents stick up, all the same height. They look like large white tubes that curve forward so their openings face us. The tube openings are round black circles.
Just to the right of the grain elevator rises a thin black chimney, reaching a height even taller than the tallest building. A thick plume of light gray smoke is pouring from the chimney.
On the left and right of the grain elevator are partial sections of low buildings, red brick, which suggest more buildings in the facility.
And below the two concrete towers are flat brown squares, suggesting the roofs of other lower buildings dwarfed by the grain elevator behind them. A short red brick chimney sits on one of the roofs, at the extreme left of the painting. Because we see only the roofs of these buildings, it seems like the giant silos are actually pressing the smaller structures right off the bottom edge of the canvas.
There are no people in the painting.
You can tell this a grain elevator, but it’s not painted in a realistic style. Demuth and the Precisionists painted in a precise style constructed of flat geometric shapes like squares and rectangles. Even the tubular structures appear flat – the concrete towers, the air vents, and the chimney. Demuth reduces the objects in the painting to the barest elements of geometric design, but you can still tell what the objects are. He emphasizes the flatness in how he uses paint too. The surface of this painting is so smooth that even up close you can hardly find a single brush stroke of paint. It almost looks like the surface of a photograph.
There’s one more element in the painting that emphasizes the flatness of the composition. Two patterns of diagonal lines cross and fragment the painting. These lines suggest rays or shafts of sunlight. But like everything else in the painting they’re flat, almost looking like pieces of glass, cut out and laid across the composition. One group of white diagonal rays begins in the upper left corner and extends diagonally down to the lower right edge of the painting. Another group of pale blue diagonal rays begins about a third of the way down the right edge of the painting and extends diagonally across to the lower left edge of the painting. The rays cross near the painting’s center.Precisionist painters like Demuth are often thought of as celebrating the growth of technology in America. Yes, Demuth compares the grain elevators to the Pyramids. But the hard edges, cool colors, and absence of people may also suggest that Demuth sensed something else…and that maybe his painting shows both a celebration of industrial growth in the 1920s and some anxiety about its effects on people and society.
- Download and Print the Artwork
- Download and Print Tactile Diagram 1
- Download and Print Tactile Diagram 2
- Teaching Activities (to come)