Excerpted from The New York Times

A Watercolorist Who Turned His Hand to Oils of Heroic Vision

By KEN JOHNSON
Search the history of American art, and you will discover few watercolors more beautiful than those of Charles Demuth. Combining exacting botanical observation and loosely Cubist abstraction, his watercolors of flowers, fruit and vegetables have a magical liveliness and an almost shocking sensuousness.

NORTON MUSEUM OF ART
Charles Demuth’s Late Paintings of Lancaster at the Whitney Museum of American Art includes the oil “After All”(1933).

AMON CARTER MUSEUM
The watercolor “Cineraria” (1923).

Watercolors were easy for Demuth, (1883-1935), and it didn’t hurt that collectors readily snapped them up. But in his era watercolors were considered a minor art form; if he were to make his mark as a Modern artist, he believed, he must do something more difficult — something bigger, bolder and in oil paint.

So in the 1920s Demuth began painting oils, and in 1927, when he was in his 40s, he embarked on what turned out to be his final campaign: a series of seven panel paintings depicting factory buildings in his hometown, Lancaster, Pa..

Six of those paintings are highlighted in “Chimneys and Towers: Charles Demuth’s Late Paintings of Lancaster,” a gorgeous, tightly focused exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art. They are not as wonderful as his floral watercolors — a few of these are also in the show — but the oils have a gripping radiance.

The exhibition was organized by the art historian Betsy Fahlman for the Amon Carter Museum in Fort Worth, where it was on view last summer. […more]