TY - JOUR
AU1 - Lazevnick, Ashley
AB - Like a parenthesis in a sentence, still life situates itself as a pause in transitive reality. Like the cupping of a hand, it gathers and holds before us a small portion of the flux. – Bonnie Costello, Planets on Tables What does it mean to still life? – to make a still life? In its best expression, a still life takes from the world an assemblage of objects and holds them together, bringing them to a rest for a moment, then extending that moment – protracting it by putting it within the parentheticals of a picture. Often, it does so by bringing ‘stillness’ itself into question: by taking objects out of action, still life paradoxically presents the viewer with a ‘portion of the flux’ of a surrounding scene. For this reason, the genre has long invited speculation about the nature of human perception, the existence of ‘real’ objects, or the very relationship between animate and inanimate matter. As humans find it increasingly difficult to maintain a secure place in this world, however, it is possible that still life’s eviction of the figure has further unexplored potentials. What can its simple gesture of inaction tell us? Consider how Charles Demuth presents an upturned dish surrounded by seven green pears in watercolour and pencil (Green Pears (1929), Fig. 1). Three pears gather on either side of the bowl while one is balanced on top, with each fruit left whole and uncut, delimited by firm but thin graphite edges. Molted layering of green hues and triangular twinkles of refracted light render the surface of the pears at once soft and hard, as though taking on the porcelain texture of the vessel around which they cluster. One pear touches the next, touches the bowl, touches another pear – huddled together as though fearful of becoming unglued. It is a cohesion demanded in the absence of a table, for, in actual fact, a surface can only be inferred from cast shadows, reflections, and the crisp line of the bowl’s edge. Otherwise, the group hovers within a creamy unmarked white space: silence holds them – in that space. And color has been construed from emptiness1 Fig. 1 Open in new tabDownload slide Charles Demuth, Green Pears, 1929, watercolour over graphite, 13 7/8 x 19 7/8 in. Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, CT. (Photo: Yale University Art Gallery.) Fig. 1 Open in new tabDownload slide Charles Demuth, Green Pears, 1929, watercolour over graphite, 13 7/8 x 19 7/8 in. Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, CT. (Photo: Yale University Art Gallery.) And yet, there is a subtle motion in the picture, evidence of some vitality pulsating from the pears: a ‘curious sense that the fruits are pressing, almost scurrying, up to the central object, with a conscious eagerness’.2 What animates these pears are concentric ripples that faintly emanate from the objects, sinuous lines that swell across the bowl’s surface, reverberating waves that cause the fruit to wobble slightly. A slower movement also unfolds if one sees this as a single pear, captured in a stop-motion sequence, rolling up and over the bowl: a pear shown in all states of turning and inverting, viewed from the side; above; the front; below. When Green Pears appeared in a 1931 exhibition at Alfred Stieglitz’s gallery, An American Place, the picture found company alongside Demuth’s symbolic portraits of Georgia O’Keeffe and William Carlos Williams, several paintings of Lancaster grain silos and water towers, illustrations of Henry James’s stories, and an assortment of floral watercolours.3 This array encapsulates the artist’s status by the 1930s. Loosely affiliated with the American modernists that congregated around Stieglitz’s ‘second’ circle, Demuth is best known for his assimilation of Futurist and Cubist techniques, which he introduced to American audiences through his portrayal of factories and rural buildings (mostly in oil) as well as domestic subjects that display his extraordinary gift with watercolour. Even among such diverse works, the critic for Creative Art, Angela Hagen, took special notice of the still lifes: Fruit and vegetable, too, are rendered in clear color and deeply understood form; still-life, which is anything but ‘still’ and, as to many an artist, has revealed also to this man the life behind the quiet surface, retreated, perhaps (except to the eye of the initiated), but never ‘still’!4 Hagen’s remark is significant for two reasons. First, she intuits the mysterious motion of Demuth’s still lifes – the ‘life behind the quiet surface’ – that renders his works, unexpectedly, ‘never “still”!’ Second, and just as remarkable, she claims that this animacy is a result of Demuth’s special communion with the objects. Through the double action of revelation and retreat, Hagen understands the emphatic movement within the watercolours as a remainder of some greater secret that was divulged to Demuth alone. This accords with the general opinion that the esoteric titles and personal symbolism of Demuth’s paintings were deliberate obfuscations. Art historian Marcia Brennan proposes that the ‘conceptually dense and interpretively elusive’ watercolours bucked up against the Stieglitz-circle ideal of ‘transparency’.5 Especially in the ‘poster portraits’ of his friends, Demuth scattered clues, puns, and insider jokes, the meanings of which continue to elude historians just as they had on their first debut, when one commentator complained that they were done ‘in a code for which we have not the key’.6 Only four years later, Demuth had seemed to remove the code entirely. What hidden meaning could possibly exist beyond the arrangement of seven pears around a bowl? The liveliness of Demuth’s pictures registers, and in fact depends upon, his restraint as an artist. His physical privacy – the patterns of his everyday life – resulted in pictures that were intentionally resistant to interpretation. In this essay, I focus on Demuth’s Green Pears as way of showing how these two themes – of privacy and interpretive difficulty – create the precondition for a new explanation of still life. One primary aim of this study is to question the limits of biography in traditional accounts of still life and, by extension, to unsettle the idea that the genre is exclusively the product of artistic intentionality. Demuth confessed his own distance from his work in 1928: ‘They – the paintings – have a strange, inner strange look about them. They look sometimes like I think my own things do or should and then again when I look at them they seem to look very different & strange with a strange strangeness’.7 Not only were the paintings (and by extension the objects contained within them) strange to Demuth, they are also kept strange for us; it was part of the point to preserve the unusualness of these represented things. Although related to modernist ideas of estrangement, I ultimately show how Demuth’s art anticipates a posthuman condition. It does so, first, by eliciting a phenomenological exchange with the viewer and, second, by making the more radical proposition that the world might well exist without us – a proposition for which Demuth offers little compensation.          * The first task is to establish the nature of Demuth’s privacy. Was it ‘imposed upon him’ after the onset of diabetes?8 Or did he relish his time in the ‘province’ – the sometimes satirical, sometimes endearing, term he used in reference to his home in Lancaster, Pennsylvania?9 We know that Demuth led a richly social life within the most prominent avant-garde circles of his generation; he found companionship among members of the Arensberg circle, the Provincetown Players, the Barnes group, and the Stieglitz circle – counting among his friends and acquaintances not only O’Keeffe, Stieglitz, and Eugene O’Neill, but also the Stein siblings, Marcel Duchamp, the Stettheimer sisters, and the editors of The Dial. Accounts of Demuth during these years describe him as affable, impeccably-dressed and dandyish, but also guarded and aloof, a temperament confirmed by the collection of letters penned by the artist. Another important factor of his social life was the homosexual spaces and circles he frequented in New York and Paris, as Jonathan Weinberg has recounted in great detail.10 But however widely he travelled, Lancaster remained the site of perpetual return. It was to his mother’s sparse Victorian rowhome at 118 East King Street, next door to Demuth’s Tobacco Shop, that the artist retired after spurts of living in Philadelphia, Provincetown, New York, Paris, or Dr. Allen’s Physiatric Institute in Morristown, New Jersey.11 And it was there that he appointed his small studio, in the corner room of the second floor: a clean and modest two-windowed space from which Demuth executed the majority of his paintings and watercolours.12 It is unsurprising, given the rhythms of Demuth’s sociality, that he was of two minds about his periods of isolation, which he variously treated with resentment and agitation, comfort and solace.13 And it is reasonable, I think, to wonder how his pictures may relate to this oscillation. Henry McBride referred to Lancaster as Demuth’s ‘secure retreat’,14 and Emily Farnham describes the claustrophobic and hermetic environment of the studio as a place that ‘stabilized him, afforded him a sense of security and inner peace’.15 Quite often, this physical isolationism is tied directly to a pictorial one. In its most blatant form, Alvord Eiseman contends: Demuth’s patriotism and his social impulses toward the poor or the downtrodden were non-existent, and it is here that we may detect his so-called snobbery, a cultural snobbery which was the mainspring of his viewpoint toward other human beings and may have been a defense mechanism. There is very little pity in Demuth’s work, it is in general completely self-oriented, as his family and his home were centered on themselves, open only at times to others16 [my emphasis]. Notice how Eiseman conflates his characterisation of the artist, as apolitical and misanthropic, with the ‘self-oriented’ nature of Demuth’s work. Though Eiseman’s point is not subtle, it reproduces a seemingly inescapable calculation about artistic solitude and the purpose of still life, one more familiarly expressed in Meyer Schapiro’s study of Paul Cézanne: ‘Cézanne’s prolonged dwelling with still-life may be viewed also as the game of an introverted personality who has found for his art of representation an objective sphere in which he feels self-sufficient, masterful, free from disturbing impulses and anxieties aroused by other human beings’.17 But does the choice of still life necessarily correspond to a kind of solipsism? To a de facto apoliticism? A brief comparison with Demuth’s fellow Precisionist artist, Louis Lozowick, suggests not. Lozowick was a herald of the machine age, an artist who proselytised Russian Constructivism, called for the Americanisation of art in the service of industry, and later committed himself to a figurative realist vocabulary commensurate with the direction of Communism in the 1930s.18 Yet, between 1928 and 1930, Lozowick created a handful of still lifes as part of a series of over seventy lithographs.19 In Breakfast (Still Life, Breakfast) from 1929 (Fig. 2), he arranges a few common things on a table: several eggs, a loaf of bread, a glass, and an odd bird figurine. The table is oriented on a sharp diagonal and overlaid with shadows as well as a lace cross-stitch pattern of roses. All at once, the viewer is made to look down, upwards, and head-on at the tablecloth: a feat that produces an oppositional strain between the three-dimensional objects and the flattened background pattern. It is no coincidence that these perceptual distortions are equivalent to the swollen buildings and sweeping lines characteristic of his city views, since Lozowick shared the idea, best expressed in the experiments of New Vision photography, that a dramatic change in perspective could change one’s world view, and that a transformation of vision could affect a transformation of society. In Lozowick’s mind, still life was not an inherently apolitical category. For him, there was no disjunction between the political content available in industrial scenes and domestic ones, a belief slyly acknowledged by the intrusion of an automobile in the upper-left corner of Breakfast.20 Fig. 2 Open in new tabDownload slide Louis Lozowick, Breakfast (Still Life, Breakfast), 1929, lithograph on paper, 10 3/8 x 7 15/16 in. Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington D.C. Gift of Adele Lozowick © 1929 Lee Lozowick. (Photo: Smithsonian American Art Museum.) Fig. 2 Open in new tabDownload slide Louis Lozowick, Breakfast (Still Life, Breakfast), 1929, lithograph on paper, 10 3/8 x 7 15/16 in. Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington D.C. Gift of Adele Lozowick © 1929 Lee Lozowick. (Photo: Smithsonian American Art Museum.) It is true that Demuth did not share the same political consciousness as Lozowick, although it is not often enough noted that he was a member of the John Reed Social Club before World War I, that he spent summers with the editors of The New Masses, listed Diego Rivera as an artist he liked, and occasionally embedded political messages within his paintings (for one, the title of his 1920 painting Coatesville: End of the Parade may have been a reference to the brutal and highly-publicised lynching of an African American man, Zachariah Walker, in that town, which was just a few short miles away from Lancaster).21 To my mind, recovering such facts does not redress the first misstep: one that assumes that the lack of socio-political content indicated that Demuth’s work was ‘completely self-oriented’. Literary scholar Bonnie Costello offers another approach to this relationship in Planets on Tables: Poetry, Still Life, and The Turning World, where she studies the ‘still life’ poems of Wallace Stevens and William Carlos Williams (among others), poets who were criticised for holding onto aesthetic, formalist concerns into the turbulent decade of the 1930s. In contemplating a jar in Tennessee or a wheelbarrow in the field, Costello claims, the poet provides an invaluable service to the reader: ‘[t]he artist’s instinct to “mend” a broken world, at least in the sphere of art, might be more than consoling, might be a way of resisting the violent orders that have shattered it’.22 Rather than weaponise art, for instance, Stevens demands that it act as a method of self-preservation, claiming that it is a ‘violence from within that protects us from a violence without. It is the imagination pressing back against the pressure of reality’.23 In recuperating the political strain of still life, Costello shows how it is a ‘threshold genre’ occupying a liminal space, or a ‘foyer’ between imagination and reality.24 Still life focuses on the table: ‘that private/public surface which we hardly notice but on which so much of life is centered … Still life is, then, one of many ways the arts find to bring the distant near and to relate to the world and public events within the private life’.25 I am proposing that the subtle political valence of Demuth’s art should be understood within this special aspect of still life, in its ability to fold public life – that which is distant – into an intimate, private realm. Still life was a ‘foyer’ genre for the artist in more ways than one. After all, Demuth’s studio was itself a permeable space, a room that let a few things in, and from which the artist looked out. Although he typically worked alone under austere conditions, the studio’s two windows allowed Demuth to view the Trinity Lutheran Church and his mother’s flower garden, beyond which lay the heterogeneous city of Lancaster with its mix of industrial, agricultural, and commercial enterprises; its Amish and Mennonite communities; and its blend of colonial and federal architecture with new industrial structures.26 Inside the studio, the walls were dotted by a Toulouse-Lautrec lithograph, photographic portraits by Man Ray, a drawing by Louis Bouché, and etchings by Matisse, artworks which indexed the social network that extended beyond his corner room.27 This ‘threshold’ space was then replicated in the mode of display of Demuth’s work. Charles Daniel, his first gallerist, literally hung the illustrations of Turn of the Screw in the foyer to a group show in 1919 (Fig. 3). Daniel also separated those illustrations, and Demuth’s floral still lifes, from the architectural pictures of New England buildings, and he kept the artist’s risqué watercolours based on Emil Zola’s Nana in a private portfolio or a small gallery.28 Years later, Stieglitz hung Demuth’s poster portraits in the entryway to the landmark group exhibition Alfred Stieglitz Presents Seven Americans at the Anderson Galleries in 1925.29 Scholars who have noted these spatial separations take the in-between placement as a sign of Demuth’s inferiority in the eyes of critics or gallery owners (who demoted watercolour to oil, erotic to chaste, Demuth to Dove, etc.). However, it is equally plausible that Demuth’s continual appearance in foyer spaces respected something intrinsically liminal in the works themselves, a seepage between private and public meanings. Fig. 3 Open in new tabDownload slide 'Annual Exhibition of Watercolors, closing May 14’, Miscellaneous art exhibition catalogue collection, 1813–1953, bulk 1915–1925, box 2, folder 30. Archives of American Art, Washington, D.C. Fig. 3 Open in new tabDownload slide 'Annual Exhibition of Watercolors, closing May 14’, Miscellaneous art exhibition catalogue collection, 1813–1953, bulk 1915–1925, box 2, folder 30. Archives of American Art, Washington, D.C. On this score, the choice of pears is notable for their significance to Demuth: the artist had used pears throughout his career and placed them within his poster portrait of O’Keeffe (he also hung her own picture Alligator Pears in his studio). Surely the concentration on this object, its recurrence across his career and the density and sobriety of its presentation here, communicates Demuth’s strategy of personal survival. But any symbolism is kept intentionally vague in the final version, where the pears refuse to transform into anything else. There is neither caricature nor correspondence here, only the simple presentation of the pears as they are. This refusal to ascribe meaning makes the still life more widely available to public interpretation. One can easily see this work as a meditation on the very purpose of art as the country was on the brink of a depression, when widespread scarcity and anxiety would soon literalise the need for storage that it illustrates. In contrast to Demuth’s earlier still lifes, which feature a more fluid and transparent application of watercolour, dark backgrounds, and plentiful ray-lines (Fig. 4), Green Pears shows a firm handling of graphite combined with opaque layers of watercolour.30 The artist’s signature techniques have been condensed and reduced; dispersal and centrifugal motion have been harnessed. Within each smooth surface of the pears’ skins are collected a bricolage of angular fragments, fractured colour planes, and linear striations, as though concretising Stevens’s expression that a violence within ‘protects us from a violence without’. One can sense in this compression the urgency of fortifying the private realm, with the pears staging a resistance rather than an escape. Fig. 4 Open in new tabDownload slide Charles Demuth, Eggplant and Tomatoes, 1926, watercolour on paper, 14 1/8 x 20 in. The Museum of Modern Art, New York. The Philip L. Goodwin Collection. (Photo: The Museum of Modern Art. Licensed by SCALA / Art Resource, NY.) Fig. 4 Open in new tabDownload slide Charles Demuth, Eggplant and Tomatoes, 1926, watercolour on paper, 14 1/8 x 20 in. The Museum of Modern Art, New York. The Philip L. Goodwin Collection. (Photo: The Museum of Modern Art. Licensed by SCALA / Art Resource, NY.)          * How do we connect Demuth’s private life to the formal qualities of Green Pears? Does the picture depend on the circumstances of Demuth’s life (his reclusiveness, his illness, his homosexuality)? The French philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty meditates on similar questions in ‘Cézanne’s Doubt’ (1945). In that essay, Merleau-Ponty famously argues that Cézanne portrayed still-life objects as one might perceive them in a ‘lived perspective,’ a perspective in which there is an ‘emerging order, an object in the act of appearing, organizing itself before our eyes’. 31 Plagued by self-doubt, beset by misanthropy and (possibly) schizophrenia, Cézanne completed his still lifes in utter solitude. ‘The painter,’ Merleau-Ponty writes, recaptures and converts into visible objects what would, without him, remain closed up in the separate life of each consciousness: the vibration of appearances which is the cradle of things. Only one emotion is possible for this painter – the feeling of strangeness.32 Recall that Angela Hagen drew a similar conclusion about the closed-up, secret life of objects revealed by Demuth’s watercolours. What Cézanne and Demuth share is their isolationism and their prolonged, repeated, intimate engagement with objects, stripped from their circumstances and returned, in Merleau-Ponty’s phrase, to the ‘base of inhuman nature upon which man has installed himself’.33 And yet, Merleau-Ponty was insistent that biography was inadequate in accounting for the power of Cézanne’s work – ‘Cézanne conceived a form of art which, while occasioned by his nervous condition, is valid for everyone … The sense of his work cannot be determined from his life’.34 In other words, Cézanne’s art (and, in my view, Demuth’s as well) required his life, but its meaning is not explained by it.35 Along with the Phenomenology of Perception (1945), ‘Cézanne’s Doubt’ is familiar to art historians who use Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenological methods to reassess subject/object relationships, focusing attention on the situatedness of the beholder. This makes phenomenology a fitting lens through which to analyse still life painting, since the genre often removes iconography, figuration, narrative – leaving only that subject–object encounter. Art historian Alexander Nemerov, for instance, makes exemplary use of Merleau-Ponty in a discussion of Raphaelle Peale’s Blackberries (1812, Fig. 5). According to Nemerov, Peale’s still-life paintings construct an intimate, pre-social world that negotiates and resists the eighteenth century’s demand for a republican selfhood; rather than the ‘long view’ taken by his contemporaries, Peale’s hermetic, tactile representations [of] blackberries, melons, or meat correspond to a Romantic ‘projective imagination’, whereby the objects portrayed come to stand in for the body of the artist.36 In Nemerov’s reading of Merleau-Ponty, the observer’s body is projected out into the object and sensation occurs only through a mutual exchange, the body’s ‘reversibility’ or its ‘intertwining’ with the object: Fig. 5 Open in new tabDownload slide Raphaelle Peale, Blackberries, c. 1813, oil on panel, 7 1/4 x 10 1/4 in. Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, San Francisco, CA. Gift of Mr. and Mrs. John D. Rockefeller 3rd. (Photo: Randy Dodson, image courtesy of the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco.) Fig. 5 Open in new tabDownload slide Raphaelle Peale, Blackberries, c. 1813, oil on panel, 7 1/4 x 10 1/4 in. Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, San Francisco, CA. Gift of Mr. and Mrs. John D. Rockefeller 3rd. (Photo: Randy Dodson, image courtesy of the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco.) In Blackberries, this reversibility is perhaps most apparent in the curious front-facing berries. Their position allows them to catch a light from our space, which they throw back as the spark of an inward life that is both their own and that of the projector … this reversible relation reads more precisely as an embodied life imaginatively bestowed and returned.37 For Nemerov, a painted object might have a ‘spark of inward life’, an ‘embodied life’, but that life occurs only through the bestowal of a viewer’s gaze. What I find most striking about Nemerov’s interpretation is how it fits not at all with the most salient features of Demuth’s Green Pears. Demuth shows no interest in the sensuous quality of these things; there is no tactile embodiment or reciprocal ‘intertwining’. In fact, the pears hardly look edible, since they are presented as odourless and durable entities. Intimacy comes not from an invitation to touch, but rather from the impression that these items constitute their own ecology. What we are offered is an object world in which things shed their human use-value to gather among themselves; they take no interest in the viewer and do not return her gaze. This does not mean that Demuth’s art has no relation to phenomenology more broadly, simply that Merleau-Ponty’s emphasis on embodiment does not capture the radically asubjective attitude of Green Pears. But there is an older, more fundamental concept of phenomenology that relates to Demuth’s art. The founder of phenomenology, Edmund Husserl, invented what he called the phenomenological ‘reduction’ in order to study things properly in the world and, eventually, consciousness itself. Husserl performs this reduction by abstracting phenomena from their ‘natural attitude’ and putting them into suspension (or parenthesising [Einklammerung]).38 And nevertheless [the object] undergoes a modification – while it continues to remain in itself what it is, we place it as it were ‘out of action’, we ‘suspend it,’ we ‘bracket it.’ It is still here as before, like the bracketed in the brackets, like the suspended outside the context of suspension.39 Husserl quickly qualifies the purpose of bracketing: not to remove phenomena from experience but rather to create the condition (of ‘utter freedom’) for ‘revaluing’ consciousness; not a Cartesian doubt but an ‘attempt to doubt’.40 Husserl builds up to this condition by describing one’s orientation to the world, a world in which objects are ‘on hand’, coming into focus only within the horizon of one’s consciousness. In realising that our thoughts are always directed at something, Husserl articulates the concept of intentionality, a ‘turn toward’ objects.41 Now notice how the white space around Green Pears resembles Husserl’s dissolving background; how Demuth brings the pears into view by taking away their purpose (they are not sliced; they are not being held or eaten). What further encourages this connection, if we read this as one pear shown in seven ways, is Husserl’s conviction that we can come to know the thing itself through the perception of its partial profiles. In a perceptual experience ‘[o]ne and the same shape (given in person as the same) appears continuously again and again “in a different way,” in profiles of shape that are always different’.42 And there is an even more literal way that Demuth’s work corresponds to the phenomenological reduction: a technique that distinguishes Green Pears (now at the Yale Art Gallery) from the three related watercolours of green pears that Demuth executed around the same time (Fig. 6). In the Yale version, Demuth introduces a line that repeats the shape at a bit of distance in several places beside the body of the pears or below the bowl. Around the central pear, this occurs just to the right, where a faint brown curve loosely hugs the side of the pear, with a touch of shading filling in the gap between the two forms. This happens again to the pear just left and just right of center, and again in a double arc in the nook of the group of three, and again in ever-fainter concentric circles below the cusp of the bowl (see: details of Fig. 7 and Fig. 8). The collective effect is simultaneously one of an echo, or reverberation, and one of containment. These lines are not set loose but rather are returned to the edges of the pear or bowl, as though Demuth were placing each object in a suspended state between some outward-moving force and an unseen limit condition. Fig. 6 Open in new tabDownload slide Charles Demuth, Three Pears, 1933, watercolour over pencil on paper, 10 x 14 in. Williams College Museum of Art, Williamstown, MA. Bequest of Susan Watts Street. Fig. 6 Open in new tabDownload slide Charles Demuth, Three Pears, 1933, watercolour over pencil on paper, 10 x 14 in. Williams College Museum of Art, Williamstown, MA. Bequest of Susan Watts Street. Fig. 7 Open in new tabDownload slide (detail) Charles Demuth, Green Pears, 1929, watercolour over graphite, 13 7/8 x 19 7/8 in. Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, CT. (Photo: Yale University Art Gallery.) Fig. 7 Open in new tabDownload slide (detail) Charles Demuth, Green Pears, 1929, watercolour over graphite, 13 7/8 x 19 7/8 in. Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, CT. (Photo: Yale University Art Gallery.) Fig. 8 Open in new tabDownload slide (detail) Charles Demuth, Green Pears, 1929, watercolour over graphite, 13 7/8 x 19 7/8 in. Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, CT. (Photo: Yale University Art Gallery.) Fig. 8 Open in new tabDownload slide (detail) Charles Demuth, Green Pears, 1929, watercolour over graphite, 13 7/8 x 19 7/8 in. Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, CT. (Photo: Yale University Art Gallery.) Is it a coincidence that these lines resemble the form and the function of quotation marks? In the structure of a sentence, quotation marks are at once closed-off and permeable, functioning syntactically as a parenthetical device (‘parenthesizing’ is one way of translating Husserl’s Einklammerung). That Demuth used quotation marks frequently in his letters is relevant here. He placed in quotations the titles of artworks (‘My Egypt’, ‘Calla Lilies’, ‘Figure 5’), but he also used these marks for emphasis or a turn of phrase: ‘Have a lot of things in mind but it is such slow “going” that I don’t know if they will ever reach canvas or paper’… ‘Of course the pages which do “happen” are quite like the water-colours when they “happen,” in and beyond Time’.43 Now watch how Demuth used scare quotes in his discussion of still life. In a letter to Stieglitz on 5 February 1928, he confessed (Fig. 9): Fig. 9 Open in new tabDownload slide Charles Demuth, Letter to Alfred Stieglitz, 5 February 1929, Alfred Stieglitz/Georgia O’Keeffe Archive, YCAL MSS 85, box 12, f. 303. Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University, New Haven, CT. (Photo: by author.) Fig. 9 Open in new tabDownload slide Charles Demuth, Letter to Alfred Stieglitz, 5 February 1929, Alfred Stieglitz/Georgia O’Keeffe Archive, YCAL MSS 85, box 12, f. 303. Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University, New Haven, CT. (Photo: by author.) ‘I think the “still-life” my best picture so far.'44 The work in question is Longhi on Broadway, a poster-portrait, said to represent the playwright Eugene O’Neill, in which a theatrical mask drapes over the neck of a green bottle with vines of ivy sprouting from the top. Magazines with blue, orange, and grey covers are scattered just below with a pale-pink playbook bearing the title “ – IF.” The quotations around still life seem different enough to suggest a third term that could be thought of as euphemistic. One other word exhibits this euphemistic quotation: in letters to Henry McBride, Demuth discussed a visit with ‘my cousin’ or my cousin (Fig. 10).45 Demuth himself called attention to the fact that ‘cousin’ here refers to his lover by informing McBride that there is also a ‘real Cousin’.46 Fig. 10 Open in new tabDownload slide Charles Demuth, Letter to Henry McBride, c. 1925, Henry McBride Papers, Yale Collection of American Literature, YCAL MSS 31, Box 3, f. 87. Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University, New Haven, CT. (Photo: The Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library.) Fig. 10 Open in new tabDownload slide Charles Demuth, Letter to Henry McBride, c. 1925, Henry McBride Papers, Yale Collection of American Literature, YCAL MSS 31, Box 3, f. 87. Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University, New Haven, CT. (Photo: The Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library.) To be clear: I am not mining Demuth’s letters for biographical clues but rather identifying Demuth’s compulsive obsession with the form of quotations. Like the private/public surface of the still-life table, Demuth’s quotation marks are formal notations that carve out space within the sentence; they are a place to pause. But they are also conduits for multiple meanings – a ‘cousin’ that is either a lover or relative; a still life that is also a portrait – meanings that are made semantically ambiguous by the very nature of their demarcation. Like the lines carefully drawn around the individual objects in Green Pears, they are physical brackets that isolate the object contained within, putting it under inspection. I am suggesting that Demuth unconsciously takes part in a method of suspension, performing Husserl’s thought experiment in both his writing and his art. Just as the phenomenological bracket radically alters reality, while also remaining a part of it (‘I do not negate this ‘world’, … I do not doubt its existence’),47 so too does Demuth’s Green Pears put the natural attitude of life – its tables, chairs, scattered fruit – outside the brackets of the picture, in order to bring heightened attention to the objects arranged therein. Green Pears suspends the natural world; pears push and pull from their background and come into focus before us, emerging from the table’s implied horizon. Only this orientation does not seem to come from a subject (or, if it does, it resists falling back too quickly onto it). Thus, Green Pears takes something of the spark of phenomenology – its opening move of bracketing, its redistribution of agency – but does not follow Merleau-Ponty’s interest in sensuality or embodied viewing. It is simply too alien for that. Perhaps this is why Husserl’s resurgence in critical theory hinges less on his reputation as a phenomenologist, but rather on his concept of ‘intentionality’, reflected in his rejoinder to return ‘to the things themselves.’48        * One interpreter of Demuth’s work who remained intensely interested in the philosophical possibilities of the ‘thing’ was the poet William Carlos Williams.49 Williams and Demuth had met, purportedly, over a bowl of prunes in a Philadelphia boarding house where they both congregated during their college years, and the intimacy of their friendship has been recorded in memoirs and letters as well as the playful exchange of art they produced. Demuth dedicated two paintings to Williams and he gifted the poet at least two others;50 Williams returned the gesture by dedicating his early experimental collection of prose and poetry, Spring and All, to Demuth, which included a short ekphrastic poem about Demuth’s painting (‘Pink confused with white’) that was significantly expanded and made into a memorial after Demuth’s death. More relevant here is their sympathetic research into art’s capacity of presenting things of the world not through strategies of illusionism but rather through what Williams refers to as the ‘imagination’. In contrast to the romantic imagination of Raphaelle Peale or the heroic imagination of Wallace Stevens, ‘imagination’ is for Williams the prosaic act of communication: separating out and presenting some semblance of everyday life. Imaginative art is that ‘CREATIVE FORCE’ that could fuse the artist and viewer, the real and the represented.51 In one passage of Spring and All, Williams struggles to comprehend Juan Gris’s cubist still-life collage in these terms. Gris’s aim was to show ‘things with which he is familiar, simple things – ’: at the same time to detach them from ordinary experience to the imagination. Thus they are still ‘real’ they are the same things they would be if photographed or painted by Monet, they are recognizable as the things touched by the hands during the day, but in this painting they are seen to be in some peculiar way – detached.52 Notice the resonance between this description of still life and Husserl’s theory of the phenomenological reduction. Williams’s condition of ‘imaginative suspense’,53 which depends upon acts of separation and detachment, are much like Husserl’s method of bracketing, just as his desire for the ‘unification of experience’ resembles to Husserl’s idea of knowing objects through the synthesis of their profiled appearances.54 Williams brings the same analysis to bear on Demuth’s art in ‘The Crimson Cyclamen’, the poet’s elegy to Demuth which purports to be a reflection on Demuth’s watercolour Cyclamen, but can be understood more broadly as a counterpoint to the artist’s late paintings. The poem tracks the erratic growth and death of potted flowers, much as Demuth’s own watercolours such as Red Poppies (1929, Fig. 11) can be read multidimensionally, as showing a flower in all aspects of its life cycle, from bloom to decay. Thematically, both Red Poppies and ‘The Crimson Cyclamen’ are a confrontation with the artist’s death, but they depend upon wildly different aesthetic strategies. Whereas Demuth’s late style is increasingly tight and controlled, Williams’s expression over the course of the poem becomes literally unbound, with stanzas alternating between fourteen and two lines. In his most brilliant passages, Williams wilfully confuses the flower (which clearly represents Demuth’s own vulnerable body) with the artist’s handling of graphite and watercolour, tropes that stand in for the ‘intellect’ and ‘passion’. answering ecstasy with excess all together acrobatically not as if bound (though still bound) but upright as if they hung from above to the streams with which they are veined and glow – the frail fruit by its frailty supreme 55 Fig. 11 Open in new tabDownload slide Charles Demuth, Red Poppies, 1929, watercolour and graphite on paper, 13 7/8 x 19 7/8 in. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Gift of Henry and Louise Loeb, 1983. (Photo: The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Image source: Art Resource, NY.) Fig. 11 Open in new tabDownload slide Charles Demuth, Red Poppies, 1929, watercolour and graphite on paper, 13 7/8 x 19 7/8 in. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Gift of Henry and Louise Loeb, 1983. (Photo: The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Image source: Art Resource, NY.) Williams captures the distinctive mode of abstraction in Demuth’s rendering of fruit and flora: ‘not as if bound … upright / as if they hung’. In Williams’s thinking, this parenthetical detachment – passion let loose (though still bound) – has to do with the artist’s freedom. In Spring and All, he insists that the artist should not be burdened with the task of observation; instead, he should strive to create: ‘[a] world detached from the necessity of recording it, sufficient to itself, removed from him’.56 It is a mistake to read this simply as a formalist demand; instead, it carries an ethical purpose – to surpass the ‘ocean’ between the poet and reader, through the paradoxical and tortured enterprise of mediation and presentation, through the extraction of objects and their preservation for the reader in an ‘unnicked’ reality embedded within the poem itself.57 Demuth’s art carries forward the ethical dimensions of detachment. His pears rest within the canvas, isolated and whole. Already the product of the artist’s dissection, these things do not require further observation or transubstantiation, since the viewer is not asked to do anything. Again, it is precisely through inaction that Demuth frees himself and the viewer, offering the possibility of an ecstatic embrace, to use Williams’s expression, not between viewer and artist (not intersubjective) but rather between pear and pear (interobjective). In a recent essay that applies ‘Thing Theory’ to American still-life painting, literary scholar Bill Brown has directed his attention specifically to Williams’s famous proclamation ‘no ideas but in things’, claiming Williams to be a part of a cohort of artists and writers concerned with an ‘American materialism’.58 As Brown sees it, Williams is an especially perceptive guide to the thingness that inheres in everyday objects because the poet’s ‘precise delineation of everyday life discloses something extraordinary about the ordinary’.59 On the one hand, Brown’s analysis recycles a familiar argument about the genre of still life, that its ‘eviction of the Event', in the words of Norman Bryson, allows for a concentration on ‘low plane’ reality (the ‘rhopographic’ rather than the ‘megalographic’), which nonetheless aspires to deliver the viewer to a higher plane of existence.60 On the other hand, Brown’s concerns in Thing Theory, along with other object-oriented and new materialist theories, pose an explicit challenge to how still life painting has been previously understood. Most scholars contend, as Schapiro had done in his analysis of Cézanne, that still life painting is nothing if not totally controlled by the artist, even if that control permits unconscious desires to surface in the (deliberately) selected things an artist represents. By contrast, new materialist theories strive to distribute ‘control’ among all participants of a situation; ontology is ‘flattened’ and the difference between human–power and object–power is diminished. Some aim to construe inanimate matter as an ‘actant’, agent, or quasi-subject, while less extreme positions have brought heightened attention to objects’ vibrant or vital materiality.61 While this discourse has certainly been shaped by late-twentieth century phenomena from globalism to digitisation, its roots are old; most theorists mine Western materialist traditions from Baruch Spinoza to Ralph Waldo Emerson as well as contemporaries of Williams and Demuth like Husserl, Alfred North Whitehead, and John Dewey. It is notable that phenomenology, with its emphasis on the perceiving subject, is rarely a touchstone for these thinkers (except through its interpretation by Martin Heidegger or Jean-Paul Sartre).62 This is because new materialism’s recovery of vitalism is directed towards a more ambitious reframing of humankind in the age of the Anthropocene. The decentring, and deprivileging, of the human has led Timothy Morton to describe ‘hyperobjects’ (such as climate and evolution) as uncannily invasive forces, and has led art historian Alan Braddock to champion an ecocritical approach to art history, one that reflects on art’s purpose in the face of irreversible damage caused by global warming.63 Bridging material culture studies and ecological anthropology, Tim Ingold has coined the term ‘meshwork’ to describe the intensive interactions of human and nonhuman actors, in which objects and persons are co-dependent and composite material/social entitles. Ingold reframes these entities not as durable ‘stopped-up objects’ but rather perpetually leaky things.64 ‘In the living, dynamically centered body, person and organism are one … As a gathering together of materials in movement, the body is moreover a thing. Thus we should no longer speak of relations between people and things, because people are things too’.65 Until very recently, new materialism has not been connected to still life painting, but it seems evident that the conventions of the genre make it an especially rich place to imagine a non-human, or a post-human, condition. This critical vocabulary contributes something valuable to our understanding of Demuth’s Green Pears because it helps us to see more unmistakably the animistic – not necessarily anthropomorphic, not necessarily phenomenologically sensual – quality of his depicted objects. Demuth has produced a work that models the stubbornness and persistence of things; one that illustrates the recalcitrance of objects and their rueful independence from us – for it seems as though the arrival of pears around the bowl is not the product of Demuth’s meddling but rather a self-generated coming-together. Perhaps it was this object–power that caused Demuth to feel alienated from what was in front of him, excited and disturbed by the ‘inner strange look’ of his work. The question for us remains: how do we allow that strangeness to flourish without destroying it with interpretation?           * After completing Green Pears, Demuth made few other still life paintings. For the remainder of his life, his art fell into two distinct series, performing two kinds of return to earlier work: the refined oil paintings of Lancaster buildings and explicitly erotic watercolours. Green Pears can be seen as a crux between those two separate ventures. In technique and concept, it rests squarely between the two, achieving an almost architectural hardness in its forms yet suggesting an intimate realm of experience. By way of addressing the uninterpretable, and returning to the issue of biography, let us consider a final comparison between Green Pears and Distinguished Air (1930, Fig. 12), the only erotic watercolour to be displayed publicly before Demuth’s death. Loosely basing his composition on a short story by Robert McAlmon, Demuth places five figures around a central sculpture: Constantin Brancusi’s Princess X.66 Two male figures embrace one another beneath the starkly phallic flesh-toned sculpture, while the other art-goers cast gazes across the room. As Barbara Haskell and Jonathan Weinberg have argued, the clear expression of homosexual desire essentially ‘outed’ the artist, who cleverly collapsed the salaciousness of Brancusi’s art with the (perceived) salaciousness of same-sex sociality.67 Fig. 12 Open in new tabDownload slide Charles Demuth, Distinguished Air, 1930, watercolour and graphite pencil on paper, 16 ¼ x 12 3/16 in. The Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. (Photo: Whitney Museum of American Art. Licensed by Scala / Art Resource, NY.) Fig. 12 Open in new tabDownload slide Charles Demuth, Distinguished Air, 1930, watercolour and graphite pencil on paper, 16 ¼ x 12 3/16 in. The Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. (Photo: Whitney Museum of American Art. Licensed by Scala / Art Resource, NY.) But the emphasis in previous accounts on male homosexuality is short-sighted on several counts; first, we must recall that the artwork that occupies the group’s attention is a deeply ambiguous sexual object since the abstraction of Princess X allows the form to flicker between a penis and (as the artist himself insisted) the breasts and head of a woman. Even as Demuth heightens the penis-like quality of the sculpture, he also keeps in play feminine gender associations by penciling in an almond-shaped eye and an arching eyebrow. The form is faintly repeated in the background by a picture of a reclined female nude. Perhaps, then, the woman on the right is not an offended lady, hand protectively placed on her genitals, but rather another desiring onlooker. Notice, too, the composite being on the left, portrayed as though woman and man are springing from the same body. The strangeness of this picture comes from its confusion of sexuality and gender, its fantastical merging of bodies, and its diffusion of desire. In short, Distinguished Air refuses to settle into the category of homosexual content, a refusal anticipated by the composition of forms in Green Pears. Both describe charged gatherings, with bodies and things related through multiple points of contact and touching, separation, and overlap. Unsurprisingly, discussions of Demuth’s sexuality often collapse the formal and biographical. I agree with Weinberg that this fundamentally diminishes the instances in which Demuth was being intentionally sexual, but making this distinction still presumes that Demuth’s pictures are designed to be decoded. In other words, previous scholars have been unwilling to accept the uninterpretable. Green Pears and Distinguish Air resist disclosure, not simply because they blur the boundary between private and public, but also because they refuse to move beyond the ‘profile’ of objects. What do we learn by staying on the surface of these pictures? By accepting that there are things that we are not invited nor permitted to decode? We may quickly realise that our thinking about Demuth’s art has been insufficiently queer. One path lies in returning to phenomenology. By taking up the question of ‘orientation’ – both how we orient ourselves to objects and how we construct sexual orientations – Sara Ahmed makes the double move of finding what is queer in phenomenology and of queering phenomenology.68 She does so by closely retracing Husserl’s thinking, primarily by concentrating on the example of the writing table, a horizontal surface (that liminal public/private space!) on which the philosopher moves objects in and out of focus. Ahmed is brilliant in showing how even this seemingly hypothetical example depends upon Husserl’s practical orientation in the world (having the time and space to spend in front of the writing table, for one), and she summarises how Husserl’s demand that we ‘apprehend the object as if it were unfamiliar’ requires bracketing the history and biography of the object, pushing all other things to the ‘fringes’, following certain directional lines of vision. In her retelling, the phenomenological bracket is less about transcendence beyond these objects than it is about a productively disorienting experience that helps us think about objects and people outside of the categories that we regularly assign to them.69 ‘Moments of disorientation are vital’, she writes, ‘[t]hey are bodily experiences that throw the world up, or throw the body from its ground. Disorientation as a bodily feeling can be unsettling, and it can shatter one’s sense of confidence in the ground or one’s belief that the ground on which we reside can support the actions that make a life feel livable’.70 Taking Green Pears and Distinguished Air together, we can see how Demuth is establishing a place for disoriented gathering across his oeuvre, regardless of the work’s sexual ‘content’. These are not artworks that are ‘completely self-oriented’ but rather queerly-oriented. And this queer orientation was sensed from the beginning of Demuth’s career. Commenting on a series of early architectural paintings on display in the Daniel Gallery in 1920 (Fig. 13), the reviewer for the New York Times noted the ‘many recognizable objects’ of churches and belfries, ‘peaked roofs and little chimneys’, but sensed that the scenes may disturb conservative viewers who would find them ‘ever so little distorted from the angle to which they have become accustomed’. [Viewers] know ‘New England’ and they don’t know it. There is the rub and there is the interest. The windows take a sudden twist, the clapboard walls are veiled by faintly defined overlapping planes, and what has happened to the sky that it rains down this planked sunshine these strips and bands of heaven’s own blue?71 Fig. 13 Open in new tabDownload slide Charles Demuth, After Sir Christopher Wren, 1920, watercolour, gouache, and pencil on cardboard, 24 x 20 in. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Bequest of Scofield Thayer, 1982. (Photo: The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Image source: Art Resource, NY.) Fig. 13 Open in new tabDownload slide Charles Demuth, After Sir Christopher Wren, 1920, watercolour, gouache, and pencil on cardboard, 24 x 20 in. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Bequest of Scofield Thayer, 1982. (Photo: The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Image source: Art Resource, NY.) Referring to Demuth’s technical compromise between cubism and representation as a form of ‘organization’, a strategy devised to ‘bring the public round’, this reviewer perceives subtle disturbances in Demuth’s portrayal of the cityscape. As in Green Pears, the artist has preserved a familiar subject matter but given it a ‘sudden twist’: a moment of confusion that causes the viewer to pause and perhaps to discover something unknown within the familiar. No doubt this evokes an array of modernist techniques, from Victor Shklovsky’s concept of defamiliarisation – as a method of breaking the automatisation brought about by modernity – to Surrealist found objects and the severe angles of New Vision photography. But I think that something slightly different is taking place. Rather than ‘new vision’, Demuth helps imagine a ‘new line of vision’, achievable through strategies of queer discomfort. For Ahmed, the ‘unfamiliar’ and ‘disoriented’ are legible only when one considers the body’s relationship to space. One final correspondence between Green Pears and Distinguished Air challenges this bodily dependence once more: the resemblance of the sailor’s blank face and the central pear. This exchangeability recalls Cézanne’s wish to paint a face like an object and it relates, further, to Nemerov’s discussion of Raphaelle Peale’s oval-shaped ostrich egg in Still Life with Strawberries and Ostrich Egg (Fig. 14). The egg resembles devices that his father Charles Willson Peale used to schematise the portrait of a face, yet the lack of ‘face’ in Raphaelle’s still life marks the artist’s unwillingness to fill-in the figure, to ‘visualize himself’.72 In Nemerov’s reading, this phenomenological non-identity, this self-annihilation, marks the irrefutable difference of one’s body and the things in the world.73 In the context of Demuth, the same sense of ‘annihilation’ was felt by Williams; just after the first attempt at describing Demuth’s still lifes in Spring and All, he confessed that ‘[a] terrific confusion has taken place. No man knows whither to turn. There is nothing! Emptiness stares us once more in the face. Whither? To what end?’74 Fig. 14 Open in new tabDownload slide Figures 25 & 26 in Alexander Nemerov, The Body of Raphaelle Peale: Still Life and Selfhood, 1812–1824 (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2001), p. 78. (Photo: by author.) Fig. 14 Open in new tabDownload slide Figures 25 & 26 in Alexander Nemerov, The Body of Raphaelle Peale: Still Life and Selfhood, 1812–1824 (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2001), p. 78. (Photo: by author.) Emptiness stare us once more in the face – what fills this emptiness? For Nemerov, who calls on Sigmund Freud’s concept of the ‘uncanny’, Peale’s ‘doubling’ indicates the artists’ narcissistic desire to find his place among objects, the repressed returning in Peale’s more disturbing still lifes of meat and vegetables.75 While I do not see Demuth as indulging in a similar narcissism, it is undeniable that the artist often equated sexual objects, faces, and fruit. Notice, for instance, the overtly-sexualised plums in the foreground of Eggplants and Plums (1921/33, Fig. 15), which may be paired equally well with the full-frontal nudity of Demuth’s late watercolours or with Williams’s memories of meeting Demuth for the first time: ‘[w]e looked, two young men, and at once the tie was cemented … The other faces are so many prunes’.76 The correspondence here among fruit, phallus, face cannot be ignored. But in Green Pears and Distinguished Air, emptiness does not seem as easily filled. Self-annihilation does not find such secure sexual replacements; other possibilities, other connotations, are kept open. If Demuth’s disorientated still life throws up the world – puts into brackets the objects in the world as well as the ‘self’ – what happens if these categories never come back down? Fig. 15 Open in new tabDownload slide Charles Demuth, Eggplant and Plums, 1921–33, watercolour with graphite on ivory wove paper, 304 x 459 mm. The Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, IL. Olivia Shaler Swan Memorial Collection. Fig. 15 Open in new tabDownload slide Charles Demuth, Eggplant and Plums, 1921–33, watercolour with graphite on ivory wove paper, 304 x 459 mm. The Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, IL. Olivia Shaler Swan Memorial Collection. I offer a final way to understand the radical strangeness of Demuth’s equivalence between faceless person and pear through the field of ‘queer inhumanism’, which brings together new-materialist thinking with queer theory’s longstanding questioning of concepts of ‘humanness’.77 Thus, scholars such as Dana Luciano and Mel Y. Chen (who edited a dossier on this topic in 2015 for GLQ) adopt the ethical demands of the ‘nonhuman turn’ while taking care not to erase or ignore human difference in the process.78 Luciano and Chen explain the potentials of queer inhumanism with the example of a photograph by the Cuban lesbian artist Laura Aguilar. Grounded #114 centres on the confusion of the artist’s own nude body and a boulder, as she assumes a pose that conceals sex, gender, and race, thus denying the gaze of an onlooker ‘by turning away from the demand for recognition within the circle of humanity’. ‘By mimicking a boulder’, Luciano and Chen claim, ‘Aguilar enters the very nonhuman fold where some would place her, effectively displacing the centrality of the human itself’.79 Moreover, by aligning the different temporalities of human time and geological time, Aguilar’s photograph does not collapse the boundaries between human with the inhuman but rather shows how ‘those categories rub on, and against, each other, generating friction and leakage’.80 Aguilar’s turning away is the gesture of the queer subject who, in Ahmed’s thinking, does not ‘turn’ when called – who resists interpellation precisely by turning away.81 It is also the gesture performed by Demuth’s sailor and the expressionless pear, those people–things that refuse to meet our gaze, or who turn away from us. In this act figures and food alike enter the ‘nonhuman fold’. A reading of the queerness of these works should come not from deciphering them with Demuth’s biography but from thinking about the way they stage disorienting encounters between subjects and objects, turning subjects into quasi-objects and objects into quasi-subjects. * Green Pears is a philosophical experiment. Like Husserl’s reduction, it focuses unrelentingly on objects that have been removed from the flow of everyday life. The vibrations of the pears evidence both the horizon from which they came and the community which they inchoately construct. As a viewer, we are invited to look on this group with the same scrutiny and quiet contemplation that the artist may have had in the isolation of his studio. But comfort is fleeting; the same marks that are signs of bracketing are also ones of agitation. Thus, however much this work seems to embody the tropes of modernist formalism (of abstraction, purity, or aestheticism), it offers only a precarious and temporary containment, a containment that inevitably points outwards again. In this, Demuth shared an ethical position with the poets of his day and the queer inhumanists of today. It was not that he felt no responsibility toward the world, but rather intuited, like the poets around him, that the most useful thing he could do was to reconstruct a world. This is the work’s new (new materialist) lesson. Still lifes such as Green Pear perform the contradictory actions of mending a ‘broken world’ – piecing it together and storing its livelihood – and of letting the world go entirely: replacing it with an ecology of non-human things that exist perfectly well on their own. Footnotes 1 William Carlos Williams, ‘Crimson Cyclamen’, in A. Walton Litz and Christopher MacGowan (eds), The Collected Poems of William Carlos Williams, Vol. 1, 1909–1939 (New York: New Directions, 1986), p. 419. 2 Elizabeth L. Cary, ‘Sophisticated Naivete: Some Moderns of Today and Yesterday – Interesting Examples of Still Life’, The New York Times, 31 October 1926, p. 11. Cary’s reference is to a similar drawing of pears by Demuth. 3 For reviews of this exhibition see: Henry McBride, ‘Exhibitions in New York: Charles Demuth – An American Place’, Art News, vol. 29, 18 April 1931, p. 10; Ruth Green Harris, ‘Demuth’, The New York Times, 19 April 1931, p. 18; Edward Alden Jewell, ‘Demuth’s Retrospective Show’, The New York Times, 14 April 1931, p. 32. 4 Angela E. Hagen, ‘Around the Galleries: Demuth Watercolors and Oils at “An American Place”’, Creative Art, vol. 8(June 1931), p. 441–443. Reprinted in Bruce Kellner (ed.), Letters of Charles Demuth: American Artist, 1883–1935, Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2000), pp. 165–166. 5 Marcia Brennan, Painting Gender, Constructing Theory: The Alfred Stieglitz Circle and American Formalist Aesthetics (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2001), p. 185. 6 Helen Appleton Read, ‘News and Views on Current Art’, Brooklyn Daily Eagle, 15 March 1925, p. 2B. For a ‘decoding’ of Demuth’s portraits, see Robin Jaffee Frank, Charles Demuth Poster Portraits 1923–1929 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Art Gallery, 1995). 7 Charles Demuth, Letter to Alfred Stieglitz, 6 August 1928, reprinted in Bruce Kellner (ed.), Letters of Charles Demuth, p. 109. 8 Betsy Fahlman, ‘Charles Has Only Just Gone: A View from the Province’, Betsy Fahlman and Claire Barry (eds), Chimneys and Towers: Charles Demuth’s Late Paintings of Lancaster, exh. cat. (Fort Worth, TX: Amon Carter Museum, 2007), p. 37. 9 Fahlman, ‘Charles Has Only Just Gone’, pp. 62–3. 10 Jonathan Weinberg, Speaking for Vice: Homosexuality in the Art of Charles Demuth, Marsden Hartley, and the First American Avant-Garde (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1993). 11 See Emily Farnham, ‘Family Background’, Charles Demuth: Behind the Laughing Mask (Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 1971), pp. 30–45; and Alvord L. Eiseman, A Study of The Development of an Artist: Charles Demuth (unpublished doctoral thesis, New York University, 1975), i, pp. 1–30. 12 Claire Barry, ‘Across the Final Surface: Observations on Charles Demuth’s Painting Materials and Working Methods in His Late Industrial Oil Paintings’, in Fahlman and Barry, Chimneys and Towers, p. 146. 13 See especially Demuth’s letters to Scolfield Thayer and Alfred Stieglitz in Kellner, Letters of Charles Demuth. 14 Qtd in Farnham, Charles Demuth, p. 44. 15 Farnham, Charles Demuth, p. 44. 16 Eiseman, A Study of The Development of an Artist, i, p. 112. 17 Meyer Schapiro, ‘The Apples of Cézanne: An Essay on the Meaning of Still-life’, Modern Art: 19th & 20th Centuries, Selected Papers (New York: George Braziller, 1978), p. 27. 18 Andrew Hemingway, ‘Louis Lozowick: Between Modernism and Marxism’, The Mysticism of Money: Precisionist Painting and Machine Age America (New York: Prestel, 2013). In this chapter, Hemingway calls for a more nuanced account of Lozowick’s art as well as his politics, arguing both that Lozowick’s art manifests a commitment to communism well before the 1930s and that the artist’s eventual embrace of realism went tragically in the direction of Stalinism in the next decade. I am thoroughly convinced by Hemingway’s claim that the series should be understood alongside the ‘perspectival shifts’ and disorientations of New Vision photography. 19 Janet Flint (ed.), The Prints of Louis Lozowick: A Catalogue Raisonné (New York: Hudson Hills, 1982), p. 21. 20 Louis Lozowick, ‘Lithography: Abstraction and Realism’, Space, vol. 1, no. 2, March 1920, pp. 31–3. Quoted in Flint, The Prints of Louis Lozowick, p. 25. 21 Henry McBride made the connection on the painting’s first appearance, though no scholar has since taken note of it. Henry McBride, ‘Charles Demuth Displays his Beautiful Landscapes at Daniels’, New York Herald, 5 December 1920, p. 3. 22 Bonnie Costello, Planets on Tables: Poetry, Still Life, and the Turning World (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2008), p. 16. 23 Wallace Stevens, ‘The Noble Rider and the Sound of Words’, The Necessary Angel: Essays on Reality and the Imagination (New York: Vintage, 1942), p. 36. 24 Costello, Planets on Tables, p. 6. 25 Costello, Planets on Tables, p. 6. 26 Emily Farnham, Charles Demuth, p. 38. 27 Elsie Everts remembers Demuth’s working process as one of solitude: ‘He sat down. Due to his lameness, had a special easel to fit on chair or table. He did not allow anyone in his studio when he worked’ (quoted in Emily Farnham, Charles Demuth: His life, Psychology, and Works (unpublished doctoral thesis, Ohio State University, 1959), p. 954. 28 ‘Exhibitions of Paintings in Great Variety: Art at Home and Abroad’, The New York Times, 1 December 1918, section 7, p. 11; Henry McBride, ‘News and Comment in the World of Art,” New York Sun, 3 December 1916, section 5, p. 12; McBride, ‘Demuth Displays his Beautiful Landscapes at Daniels’, New York Sun, 5 December 1920, section 3, p. 9. It was not uncommon for Charles Daniel to divide the gallery in this way, see Julie Mellby, A Record of Charles Daniel and the Daniel Gallery (unpublished masters thesis, Hunter College, New York, 1993), p. 42; For Nana, also see Weinberg, ‘Chapter 4: Illustrating Difference’, Speaking for Vice, pp. 61–88. 29 Reviewed by Helen Appleton Read, ‘New York Exhibitions: Seven Americans’, The Arts, vol. 7 (April 1925), pp. 229–231. 30 Barbara Haskell, ‘Late Works, 1927–1935’, Charles Demuth (New York: Whitney Museum of American Art, 1987), pp.193–212. 31 Maurice Merleau-Ponty, ‘Cézanne’s Doubt’, in Ted Toadvine and Leonard Lawlor (eds), The Merleau-Ponty Reader (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2007), pp. 73–4. 32 Merleau-Ponty, ‘Cézanne’s Doubt’, p. 77. 33 Merleau-Ponty, ‘Cézanne’s Doubt’, p. 76. 34 Merleau-Ponty, ‘Cézanne’s Doubt’, p. 71. 35 Merleau-Ponty, ‘Cézanne’s Doubt’, p. 80. 36 Alexander Nemerov, The Body of Raphaelle Peale: Still Life and Selfhood, 1812–1824 (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2001). 37 Nemerov, The Body of Raphaelle Peale, p. 32. 38 I refer here to Husserl’s description of the phenomenological epoché in volume one of Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy, first published in German in 1913 and subsequently reissued with modifications and emendations by Husserl; my quotations draw from the most recent English translation, by Daniel O. Dahlstrom in 2014. It need hardly be said that there is no evidence that Demuth knew of Husserl’s work – even if Husserl’s Ideas was first published the year of the Armory show, Husserl’s work was only translated into English in the late 1960s. 39 Edmund Husserl, Ideas for a Pure Phenomenology and Phenomenological Philosophy: First Book: General Introduction to Pure Phenomenology, trans. Daniel O. Dahlstrom (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 2014), p. 54. 40 Husserl, Ideas, p. 54. 41 For interpretations of Husserl’s philosophy, I have relied upon Dan Zahavi, Husserl’s Phenomenology (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003) and Sara Ahmed, Queer Phenomenology (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006). 42 Husserl, Ideas, p. 72. 43 Charles Demuth, Letter to Alfred Stieglitz, 29 June 1927, reprinted in Kellner, Letters of Charles Demuth, p. 96; Charles Demuth, Letter to Alfred Stieglitz, 10 September 1931, reprinted in Kellner, Letters of Charles Demuth, p. 133. 44 Charles Demuth, Letter to Alfred Stieglitz, 5 February 1929, Alfred Stieglitz/Georgia O’Keeffe Archive, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University, YCAL MSS 85, box 12, f. 303, reprinted in Kellner, Letters of Charles Demuth, p. 115. 45 Charles Demuth, Undated letter to Henry McBride, c. 1925, Henry McBride Papers, Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University, YCAL MSS 31, box 3, f. 87, reprinted in Kellner, Letters of Charles Demuth, p. 69; Charles Demuth, Letter to Henry McBride, 21 June 1925, reprinted in Letters of Charles Demuth, p. 68. 46 ‘My cousin thinks that you are grand … Some time you must come up and see my real cousin here, here, –there is one’ (Charles Demuth, Letter to Henry McBride, 21 June 1925, reprinted in Kellner, Letters of Charles Demuth, p. 68). 47 Husserl, Ideas, pp. 52, 55. 48 See especially, Bill Brown, Other Things (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2015), p. 25. 49 The classic accounts of Williams and Demuth’s friendship include Dickran Tashjian, William Carlos Williams and the American Scene, 1920–1940 (New York: Whitney Museum of Art, 1978); Bram Dijkstra, Cubism, Stieglitz, and the Early Poetry of William Carlos Williams (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1969). 50 See James E. Breslin, ‘William Carlos Williams and Charles Demuth: Cross-Fertilization in the Arts’, Journal of Modern Literature, vol. 6, no. 2, April 1977, p. 251. 51 William Carlos Williams, Spring and All (1923), reprinted in Litz and MacGowan (eds), The Collected Poems of William Carlos Williams, p. 199. 52 Williams, Spring and All, p. 197. 53 Williams, Spring and All, pp. 206–207. 54 Williams, Spring and All, p. 207. 55 Williams, ‘The Crimson Cyclamen’, p. 424. 56 Williams, Spring and All, p. 207. 57 For an interpretation of Williams’s ethics, see Ian Copestake, The Ethics of William Carlos Williams’s Poetry (Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2010). 58 Bill Brown, ‘Object Cultures’, in Mark D. Mitchell (ed.), The Art of American Still Life: Audubon to Warhol, exh. cat. (Philadelphia, PA: Philadelphia Museum of Art, 2015), p. 55. In this essay, Brown refers to Williams’ phrase ‘kinetics of the thing’. 59 Brown, ‘Object Cultures’, p. 53. 60 Norman Bryson, Looking at the Overlooked: Four Essays on Still Life Painting (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990), p. 61. 61 For a recent overview of this literature, see Jennifer Roberts, 'Things: Material Turn, Transnational Turn,' American Art, vol. 31, no. 2, Summer 2017, pp. 64–9; for a more contentious discussion, see the contributions to David Joselit, Carrie Lambert-Beatty, and Hal Foster (eds), ‘A Questionnaire on Materialisms’, October, vol. 155, Winter 2016, pp. 3–110. 62 Jane Bennett, ‘The Force of Things: Steps Toward an Ecology of Matter’, Political Theory, vol. 32, no. 3, June 2004, pp. 347–72. The differences among object-oriented approaches, new materialisms, and phenomenology are layered; see, for instance, Graham Harman’s distinction between Latour’s Actor-Network Theory, which is ‘anti-materialist’ but not ‘realist’, and his own Object-Oriented-Ontology, which is both (Harman, ‘Questionnaire on New Materialisms’, October, vol. 155, Winter 2016, pp. 51–52). 63 See Timothy Morton, Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology after the End of the World (Minneapolis, MN: Minnesota Press, 2013). Alan Braddock, ‘Ecocritical Art History’, American Art, vol. 23, no.2, Summer 2009, pp. 24–8. 64 Tim Ingold, ‘Toward an Ecology of Materials’, Annuals Review of Anthropology, vol. 41, 2012, [pp. 427-442] p. 438. 65 Ingold, ‘Toward an Ecology of Materials’, p. 437–8. 66 Barbara Haskell, Charles Demuth (New York: Whitney Museum of American Art, 1987), pp. 204–6. 67 Haskell, Charles Demuth, p. 204; and Weinberg, Speaking for Vice, p. 200. 68 Ahmed, Queer Phenomenology, p. 3. 69 Ahmed, ‘Orientations Towards Objects’, Queer Phenomenology, pp. 25–63. 70 Ahmed, Queer Phenomenology, p. 157. 71 ‘The World of Art’, New York Times Book Review and Magazine, 19 December 1920, p. 20. 72 Nemerov, Raphaelle Peale, p. 77. 73 Nemerov, Raphaelle Peale, p. 78. 74 Williams, Spring and All, p. 184. 75 Nemerov, Raphaelle Peale, p. 79. 76 Qtd in Breslin, 'William Carlos Williams and Charles Demuth,' p. 249. 77 Dana Luciano and Mel Y. Chen (eds), ‘Introduction: Has the Queer Ever Been Human’, GLQ: A Journal of Gay and Lesbian Studies, vol. 21, no. 2–3, 2015, [pp. 183–218] p. 186. 78 Luciano and Chen, ‘Introduction’, p.188. 79 Luciano and Chen, ‘Introduction’, p. 184. 80 Luciano and Chen, ‘Introduction’, p. 186. 81 Ahmed, Queer Phenomenology, p. 107. For this understanding, Ahmed follows Judith Butler’s analysis of subject formation based on Louis Althusser’s concept of interpellation (see Ahmed, Queer Phenomenology, p. 15). © The Author(s) 2022. Published by Oxford University Press; all rights reserved This article is published and distributed under the terms of the Oxford University Press, Standard Journals Publication Model (https://academic.oup.com/journals/pages/open_access/funder_policies/chorus/standard_publication_model)
TI - Never Still! Nonhuman Life in Charles Demuth’s Green Pears
JF - Oxford Art Journal
DO - 10.1093/oxartj/kcab017
DA - 2022-01-14
UR - https://www.deepdyve.com/lp/oxford-university-press/never-still-nonhuman-life-in-charles-demuth-s-green-pears-Y5DlbIPclo
SP - 269
EP - 290
VL - 44
IS - 2
DP - DeepDyve
ER -