With a Teaspoon

Last week, 15 years after the death of Charles Demuth, Manhattan's Museum of Modern Art got around to giving him a big exhibition. The 168 paintings and drawings on display proved the Lancaster, Pa. tobacconist's boy to have been among the nation's top moderns. In his lifetime Demuth was much admired by a small circle of artists, critics and collectors. But Demuth (rhymes with see tooth) never made much of a dent on the public.

In the exhibition catalogue, Museum Director of Painting and Sculpture Andrew Ritchie collared Demuth with a string of adjectives: "Elegant, witty, frivolous, dandified, shy, gentle, kind, amusing." The painter was also lame, and long ill with the diabetes which killed him at 52. A bit of a bohemian in his excursions to Greenwich Village and Montparnasse, he never stayed away from Lancaster long. Bachelor Demuth was "sheltered as a child and as a man," wrote Ritchie, "by an extraordinarily robust mother."

His mother must have been a little shocked by some of Charles's work. On rainy days when he had to stay indoors, he did acid little illustrations, in thin wiggly lines and soppy watercolor washes, for Zola's Nana, Foe's The Masque of the Red Death and Wedekind's Erdgeist. They were often sexy but never lusty, and Exhibition Director Ritchie, who points out that Charles apparently never meant them to be published, thinks they reflected "a deep unbalance and disquiet in his own nature." Perhaps his watercolors of anemic acrobats in painful poses did too.

The better part of Demuth's art was reticent, stiff and dainty as his mother's gros point. Inspired by the French moderns, he drew out his inspiration, as he once put it, "with a teaspoon, but I never spilled a drop."

The cubists, particularly his friend Marcel Duchamp, had taught him to shatter shapes. He cracked the sky as well, painted Pennsylvania factories and Provincetown houses impaled, piecemeal, on diagonal slivers of blue, white and grey light.

When the sun was shining outdoors and Demuth turned his lapidary instinct on the poppies, cyclamen and zinnias in his mother's garden, or the fruits and vegetables for her kitchen, the results were sparkling. He had the knack of putting flowers into many-faceted, highly polished pictures without seeming to disarrange their leaves and petals. The driest of artists, he knew how to keep the bloom on a peach or the dew on a blossom. His talent had never been robust; the fact that his best works were evocations of things so elusive and so close to perfection as flowers was a measure of its fineness.

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