Charles Demuth
Lancaster, Lancaster County, Pennsylvania
Marker Inscription
Born in Lancaster, Nov. 8, 1883. Demuth achieved international fame for his precise, modernist paintings including "My Egypt" and "I Saw the Figure 5 in Gold." He traveled in the U.S. and abroad but resided after 1889 in this house. Here he died in 1935.
Erected by Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission
The Story
Charles Demuth, born in Lancaster in 1883, became one of America's foremost modernist painters, working from the family home where he spent most of his life. His crisp, geometric "Precisionist" canvases like "My Egypt" and the poster-portrait "I Saw the Figure 5 in Gold" translated grain elevators, factories, and city signs into a distinctly American visual language. Though he traveled widely, he returned always to Lancaster, where he died in 1935.
Why it matters
Demuth helped invent an American modernism that found beauty in the industrial landscape, placing a small Pennsylvania city at the heart of twentieth-century art.
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Related people
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Themes & tags
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