AFA Summer 2018

Summer 102 www.afamag.com | w ww.incollect.com Alice Neel (American, 1900 – 1984) Portrait of John with Hat, 1935 Oil on canvas, 23½ x 21½ inches Philadelphia Museum of Art; Gift of the estate of Arthur M. Bullowa (1993-119-2) Alice Neel met John Rothschild (1900– 1975) in 1932. She stayed with him in 1934 after her lover Kenneth Doolittle slashed and burned many of her paintings and drawings at the apartment that they shared. Rothschild helped Neel acquire a small cottage in Spring Lake, New Jersey, a seaside town where she spent time each summer for the rest of her life. This portrait shows her friend’s strong jaw and distinctive profile clearly outlined against the ocean behind him. Charles Demuth (1883 – 1935) Lancaster (In the Province No. 2), 1920 Oil on canvas, 30 x 16 inches Philadelphia Museum of Art; The Louise and Walter Arensberg Collection (1950-134-45) Over the course of his career, Charles Demuth lived and worked in New York, Philadelphia, Provincetown, and Paris, but his real home was in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, which he referred to as “the province.” The city provided the subject for many of his architectural compositions such as this water tower and cupola of an industrial building from the 1800s not far from his family’s house. Demuth used sharp lines and clearly defined patches of color to divide the structures, and even the sky, into precise geometric shapes in a style that came to be described as Precisionism.