Palm Beach Show 2011

Charles Demuth (American, 1883–1935) End of the Parade: Coatesville, Pa., 1920 Tempera and pencil on board, 19⅞ x 15¾ inches Collection of Deborah and Ed Shein Demuth fused industrial style and subject matter, depicting the Lukens Steel complex with clear-cut lines and contained color—a style known as precisionism. The smokestacks and buildings are as crisply rendered as an architectural drawing, and even the billows of smoke are carefully delineated. Demuth’s painting, however, does not faithfully document the Lukens factory; one building is fancifully composed of stacked trapezoids, and rays of steely gray shoot across the sky in a decorative arrangement. Critics admired Demuth’s ability to find beauty in industrialized America. As Henry McBride noted, “He makes of it a thing that seems to glorify a subject that the rest of us have been taught to consider ugly.” Marcel Duchamp (French-American, 1887–1968 Fresh Widow, 1964 edition (based on 1920 original) Painted wood frame and eight glass panels covered with black leather, 30½ x 1711⁄16 inches National Gallery of Art, Washington, Gift of Deborah and Ed Shein Describing the manufacture of this sculpture, Duchamp said, “This small model of a French window was made by a carpenter in New York in 1920. To complete it I replaced the glass panes by panes made of leather, which I insisted should be shined everyday like shoes. French Window was called Fresh Widow, an obvious enough pun.” Indeed, the pun would have been especially pertinent in 1920, in the immediate aftermath of World War I. Signed by Duchamp’s female alter ego, Rose Sélavy (a pun on eros c’est la vie, or “eros, that’s life”), Fresh Widow offers a critique of how art tradi- tionally operates. For instance, by covering the window panes with black leather Duchamp contradicts the basic notion that a painting should operate as a window into another world—an idea broadly accepted since the Renaissance. 22