YOU'RE TACKY AND I HATE YOU

Charles Demuth (1883–1935) was an American painter well known for his watercolors and oil paintings in a style of Precisionism, a modern art movement influenced by Cubism and Futurism. He was a forerunner to later movements, including Abstract Expressionism and Pop art.

In Paris, Demuth found more acceptance and freedom as a gay man compared to living in the United States, and he repeatedly visited Paris in the late 1910s and early 1920s. Demuth became a part of a vibrant Parisian artistic community that accepted his homosexuality. He created a number of paintings depicting the gay subculture of the postwar period in Paris, though he never intended to show them in public. One of his favorite Parisian venues was the Lafayette Baths, the setting of this 1918 self-portrait.

Demuth was instrumental in developing a modernist form that had distinctly American perspectives, combining Cubism with American urban and industrial landscape. His watercolors have a lightness that combines immaculate lines with an air of sensuality.

“Tête-à-Tête” (1977).

~ Boris Talberg