Charles Demuth

Beginning of article

Charies Demuth

There is a familiar puzzle-drawing that is a picture of a rabbit or of a duck, depending upon the way one looks at it. The "duck-rabbit," as it is called by philosophers, has been used since Wittgenstein to demonstrate how the same thing has different identities under different perceptual aspects. It would be a rare student of philosophy, on the other hand, who raised the further question of what deep identity connects ducks and rabbits so that they should be aspects of each other. But such considerations would not have been far from the mind of Man Ray when, in a 1930 photograph, Anatomies, he showed a woman from the shoulders up with her head bent back in so strenuous a way as to show us her chin from underneath: The lines of the jaw form an obvious visual pun on the head of a penis, for which the neck becomes the shaft. As were most Surrealists, Man Ray was obsessed with such transformations, and he would have considered the photograph a surprising revelation of an underlying oneness between male and female. A precise, if inadvertent, anticipation of Man Ray's wily and unsettling picture may be found in a sculpture by Brancusi. Princesse X is a sleek and abstract portrait bust of a woman with a very long and arched neck, her head and breasts reduced to polished knobs. It is a powerful irony that this marvelous form, in which a woman is reduced to her essential lines, should, through an irresistible perceptual switch, look unmistakably like an Art Deco phallus. It at least looked sufficiently phallic to have been removed, on grounds of questionable decency, from the Salon des Independants of 1920, angering Brancusi to the point that he refused to exhibit in France for the next several years.

With a work such as Brancusi's phalloprincess, the term "exhibition" (or, en francais, exposition) takes on its own double meaning, which is captured, deliciously, in a masterpiece of giggling visual innuendo by the American modernist Charles Demuth, for me a high point in the stunning show of his work on view at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York City (it ended January 17). Titled Distinguished Air, the watercolor shows five persons, who could just be a group of lovers of advanced art, …