Biography
A titan of American Modernism, Charles Demuth produced works ranging from delicate watercolors of flowers and fruits to hard-edged, bold Precisionist paintings of urban and industrial landscapes influenced by Cubism and Futurism. I Saw the Figure 5 in Gold (1928) is among Demuth’s most famous Precisionist works. A largely conceptual portrait of poet William Carlos Williams, the work is an accumulation of images associated with Williams and with his celebrated poem about a fire engine, “The Great Figure.”