Charles Demuth’s Dramatic Abstraction

The title of Charles Demuth’s abstract townscape, Backdrop of East Lynne (1919) was long disregarded as either a specific place name or a Dada-inspired play on words of little significance. This article proposes that it actually references the nineteenth-century novel and popular play East Lynne (1861) by Ellen Wood. East Lynne remained well known in Demuth’s day through theatrical revivals and silent film adaptations. Though it still appealed to traditional taste, it became notorious for displaying a Victorian sentimentality many considered out of touch with the complexities of modern life. Understood in this context, Demuth’s title draws an analogy between outmoded theatrical traditions and the American landscape conventions his modernist painting sought to revitalize. Moreover, it provides important insight into how his involvement with avant-garde theater as a founding member of the Provincetown Players shaped his practice as a visual artist and points to the deeper impact of nineteenth-century culture on the foundations of American modernism

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