Fantasies of Precision by Ashley Lazevnick

Author:Ashley Lazevnick [Lazevnick, Ashley]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: ART015100 ART / History / Modern (late 19th Century to 1945)
Publisher: University of Minnesota Press
Published: 2023-07-25T00:00:00+00:00

Figure 4.7. Charles Demuth, Three Pears, 1933. Watercolor over pencil on paper, 10 × 14 inches. Williams College Museum of Art, Williamstown, Massachusetts: Bequest of Susan Watts Street (57.11).

Figure 4.8. Charles Demuth, Green Pears, 1929 (detail). Watercolor over graphite, 13⅞ × 19⅞ inches. Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, Connecticut. Philip L. Goodwin, B.A. 1907, Collection, Gift of James L. Goodwin, B.A. 1905, Henry Sage Goodwin, B.A. 1927, and Richmond L. Brown, B.A. 1907.

Is it a coincidence that these lines resemble the form and the function of quotation marks? In the structure of a sentence, quotation marks are at once closed-off and permeable, functioning syntactically as a parenthetical (“parenthesizing” is one way of translating Husserl’s Einklammerung). That Demuth used quotation marks frequently in his letters is relevant here. He placed in quotations the titles of artworks (“My Egypt,” “Calla Lilies,” “Figure 5”), but he also used these marks for emphasis or a turn of phrase: “Have a lot of things in mind but it is such slow ‘going’ that I don’t know if they will ever reach canvas or paper”; “Of course the pages which do ‘happen’ are quite like the water-colours when they ‘happen,’ in and beyond Time.”50 Now watch how Demuth used scare quotes in his discussion of still life. In a letter to Stieglitz on February 5, 1928, he confessed (Figure 4.9):

I think the “still-life” my best picture so far.51

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