Bermuda: Houses Seen Through Trees

Discussion

FROM THE BARNES FOUNDATION’S CATALOG

Two tall trees with wavy trunks screen a group of houses, suggested by overlapping red and black rectangles. The compressed setting reads as a series of receding registers and probably captures a view from a hotel on Saint George's Island, Bermuda. Demuth stayed there with his friend Marsden Hartley after both had worked in Provincetown, Massachusetts, where they experimented with cubism. The combination, as here, of hard geometric forms with curved organic shapes is perhaps what prompted Dr. Barnes to compare Demuth's landscapes to an 18th-century Chinese portrait of an abbot on silk from his collection (BF86).

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