Charles Demuth

Between 1916 and 1917, Charles Demuth executed a group of watercolors featuring circus performers and dancers. Fluid brushstrokes and translucent washes of color emphasize the performers’ flexible bodies and nimble movements. The yellow areas mimic the effect of spotlights and create a hazy, dreamlike glow around the figures, enhancing the sense of their strength and daring.

Watercolor was Charles Demuth's principal medium of expression, as it was for modernists John Marin and Charles Burchfield. Like many artists and writers of his generation, Demuth was attracted to vaudeville and circus performers and enjoyed capturing their graceful bodies in movement. This drawing's playful subject and simplicity of forms and contours belies Demuth's great skill at laying on washes of color.