Born, Wolfgang: American landscape painting: an interpretation (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1948)

embarked on the development of a tech-
nocratic society. In an economic and
social structure based on technological
thinking, the exactitude of photography
must have recommended itself as a
perfect satisfaction of the “thirst for
pictures innate in man and increased in
a period of heightened intellectual curi-
osity. Thus it happened that photography
began to inspire painters. Photography
showed that it was capable of producing
true visual documents of the industrial-
ized world. In spite of the disadvantage
of a mechanical reproduction that can-
not, save by synthetic devices, eliminate
the unessential elements, the new aspect
of the world was captured with an au-
thenticity rarely before achieved. There
was no escape. The photographic eye
focused the hard, nonpicturesque struc-
tures of engineering architecture with
the same objectivity as the trees and the
water next to it. Only there were less and
less trees and more and more industrial
architecture.

The new wave of influence which
photography exerted on painting was
unlike that which, after the invention of
photography, made itself felt in the
middle of the nineteenth century. Then
photography was considered a “truthful”
means of “imitating nature” and it con-
fused the painters who tried to compete
with its alleged truthfulness—a naive
misunderstanding caused by a lack of
discrimination. For artistic truth has
nothing to do with mere optical correct-
ness.

There was enough confusion in the
camp of the photographers too, espe-
cially around 1900 when the doctrine of
pictorial photography originated—a
doctrine that looked for redemption to
technical devices which were to make
photography similar to painting and

etching. Stieglitz was instrumental in
clearing the atmosphere and in paving
the way for a distinctly photographic
style. It was this “objective” style of
photography that formed the starting
point for the development of a style in
American painting that eventually was
able to cope successfully with the tasks
that confronted the painter of the new
American reality.

The first of these painters was Charles
Demuth 7 (1883-1935). This descendant
of a Pennsylvania German family, a man
of refined taste but broken health, ab-
sorbed in Paris those elements of postim-
pressionist painting which eventually
enabled him to interpret his own country.
Demuth stayed in Paris during the hal-
cyon but sometimes tense years before
the first World War in which the faint
grumbling of a political earthquake oc-
casionally was sensed by those engrossed
in pursuits seemingly far removed from
reality. When Demuth studied the ex-
periments of the cubists and, in the com-
ing years, assimilated their theory to his
own way of seeing, he paved the way to
what soon was termed precisionism, an
art that was to combine the exactitude of
photography with the geometrical inter-
pretation of space introduced by cubism.
Demuth experimented with the latter.
Since the line was to him a natural way of
expressing himself, he interpreted the
elements of solid geometry that form the
essence of cubism in a way quite different
from that of Picasso and Braque who
painted the plane as such, and gave it its
distinguishing character by means of an
almost traditional illusionistic color treat-
ment. Demuth indicated geometric re-
lations by inserting ruler-drawn lines into
his compositions, lines that forced the
rigidity of a geometrical diagram upon
the scene, whether it was a steeple of a