Research Notes:
January 2026

Interdisciplinary Inspiration

Demuth was born to a wealthy family in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, but did not aspire to join the family tobacco business.³ After receiving a strong formal education in the humanities, he chose to study art at Drexel University, the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, and arts academies in Paris.⁴ Through his studies, Demuth joined a network of creatives and gained an appreciation for reading, writing, and performance. He practiced prose, poetry, and acting, but ultimately developed his creative talents in the visual arts.⁵

Demuth’s interdisciplinary interests shaped his artwork—his subjects are often from literature and theater. The artist’s myriad influences are on display in Jugglers with Indian Clubs (fig. 1), found in Room 17 of the Barnes collection. Here, Demuth presents a two-person juggling act. Six Indian clubs (traditional juggling objects) fly across the stage between the performers. The circular shape at center—likely a spotlight—glows yellow and orange, illuminating the action. The stage is decorated with commonplace furniture, such as a table and a floor lamp, and props that include a cane, a black umbrella, and two black top hats.

The specific combination of props and acrobatics, along with the stage setting, is highly suggestive of vaudeville, a style of performance that originated in France and was popularized in the United States at the turn of the 20th century. A typical vaudeville show featured short, lighthearted acts, including dance, music, slapstick comedy, and acrobatics. Performers were often members of minority communities, such as immigrants and African Americans. Rambunctious and socially clever, vaudeville shows used comedy to critique the elite, which contributed to their broad appeal.⁶ The genre thrived in New York’s Greenwich Village at venues that Demuth frequented.⁷

While Demuth celebrated popular entertainment within Greenwich Village, he also ran in the neighborhood’s bohemian social circles. These groups of educated artists were more interested in breaking conventions than finding commercial success.⁸ One such circle was the Provincetown Players, an experimental theater collective where playwrights, artists, and activists explored intellectual themes. The collective was based at 133 MacDougal Street in Greenwich Village, but had been established in 1915 in Provincetown, Massachusetts.⁹ Demuth, a founding member, was intimately involved during the summers of 1915 and 1916. His experience informed his understanding of stage mechanics, which helped him to accurately represent such spaces within his paintings. However, his intellectual engagement with the Provincetown Players was arguably more influential on his art. The group wrote and performed short plays about modern topics such as psychotherapy and gender relations, themes that appear throughout Demuth’s work.¹⁰

Years earlier, during his first stays in Paris, Demuth gained an appreciation for the evolving overlap between the critical theater associated with the educated elite and other forms of popular entertainment.¹¹ In Paris, circuses, cabarets, and ballets were favorite spaces of creative exchange where avant-garde thinkers pursued new artistic expressions and class intersections. The Ballet Russes, founded in Paris in 1909, exemplified the collaborative nature of the modern art scene. High-profile artists such as Léon Bakst and Pablo Picasso designed sets and costumes for the company, forming a dialogue between the visual arts and the medium of ballet. These collaborations influenced audiences in both directions: elite theatergoers were exposed to avant-garde art, while the innovative approach to ballet attracted new theater audiences. Ultimately, the Ballet Russes blurred the divide between the elite and popular culture, expanding the definitions of ballet and theater.¹² Simultaneously, circuses and cabarets offered similar environments that also dissolved hierarchies. Demuth and other artists who ran in “high-culture” circles sourced subject matter from these venues, elevating popular performance to the status of fine art.¹³

Demuth’s Jugglers with Indian Clubs exhibits his fondness for the stage. The painting’s colorful palette echoes the ballet designs of Bakst, whose work Demuth found exciting.¹⁴ The figures appear to move simultaneously, and their footing recalls ballet—the woman’s toes are pointed, as if just landing an elevé, and the man takes a demi-plié in a wide second position [figs 1a,b]. However, the juggling and stage props clearly reference vaudeville. Demuth’s love of the stage was not bound by culture or class. His unconventional combination of performance styles—American and European, popular and intellectual—is present in his art. This embrace of diverse expressions is characteristic of Demuth’s work where literature, theater, and painting comingle to create an interdisciplinary body of visual art.

Queer Communities

Demuth and his libertine peers rejected repressive heteronormative values that confined sex practices to marriage and determined the nuclear family unit the pinnacle of familial success. Demuth instead prioritized community living, expressed same-sex attraction, and depicted sexual practices that were viewed as uncouth by moral traditionalists.

His painting Nana Visiting Her Friend Satin (fig. 2) embodies a modern view of sex, which Demuth and the bohemians embraced. The scene is drawn from Émile Zola’s novel Nana. Published in 1880, the novel tells the story of Nana, a woman of lower-class status who rises to become a popular courtesan, or upper-class sex worker. While prostitutes and mistresses had served elite figures for centuries, by the mid-1800s clientele had expanded to include the Parisian working man.¹⁵ Courtesans held an elevated status within their field. They were paid in expensive gifts, a practice that reframed their employment as sex workers and gave them a more esteemed reputation than their counterparts of lower socioeconomic status. It is important to note that women pursued sex work out of financial necessity and that the profession, even for those with courtesan status, was stigmatized.¹⁶ While bohemian artists embraced sex-work imagery to express their liberal views, they also employed the subject to titillate viewers—particularly men.

However, Demuth’s paintings featuring sex work pushed beyond the normative gender views that often structured both bohemian and mainstream depictions of women. Nana Visiting Her Friend Satin operates beyond the male gaze and celebrates lesbian love. Nana sits with Satin, her friend, lover, and fellow sex worker. Demuth captures their shared tenderness. Satin rests her head on Nana’s lap in an intimate moment, a contrast to the roles the two women play with their male clients. In 1880, when Nana was published, and in 1918, when Demuth painted this piece, queer relationships were both unconventional and illegal. Those who chose to live as openly gay, as Demuth did within the relative safety of bohemian circles, operated in networks that, by their fringe nature, distanced queer identities from mainstream society. Demuth created 11 pieces inspired by Zola’s novel but took liberties in his rendering of Nana,¹⁷ portraying her as an empowered woman rather than a stigmatized sex worker. Perhaps Demuth’s experience as a queer man made him empathize with Nana and the challenges she faced in society.

Transatlantic Networks

In the early 20th century, bohemian neighborhoods like Montmartre and Montparnasse in Paris and Greenwich Village in New York became inspirational havens for avant-garde artists.¹⁸ These like-minded thinkers formed professional and deeply personal bonds. Members dined together, philosophized, and collaborated on projects, collectively influencing the trajectory of modern art. While Lancaster, Pennsylvania, was the town Demuth called home, his extended time in Paris and New York tied him to the evolving modern art scene.

Demuth’s Interior with Group of People and Red-Headed Woman (fig. 3) conjures the lively meetings of artists and intellectuals working across the Atlantic in the early 20th century. The scene is dark, yet spirited. The room is crowded with people that converse, drink, and smoke. Some individuals gaze pensively into the distance. The scratchy pencil marks convey a sense of energy, as if the room is abuzz with new ideas and creative exchange.

Demuth resided in Paris for about five months between 1907 and 1908 and for a year and a half from 1912 to 1914, networking with a growing constellation of global artists.¹⁹ Through his friend, American artist Marsden Hartley, Demuth made the acquaintance of art collector and writer Gertrude Stein around 1913.²⁰ By this time, Stein had established herself as a central figure in Paris’s artistic and intellectual vanguard. She hosted a weekly event at her home—the Salon de Fleurus—where guests would view her growing modern art collection and discuss new directions in art. It was through these events that Demuth was introduced to the art of Paul Cézanne, Henri Matisse, Pablo Picasso, and Juan Gris, European artists whose work had not yet reached wide popularity in the United States.²¹ It is easy to draw parallels between Interior with Group of People and Red-Headed Woman and photographs of the Salon de Fleurus (fig. 4).²² The salon’s cozy, art-filled space is echoed in Demuth’s composition.

As the Parisian community evolved and welcomed international avant-garde artists—particularly those active in New York—a dialogue formed between the two cities. With his ties to both places and his general social nature, Demuth connected creatives across the Atlantic. For example, Demuth advocated for French-American artist Marcel Duchamp in both New York and Paris. In a 1917 letter, he introduces Duchamp to American art critic Henry McBride, and in a 1921 letter to Gertrude Stein, he writes that he and Duchamp wish to visit her in Paris.²³ The experimental movements that had emerged in Paris at the turn of the century made their way to New York. The modern was not fixed—its style and geographies continued to evolve.

While Interior with Group of People around Red-Headed Woman evokes a Parisian salon, it may actually depict a bohemian gathering in New York. Scholars have drawn connections between Interior and Demuth’s At the Golden Swan, Sometimes Called the Hell Hole, which depicts an Irish saloon in Greenwich Village.²⁴ Both were created in 1919 and both show a large painting hung above chatty guests. Close looking at the painting within Interior reveals the signature “GO. Colman,” referring to Glenn O. Coleman, one of Demuth’s contemporaries [fig 3a].²⁵ Demuth, with his affinity for poetry, was known to play with spelling and word choice—a sign of affection within his personal letters and a conceptual choice within the titles of his artwork.²⁶ Coleman spent most of his career in New York, perhaps another clue that, within Interior, Demuth is depicting an American setting.²⁷

Though Paris remained a hub for artistic exploration, by the end of the first World War, New York had emerged as the capital of the modern art scene. In a 1921 letter to his friend, American photographer and art dealer Alfred Stieglitz, Demuth offers a bittersweet reflection on his return home from France. “It was all very wonderful . . . but I must work, here. New York is something which Europe is not. Marcel [Duchamp] and all the others, those who count, say that all the ‘modern’ is to us [New Yorkers], and of course they are right, but it is so hard.”²⁸ Although deeply fond of Paris, Demuth embraced the forward momentum of New York. In the same letter to Stieglitz, he writes, “Together we will add to the American scene, more than has been added since the [1860s] and 70s—maybe more than they added.”²⁹

Endnotes