Acrobats
Charles Demuth
American, 1883–1935
1919
A watercolor and pencil on paper showing two circus acrobats riding a bicycle, where Demuth flattens form and amplifies color to capture the spectacle and physical energy of the performance.
What stops you is the whirl of oversized yellow rings and the sculptural, muscular bodies reduced to bold, rhythmic planes that seem to spin and lock together against a quietly sketched landscape.
The drawing brings avant‑garde experiments in motion and simplified form into an American vocabulary, pointing toward the Precisionist clarity and modernist abstraction that Demuth and his contemporaries developed.
Medium
Watercolor and pencil on paper
Dimensions
13 x 7 7/8" (33 x 20 cm)
Classification
Department
Credit
Gift of Abby Aldrich Rockefeller
Accession
51.1935
Palette
Art Terms
Exhibitions
