The story of Art Deco occurs against the backdrop of the Roaring Twenties in the U.S. and a scarred Europe recovering from World War One. While the U.S. wasn’t faced with rebuilding after the war, it did have to rebuild its economy after the Great Depression of 1929. 

Art Deco is a form of Modernism that flourished in the United States and Europe in the 1920s and 1930s. The origins of Art Deco began two decades earlier in Paris. “La Societe des artistes decorateurs” or the Decorative Artists Society was founded following the Universal Exposition of 1900. Early members, including architect Hector Guimard, believed in the importance of France’s decorative arts and marketing their achievements for business purposes. These artists also displayed their creations at the International Exposition of Modern Industrial and Decorative Art in Paris in 1925.

A founder of the Decorative Artists Society, Hector Guimard (1867-1942) was a French architect famous for designing modern facades for the entrances to Paris Metro stations during the Art Nouveau movement (1890-1905). His style was curvilinear, characteristic of Art Nouveau.

He trained in Philadelphia at the Drexel Institute of Art, Science and Industry (1901–5) and at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts (1905–11), where his teachers included Thomas Anshutz, Henry McCarter (1864–1942), Hugh Breckenridge (1870–1937) and William Merritt Chase. While still a student, he participated in a show at the Academy (1907), exhibiting his work publicly for the first time.

In 1919 Demuth began a series of paintings depicting themes inspired (with the exception of two views of nearby Coatesville) by the architecture of Lancaster. Executed in oil and tempera, the series marks a shift from his previously favoured watercolour medium. Larger in scale than any of his other works, these paintings maintain a striking balance between abstraction and realism. The industrial images he used are strongly formalized, structured in simplified Cubist planes and Futurist lines of force, but remain specific. 

From the mid- to the late 1920s, Demuth produced a series of symbolic ‘poster portraits’ of several of his friends, the most famous of which is I Saw the Figure Five in Gold (Homage to William Carlos Williams) (1928; New York, Met.). He also painted tributes to John Marin, Georgia O’Keeffe, Arthur Dove, Gertrude Stein and others. The highly personal iconography and less accessible style of these portraits, combined with their unusual titles, made them difficult for most viewers to appreciate when they were first exhibited. These works, as well as those of Lancaster’s architecture, were not well received by critics.

Demuth’s last works, a series of luminous studies made while on holiday in Provincetown in the summer of 1934, reveal a renewed interest in the human figure. By 1920 the effects of diabetes became debilitating; the disease increasingly drained his artistic energies and led to his death.