Charles Demuth
Charles Henry Buckius Demuth was an American painter who specialized in watercolors and turned to oils late in his career, developing a style of painting known as Precisionism. He also retained aspects of Cubism in many of his works.
Here he portrayed a cigar factory using a sharply linear, planar style inspired by streamlined machinery. The building was part of the industrial landscape in his hometown of Lancaster, Pennsylvania, which Demuth began depicting with increasing monumentality in the last years of his life. Although he presented the factory with no reference to the potentially detrimental effects of industrialization, the painting expresses some irony or ambivalence. Demuth drew the title from the last line of The Star-Spangled Banner, which was adopted as the United States national anthem the year he painted this work, thus implying that for many workers, the factory was the new “home of the brave.”
P.S. Read this fascinating story of Charles Demuth's art and poems by William C. Williams!
P.P.S. If you are a fan of writing down your thoughts about art (like me), please check our Art Journals on DailyArt Shop. In the one I use, there is a place for Demuth's work. :)