Love, Love, Love. Homage to Gertrude Stein

Charles 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.

Love, Love, Love. Homage to Gertrude Stein falls within Demuth's collection of so-called poster portraits, created from 1924 to 1928, featuring various artists and writers. These symbolic representations compose the subjects' identities by assembling words and objects, diverging from traditional portraiture. Demuth aligns with a Modernist portrait tradition initiated in the previous decade by figures like Marsden Hartley, Marius de Zayas, Francis Picabia, and Gertrude Stein herself. Rather than capturing the physical likeness of his subjects, Demuth opts for a blend of symbols and signs, inviting a playful interaction with the audience and challenging conventional notions of identity in art. The quest for an accurate physical representation was not his primary concern.

In this specific work depicting Stein, who was an American writer who hosted a famous salon in Paris, Demuth incorporates a mysterious mask alongside the numbers 1, 2, and 3, and the word "LOVE" repeated thrice, all set against a stark backdrop bisected diagonally into black and red segments. The mask's significance remains elusive, while the numerical elements might hint at the writer's affinity for the number three.

Today's work is part of our celebrations of Pride Month!  :) Enjoy!

P.S. Have you heard of Marlow Moss, another LGBTQ artist who was one of the pioneers of Abstract art? Meet this queer painter who influenced Mondrian!