Bowdoin College Museum of Art | - Study for Poster Portrait: Wallace Stevens

Preview image of work. graphite and colored pencil on paper, Study for Poster Portrait: Wallace Stevens 29458

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Study for Poster Portrait: Wallace Stevens

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Artist

Charles Henry Demuth (Lancaster, Pennsylvania, 11/8/1883 - 10/23/1935, Lancaster, Pennsylvania)

Title

Study for Poster Portrait: Wallace Stevens

Creation Date

1925-1926

Dimensions

8 1/4 x 6 3/4 in. (20.96 x 17.15 cm)

Object Type

drawing

Creation Place

North America, United States

Medium and Support

graphite and colored pencil on paper

Credit Line

Lent courtesy of the Ackland Art Museum, The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Image: Ackland Museum

Copyright

This artwork may be under copyright. For further information, please consult the Museum’s Copyright Terms and Conditions.

This is one of three “poster portraits” by Demuth that honor important early twentieth-century writers. The other two subjects are Eugene O’Neill and William Carlos Williams, both of whom Demuth knew well. Wallace Stevens led something of a double life, working as lawyer by day and composing poetry in his free time. Demuth and Stevens met through Walter Arensberg, a major collector of modern art. What could be interpreted as a variegated patchwork quilt hung in the background may refer to Demuth’s and Stevens’s respective childhoods in Pennsylvania Dutch country. The quills, inkwell, and papers are appropriate attributes for an author. The artist—in his haste—has misspelled the poet’s first name, at top. No fully-realized version of this composition is known today.