“A Picture of Resilience”: Ashley Lazevnick on Charles Demuth’s "Red Poppies"

02/01/22 • 10 min

In the Foreground: Conversations on Art & Writing

A still life, like a poem, may be charged with private meaning, and yet it is offered like a gift that the viewer may open for themselves, not unlike the delicate unfurling of a flower. Charles Demuth’s watercolor Red Poppies of 1929 exemplifies this exchange in the way it pictures how vulnerability may still be resilient, as expressed in a contemporaneous poem by Williams Carlos Williams that meditates on loss.

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In the Foreground: Conversations on Art & Writing - “A Picture of Resilience”: Ashley Lazevnick on Charles Demuth’s "Red Poppies"

Transcript

Caitlin Woolsey (host)

Join us for an immersive personal encounter with a single work of art as seen through the eyes of an art historian. You're listening to In the Foreground: Object Studies, a podcast series from the Research and Academic Program at the Clark Art Institute.

In this episode, Ashley Lazevnick, assistant professor of art history at Converse University in South Carolina, reveals how Charles Demuth and his watercolor Red Poppies f