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

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.