My Egypt
Charles Demuth, 1927
My Egypt is an American painting from 1927 by Charles Demuth, who depicts a grain elevator in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, his hometown. It is regarded as a key work of Precisionism, the movement that turned industrial architecture and factory forms into subjects for painting. The elevator belonged to a feed mill near the city centre, and its concrete silos, built in 1919, rise above older brick and timber buildings along the lower edge of the canvas. The art historian Emily Farnham observes that Demuth's earlier work, notably his 1917 Bermuda landscapes, used pale colours, and she sees in this painting a moment when his colour seems to come back to life. The title points to Egypt deliberately. Karal Ann Marling regards the Great Pyramid of Giza as the main model for this monumental silo and reads the structure as a personal memorial, a kind of emblem of death tied to the American monuments that dominate Lancaster's skyline. The link between pyramids and granaries is older still: the Egyptologist I. E. S. Edwards traces it back at least to the 5th century.
- Painter
- Charles Demuth
- Date
- 1927
- Museum
- Whitney Museum of American Art, New York City
