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For this week's Kemper x KU: Collection Spotlights, we're featuring writings from Marty Arnold on Charles Demuth, Wild Orchids and Rebecca Lampe on Janet Fish, Still Life with Open Book and Roses and Roofs, as a part of the ongoing series about the Kemper Museum Collection. This series is in collaboration with the University of Kansas.

Collection Spotlights: Charles Demuth, Wild Orchids; Janet Fish, Still Life with Open Book and Roses and Roofs

Wild Orchids

11b_Demuth_Wild Orchids_Arnold FINAL to Kemper.pdf

Artwork credit: Charles Demuth (1883-1935), Wild Orchids, 1920. Watercolor and graphite on paper 18 7/8 x 8 1/2 inches. Bebe and Crosby Kemper Collection. Collection of the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, Kansas City, Missouri. Gift of the William T. Kemper 


Charles Demuth’s watercolor depicts a vertically oriented grouping of stylized orchid blossoms. The two central flowers, with white, pink, and red petals, rise from slender, gently curving stems that are anchored by pale green leaves near the lower center of the paper. Moving outward, the subsequent blossoms become more abstract, their forms dissolving into fluid washes of muted green, deep red, and near-black pigments. These less defined orchids further merge with the background through jagged, brush-stroked edges in the upper right corner and loose, unfinished forms emerging from the lower left. Graphite appears both above and beneath the watercolor, with the delicate contour of a blossom traced in the lower left. Together, the legible flowers and surrounding abstraction suggest a single unified organic form rather than a traditional bouquet, subtly shifting the work away from still life and aligning it more closely with the modern sensibilities associated with Demuth.

Demuth’s early relationship with watercolor began in childhood, when a congenital hip deformity left him bedridden for extended periods and watercolor became both pastime and discipline. His fascination with flowers also likely developed at a young age, as Demuth’s mother kept a luxuriant Victorian garden at the family home in Lancaster, Pennsylvania.[1] The opulent floral subject and technical execution of Wild Orchids thus connects this mature work to the cultivated domestic world of Demuth’s youth.

Though Demuth never left Lancaster permanently, his frequent travel to New York City and Europe between 1910 and the 1920s profoundly shaped both his artistic approach and his self-fashioning. During this period Demuth was not only refining his artistic language but also making deliberate choices about his lifestyle and public identity. His “dandified” sensibility, attraction to fashionable interiors and small luxuries, such as orchids, and his cultivated eccentricity positioned him as a distinctive social figure as much as an artist.

While in Paris, Demuth socialized with artists such as Picasso and Braque, and in New York City he became closely involved with figures including Alfred Stieglitz and Georgia O’Keeffe, who notably is known for her floral paintings. During this period, Demuth’s work expanded across genres; where earlier he worked primarily in portraiture and landscape, these experiences directed his eye towards architectural cityscapes, theatrical settings, and erotica.[2] This time can be seen as a throughway to the development of Demuth’s Precisionist style, devoted to architectural subjects, which reduced compositions to simplified, geometric shapes with clear outlines and smooth fields of color. The angular and fractured treatments of these Precisionist paintings, as well as the abstraction present in works like Wild Orchids, can surely be traced to this exposure to modernist and Cubist practices.

By 1920, Demuth was an established modernist with a substantial exhibition record, even as chronic illness increasingly shaped his life. Notably, Wild Orchids was completed the same year he learned he had diabetes—a diagnosis that would profoundly affect his routines, career, and ultimately his life. Although it remains unclear whether the Kemper painting predates or follows this diagnosis, the temporal connection invites reflection on the emotional weight of the moment.

In 1925, Demuth began insulin treatment at a New Jersey hospital, a groundbreaking therapy that extended his life by a decade. Despite his illness, Demuth was productive during his last years, creating some of his most celebrated Precisionist works, including My Egypt (1927) and I Saw the Figure 5 in Gold (1928).

Wild Orchids stands at a quiet intersection of Demuth’s personal history, modernist ambition, and the physical vulnerability that increasingly shaped his final years. Unlike the sharp geometric treatment of his Precisionist works, Wild Orchids presents a softer approach, with both its subject and medium rooted in Demuth’s early life. In this way, the watercolor becomes a condensed expression of the emotional, bodily, and formal tensions that run throughout Demuth’s lifelong practice.


Marty Arnold
MA Student in Museum Studies, University of Kansas
Fall 2025 


[1] Andrew Carnduff Ritchie, Charles Demuth (Museum of Modern Art, 1950), 6. 

[2] Wanda M. Corn, The Great American Thing: Modern Art and National Identity, 1915-1935 (University of California Press, 1999). 211-213.

Still Life with Open Book

Roses and Roofs

11a_Fish_Open Book_Roses and Red Roofs_ Lampe FINAL to Kemper.pdf

Janet Fish (1938-2025), Still Life with Open Book, 1990. Oil on canvas. 48 x 60 inches. Bebe and Crosby Kemper Collection. Collection of the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, Kansas City, Missouri. Gift of the William T. Kemper Charitable Trust, UMB Bank, n.a., Trustee. 1995.31


With both Roses and Roofs and Still Life with Open Book, Janet Fish showcases her interest in painting vibrant flowers and detailed glassware that become more brilliant through the artist’s masterful use of light and color. In the watercolor Roses and Roofs, Fish depicts a green glass vase containing various flowers resting on a blue-topped table with a landscape in the background. The textured, wide-bodied vase sits off-center on a metal plate, sunlight reflecting the vase and flowers onto the plate. The top blossoms visually overlap the background vista of rooftops surrounded by green vegetation.

Made three years later, Fish’s Still Life with Open Book depicts an array of objects: various glassware, flowers, fruits, and the titular book, whose pages illustrate a bearded male figure with outstretched arms. Throughout her composition, Fish employs dramatic highlights and shadows to explore elements of reflection and refraction that showcase various sources of light shining through the brilliantly colored and textured glassware. From these two artworks, it becomes clear that Fish enjoys depicting rich colors and textures made visible through her emphasis on light.

The artist’s interest in expressive color palettes stems from her childhood in sun-drenched Bermuda, where her family moved shortly after her birth in Boston, Massachusetts in 1938.[1] As a child, Fish always assumed she would become an artist like her mother, uncle, and grandfather.[2] In the middle of her art studies at Yale, Fish spent the summer of 1962 at the Skowhegan Art School in Maine, dissatisfied with the Abstract Expressionist style in which she had been working. As she later described, “I’m thrashing around making big, gestural, kind of messy paintings, and I’m feeling like it was meaningless.”[3] Her Skowhegan teacher, Alex Katz, suggested that she paint the lush landscapes surrounding the school, an idea that propelled Fish into the realist style for which she would become known.[4] She began specializing in still lifes as a means of exploring various effects of light and formal qualities like repetition, color, and line while working from direct observation of her objects.

Throughout her oeuvre, Fish portrays light as the true subject of her paintings to explore how it changes our perception of objects through reflection and refraction. She only paints in natural sunlight, sometimes waiting up to a month to capture the perfect moment.[5] In Open Book, viewers can sense this process through the highlights and shadows that seem to contradict each other, revealing that Fish painted only when the sun’s rays struck each object at her preferred angle.

Over time, Fish’s compositions developed to include landscape backgrounds, figures, and references art historical interests, such as the image of a man in Open Book sourced from Caravaggio’s Supper at Emmaus. Here, the figure’s outstretched left hand seems to reach toward the fruit, a potential compositional joke despite Fish’s stated belief that her art is non-narrative.[6] Instead, the artist asserts that her primary interests have always included the subject of light and the exploration of formal elements.


Janet Fish (1938-2025), Roses and Roofs, 1987. Watercolor on paper, 30 x 23 inches. Bebe and Crosby Kemper Collection. Collection of the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, Kansas City, Missouri. Gift of the Enid and Crosby Kemper Foundation. 1995.3.

In Roses and Roofs, Fish uses color repetition between the green vase, flower stems, and landscape to balance the warmer flower hues while the bright sunlight reflects the vase onto the plate and casts shadows in the lower left. As viewers discover each object in Open Book, they can perceive distinct treatments of light shining through liquids and clear, colored, and textured glassware. To fully appreciate these details requires close observation, as the artist wants the viewing experience “to be more like a long novel than a short story, so that you could go back in and see something different another time.”[7]

Rebecca Lampe
MA Student in Art History, University of Kansas
Fall 2025


[1] Vincent Katz, Janet Fish Paintings (Henry N. Abrams, 2002), 44.
[2] Ira Goldberg, “Reflections: An Interview with Janet Fish,” Linea: Studio Notes from the Art Students League of New York, October 1, 2009, https://asllinea.org/janet-fish-reflections-art-journaling/.
[3] Janet Fish quoted in Robert Berlind, “Interview,” in Janet Fish (DC Moore Gallery, 2005), 7.
[4] Katz, Janet Fish Paintings, 7.
[5] Gerrit Henry, Janet Fish (Burton & Skira, 1987), 7.
[6] Stephen Bennett Phillips, “Janet Fish: Real and Surreal,” in Janet Fish (2005), 41.[7] Fish quoted in Berlind, “Interview,” 17.

Kemper x KU: Collection Spotlights: Janet Fish, Still Life with Open Book; Charles Demuth, Wild Orchids