Four models, one prompt, and the same drift in three of them. Demuth's Precisionism is flat, hard-edged and shadowless, painted in full daylight. Three of the four went Art Deco instead: modelled chrome, drop shadows, a skyline nobody asked for. The models appear to keep 1920s American flat-plane painting and 1930s poster design in the same drawer, and to reach into it without looking.
Two things worked everywhere. All four rendered 4.93 legibly, which I did not expect from a four-character numeral with a decimal point in it. And not one of them drew a face.
The four renderings
The only one that held the flat unmodelled plane. No modeling, no atmosphere, hard edges, and the gold reads as leaf rather than as a gradient. It also found a Demuth device nobody asked for: the stencil band runs off the left edge and repeats, which is what Demuth did with the word BILL in the Figure 5. The stacked numerals are the weak point. The topmost 4.93 loses its decimal and reads as 4 93.
Best object legibility of the four. The toroid is unmistakably a tokamak, the ingot is unmistakably the Radiendocrinator, and it is the only one that read the seat-belt sign as a buckle rather than a passenger. Then it built a city underneath, which was not in the prompt, and the picture tipped from Precisionism into Metropolis. Deco is the attractor.
The most designed and the least faithful. Three nested arched cartouches receding is a better answer to repeated three times than the one I wrote, and arguably better than what Demuth did. It is also drop-shadowed, gradient-lit and rounded, which is a WPA travel poster. The seat-belt pictogram has become a child in a car seat.
Stamped 1927 on the vessel without being asked, which is the year of My Egypt. I cannot tell whether that is scholarship or coincidence and I have decided to be flattered. Everything else is chiaroscuro, a glow on the seat-belt sign and deep shadow behind the disc, and Precisionism does not have shadows. The handsomest picture here and the furthest from the assignment.
The prompt
An American Precisionist poster portrait, gouache and oil on board, 1927. No face and no human figure anywhere in the picture: the sitter is rendered entirely as numerals, signage and machinery. At the center, the numeral 4.93 in burnished gold leaf, repeated three times at increasing scale and receding into the picture plane, largest at the front, each nested inside the next. Around it, hard-edged industrial forms flattened into unmodelled planes: a toroidal magnet ring in ribbed steel; a tall cylindrical vessel with a spout, drawn with the gravity of a funerary monument; a small gilt rectangle the size of a matchbox; a horizontal band stamped with five stars, the last one left unfilled; a segment of aircraft fuselage with three oval windows. Thin white searchlight ray lines cut diagonally across the entire composition, passing through the architecture and the numerals alike, so that light and structure share one geometry. Fragments of stenciled signage set flush into the planes: ISIC / PACMAN / DECAF / R2 / and an illuminated seat-belt pictogram. Palette limited to warm grey, ochre, oxide red, deep chrome green, black and gold. Flat poster-scale colour, hard edges, no brushwork, no atmosphere, no cast shadow. Composition frontal and near-symmetrical. Negative: no faces, no people, no portraits, no soft focus, no painterly texture, no gradients.
The sitter is the Uber rating from this week’s opening. The toroid is PACMAN, the fusion controller at the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory. The cylindrical vessel is the espresso machine, standing in for My Egypt. The gilt matchbox is the Radiendocrinator. ISIC is the coffee funder, DECAF is the trial arm, R² is the vibe-coding study, and the fuselage is the kidney section.
Fair disclosure: Charles Demuth’s name appeared in this newsletter once before, in September 2023, appended to a prompt for a glowing platypus in a kilt playing the bagpipes. That was not Precisionism. This is the first honest attempt. · The What Adam Is Reading archive