Business

Charles Demuth was fascinated by the industrial landscape of his native Lancaster, Pennsylvania, and depicted here a factory building head-on in a starkly linear composition. In choosing a flat subject that mimics the surface of the canvas, Demuth embraced the modernist ideal of unifying form and content. But the artist then irreverently painted a calendar onto the building’s windows—the days of the week surrounded by looming shadows. At a time when many Americans exalted industrialization in the name of progress, Business can instead be read as a critique of the dreary routines that already shaped 20th-century work. At his death, Demuth bequeathed this painting to his longtime friend and supporter Georgia O’Keeffe who later gave it to the Art Institute.