With the first anniversary of September 11 looming, this week’s choice of picture is Charles Demuth’s I Saw the Figure 5 in Gold. Painted in 1928, it evokes the sight of a New York Fire Department truck, hurtling through the city streets on an emergency call. The vehicle’s bold, enamel-painted insignia has been multiplied three times, to convey the speed and clamour of its passage across town. Standing out in gold, against the schematic red block of the truck, the successively enlarged “figure 5” seems simultaneously to rush at and recede from the viewer. A piece of bright modern heraldry, it has been stamped on to the grey lamplit streets of the city, like a vivid memory indelibly imprinted on the mind.
Demuth himself never saw the firetruck that he memorialised in his painting. The artist’s close friend, the poet William Carlos Williams, explained its origins in his autobiography. One hot summer evening in the early 1920s, Williams was on his way to visit an acquaintance in New York. “As I approached his number I heard a great clatter of bells and the roar of a fire engine passing the end of the street down Ninth Avenue. I turned just in time to see a golden figure 5 on a red background flash by. The impression was so sudden and forceful that I took a piece of paper out of my pocket and wrote a short poem about it.” He called it “The Great Figure”, and it was the catalyst for Demuth’s picture:
“Among the rain / and lights / I saw the figure 5 / in gold / on a red / firetruck / moving / tense / unheeded / to gong clangs / siren howls / and wheels rumbling / through the dark city.”
Williams and Demuth...
