Charles Demuth took three trips to Paris in his life.

Each one of those trips helped define Demuth as an artist, deeply influencing his work, particularly his more mature, Precisionist style.

Just how that happened is explored in "Demuth in the City of Lights," now at the Demuth Museum through Aug. 28.

The museum collaborated with the Woodmere Art Museum in Chestnut Hill, which featured the show this past spring.

The exhibit brings together a number of sketches and paintings Demuth did while in Paris, along with work that he created here in Lancaster, which was influenced by those trips.

"We are looking at Demuth's three sojourns in Paris and the affects they had on creating his mature style," says Anne Lampe, the director of the Demuth Museum who curated the show. "We're looking at the people he met, the classes he took, the art he saw."

Demuth's first trip to Paris was in 1907, when he was 23 and a student at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts in Philadelphia.

He drank in everything, attending museums, galleries, the ballet, opera and theater.

That first trip coincided with the huge retrospective at the Salon d'Automne of Paul Cezanne, who had died the year before. It certainly influenced Demuth, as it did most serious artists of the day.

A highly social man, Demuth also enjoyed meeting people and spending hours at cafes and salons, deeply involved in discussions about the arts.

Also on that first trip, he took classes in the studios of Auguste Rodin and Henri Matisse.

Rodin's classes had a particular impact on Demuth. The sculptor would have his models pose for three minutes, then rest, then take on a new pose.

This forced the artists to work quickly, turning the pencil into an extension of the hand.

The exhibit features several water colors and sketches from Rodin's classes.

With the advent of photography, artists were becoming more concerned with the emotion of a work rather than its likeness to a subject.

For the three or four months Demuth was in Paris, he lived in the heart of the Latin Quarter on the Left Bank, which at the time was filled with American artists.

Demuth next visited Paris in 1912 and stayed until 1914, when the outbreak of World War I forced him to return.

He settled into the Left Bank again, but now, because Picasso and his circle had moved there, it was the center of the Paris art scene.

And what a scene it was. As Lampe notes, it was a hotbed of artistic activity with new ideas on every front, from Igor Stravinsky's "Rite of Spring," which caused riots when it premiered (Demuth was there), to the exploration of Cubism and Fauvism, which Demuth would explore to help develop his Precisionist style.

Demuth did little painting or drawing while in Paris. But he watched, listened and talked, opening up the ideas that were fueling the Paris art scene.

He was a favorite of Gertude Stein and met just about everyone who frequented her salon.

The exhibit features two unnamed watercolor portraits, which are probably of Stein's partner, Alice B. Toklas, and Stravinsky.

"It's amazing how he can create the essence of someone in just a few black lines," Lampe says.

By the time Demuth returned to Paris in 1921, he had largely developed his Precisionist style, which incorporated a more refined cubism combining realism and geometrics.

"He's not deconstructing the way Picasso is," Lampe says. "Demuth has a more refined goal, his work is more elegant, more architectural."

That work helps introduce what became the pop aesthetic in modern art.

But it was here in Lancaster where Demuth created his most brilliant works, where his muse was most demanding.

The grain elevators, water towers and courthouse domes of Lancaster would becomes parts of his most famous paintings.

But as this exhibit suggests, those paintings would not have existed without those sojourns to Paris.

"Demuth in the City of Lights"

Cont. through Aug. 28

Tues.-Sat. 10 a.m.-4 p.m.

Demuth Museum

Sun. 1-4 p.m. Admission by donation

120 E. King St. (rear), 299-9940

www.demuth.org.