Usually when we think of the avant-garde, we think of testing limits and pushing boundaries, or we think of outrageousness and oddness. We also tend to think of Europe, where the movement started and really took off.

Yet the Luther W. Brady Art Gallery’s Out of the Chateau: Works from the Demuth Museum is exhibiting some 30 works by American Charles Demuth (1883-1935), an artist who produced a tamer form of avant-garde art and helped contemporary and future American artists embrace the European based movement.

From the Demuth Museum in Lancaster, these works are traveling for the first time. Although made up of a small fraction of the 900 works Demuth created in his lifetime, the Demuth Museum Collection ranges from his early childhood drawings through his late floral works.

By co-founding Precisionism, Demuth helped to establish a particularly American application of the avant-garde. A good friend of famous modernists William Carlos Williams, Marcel Duchamp, Gertrude Stein, and Alfred Steiglitz (he made symbolic “portrait posters” of some of them), and a known face in both European and American modernist art scenes, Demuth absorbed the turn-of-the-century movements and applied them to his own work.

Charles Demuth, Self-Portrait,1907, oil on canvas, 26 1/16 x 18 inches, The Demuth Museum, Lancaster, PA. Photograph: John Herr.

Demuth made playful watercolor works of contemporary urban pop-culture; he also applied new ideas of negative space to pieces depicting architecture in his hometown Lancaster, PA, and of flowers in his mother’s garden. Demuth’s oeuvre is, therefore, varied in both method and subject. But Demuth was consistent in the use of modern techniques and, as the exhibition catalog says, “based his new art in the experience of America.”

Neither political nor necessarily profound, Demuth and other famous Precisionists Charles Scheeler and Georgia O’Keeffe sought simply to create representations of experience. Thus when O’Keeffe painted a flower, it was, no matter what we all see today, really just a flower. Likewise with the angular Precisionist Demuth pieces on display at the Brady.

The exhibition catalog says Demuth combined “the wit and irony of a cosmopolitan" to create a “uniquely American art.”

Demuth opened January 16, but a reception for the exhibit will take place February 7 from 5 to 7 p.m.. The gallery is open Tuesday through Thursday 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. and is located on the second floor of GWU’s Media and Public Affairs building at 805 21st St., NW. Curator Lenore D. Miller can often be found walking around, happy to explain or discuss Demuth and his contemporaries.