The Demuth Five is one of five paintings inspired by Charles Demuth’s painting I Saw the Figure 5 in Gold (1928), a symbolic portrait of the poet Williams Carlos Williams. Other works in the series are The Figure 5 (1963), The Small Diamond Demuth Five (1963), The Demuth American Dream No. 5 (1963), and The X-5 (1963).
The work was first exhibited in 1965 in The Twenty-Ninth Biennial Exhibition of Contemporary American Painting at the Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., and was also included in An Exhibition of Contemporary Painting and Sculpture in 1968 at the American Academy of Arts and Letters, New York, and in the 1969 exhibition Pop Art Redefined at the Hayward Gallery, London.