Stuart Davis (1892-1964)

Stuart Davis lived most of his life in New York City, and the majority of his work echoes the sights and sounds of metropolitan America. Dixieland jazz, blinking neon, glaring billboards, and even gasoline pumps appear in his canvases. An artist deeply attuned to his environment, Davis reflected the idiom of modern America.

Davis was born in Philadelphia in 1894 to artistic parents. His mother was a sculptor and his father was art director of the Philadelphia Press. He moved with his family to East Orange, New Jersey, in 1901 and at the age of 16 left school to study at Robert Henri's art school in New York. He helped support himself by producing illustrations for The Masses (edited by John Sloan) and Harper's Weekly. Davis's early works, five of which were exhibited at the 1913 Armory Show, are strongly reminiscent of works by Ashcan School realists such as Henri and Sloan. 

The Armory Show also strengthened the young artist's admiration for Vincent Van Gogh, Paul Gauguin, and Henri Matisse. Between 1916 and 1920, Davis's work underwent a dramatic stylistic change. He abandoned expressionistic landscapes and portraits in favor of a visual language derived from cubism. He adopted bold forms and unmodeled color planes to express the raw energy of postwar America in his own vigorous brand of geometric abstraction. By the 1920s he expended less effort in searching out unusual subject-matter and applied himself to working out fundamental problems of space-color relationships and ordered, rhythmic composition.

The sale of several paintings in 1928 made it possible for Davis to travel to Paris for nearly a year. He admired the human scale of the city, its harmonious blend of old and new, and its supportive atmosphere for the arts. In the paintings and drawings executed in Paris, he recorded its picturesque streetscenes in a representational style that retreated from the progressive abstraction of his Eggbeater series from the previous year. Despite their figurative basis, these works continued Davis's interests in formal notions of color as space, line as direction, and plane as both color and form. The streetscenes are translated into interlocking geometric blocks that stress the flatness of the picture plane and constantly counteract classical perspective. Signs and lettering assume a primarily graphic function, paint application varies from smooth to textured so as to call attention to surface qualities, and abrupt color shifts heighten the dynamic interplay of planes. 

In the 1930s Davis began combining his penchant for strong color and linear patterns with observation of the American scene, particularly harbors and cityscapes. (For nearly all of his adulthood, he spent summers on the coast of Massachusetts, first in Provincetown and later in Gloucester.) What counted for Davis was not the subject per se, but the interaction of formal components in an autonomous design. During this decade he taught at the Art Students League and enrolled in the Federal Arts Project, championing abstraction within the predominantly representational circle of New Deal artists. He was active with the Artists' Union and, after 1935, with the Artists' Congress. From 1940 to 1950 he taught at the New School for Social Research.

Davis's youthful conversion to the abstract school was permanent. Though he never abandoned material objects and visible environments for his inspiration, he focused on resolving aesthetic problems in terms of rhythmic, colored, and action-charged contrasts. With its vibrant play of color and form, so strongly musical in association, Davis's art translates the energy and dynamism he felt in American life into appropriately high-keyed pictorial expression.

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