Stuart Davis

One of the foremost American modernist painters of the 20th century, Stuart Davis is renowned for his brightly colored and visually dynamic paintings and drawings. Born into a family of artists, Davis was exposed to the arts throughout his childhood. His mother was a sculptor, exhibiting at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, and his father, a newspaper art editor, was deeply involved with the artists and illustrators working in the late 19th and early 20th century, including Robert Henri, George Luks and William Glackens. Davis would be heavily impacted by this early exposure to the New York arts scene, dropping out of high school to study under Henri in 1909. Working with other Ashcan school artists, Stuart’s earlier work would take on a more realist style before moving to the more staccato, modernist painterly lexicon for which he is now known.

In the 1920s and 30s, Davis’ output pivoted to richly painted urban landscapes, erected in simplified, untethered forms reminiscent of the Surrealist and Cubist movements that were prominent among European artists of the time. Constantly straddling the lines of various artistic movements, including Fauvism, Modernism and even elements of Abstraction, Davis combatted categorization through his own distinct visual idiom. This would become more pronounced with the rise of advertising and Pop Art in the latter half of his career. Melding these artistic influences, Davis’ work exudes a vibrant energy all its own.

Stuart Davis participated in several significant exhibitions throughout his career, including the 1913 Armory Show, where he was one of the youngest featured artists, and had a solo exhibition at the American Pavilion at the Venice Biennale in 1952. Today, Davis’ work resides in numerous institutional collections, including the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington D.C., to name a few.