Stuart Davis 1892-1964

The Downtown Gallery, New York
Acquired by the present owner from the above, 1962

New York, The Downtown Gallery, Group Exhibition, November-December 1962
Tulsa, Oklahoma, Philbrook Art Center, Texas Collects: Twentieth Century American Art, October 1971, no. 11

Ani Boyajian and Mark Rutkoski, Stuart Davis: A Catalogue Raisonné, Vol. III, New Haven, Connecticut, 2007, no. 1740, p. 466, illustrated in color

Very good condition; under UV: no apparent retouching.
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Early in his career, Stuart Davis was a member of the Ashcan School, painting under the tutelage of Robert Henri and deeply influenced by the work of his close friend John Sloan.  In the years following the 1913 Armory show he began experimenting with synthetic cubism and by the 1920s, Davis had adopted his own visual vocabulary.  A distinctive brand of modernism defined his work, described by Wanda M. Corn as "an American style structured on cubism and calibrated to express urban street life and popular culture."  Over the next thirty-five years, Davis dedicated himself to the development of his aesthetic theories, which he continued to refine, modify and at times, contradict, both in the written word and on canvas. 

Wayne L. Roosa writes that Davis used a "hip melding of two grammars—the geometric construction of color space logic and calligraphic syntax of word-shapes—as a way of being true to the fact that all perceptions are simultaneously visual and linguistic" ("Underwriting the 'Amazing Continuity': The Journals of Stuart Davis," Stuart Davis, 1997, p. 56).  The dynamic between Davis's 'two grammars' coalesced in the 1950s and 60s as reflected in the artist's journals from the period. "In 1960 he wrote, 'The Alphabet Syntax and the Language of Color-Space Method became the Object...as they take the place of Subject.'  Within that 'syntax' of alphabet and color space, Davis wrote of the shape of language, noting that 'physically words are also shapes'" (Stuart Davis, 1997, p. 61).  Davis' work from the period, while never fully abstract, became more reductive in both color and form, as though the artist had distilled only the most essential elements from his earlier work, revisiting and reworking his subjects with renewed clarity and focus.  Davis used a very limited palette of bold, pure colors and more contained forms to define his subjects.  His signature, which had always had a distinguished presence, appears more prominently in these later paintings.  Large, abstracted and at times, barely legible, the inclusion of the signature was both a design element and psychologically symbolic.

Between 1961 and 1963, Davis produced a series of works based on a single photograph he had clipped from The New York Times in 1959. The image depicted the fortified village of Carcassonne in France, with its neo-Gothic medieval walls, rounded turrets and arched entrances.  The view of the town is bisected in two by a massive tree at the center of the photograph.  In Rialto, one of the works from this series, Davis engages a palette of red, green, yellow, black and white to transcribe the visual information from the photograph into his own unique vernacular of form.  Alternating squares of black and white mimic the rhythm of the crenellation and merlons of the town's battlement; white shapes suggest the open archways, which interrupt the heavy stone walls of the medieval fort.  The only literal use of color appears to be the green mass on the upper right, suggesting the tree top, which appears in the photograph.   The tree trunk assumes the shape of a thick black line separating the right and left halves of the bi-partite composition. 

The most popular refrain, both in Davis' own extensive journals and by admirers of his work is 'amazing continuity.'  Davis was praised for his perpetual relevance in an art world of forever changing aesthetic critique.  Corn writes that Davis  "is an artist who kept 1920s tenets alive right up until the advent of postmodernism, which coincided, more or less, with his death in 1964" (The Great American Thing, 1999, p. 340).   In a 1962 review of Davis's work at The Downtown Gallery show in which Rialto was exhibited, Donald Judd, the renowned minimalist sculptor, wrote: "Stuart Davis: There should be applause.  Davis, at sixty-seven, is still a hot shot.  Persistent painters are scarce; painters with only a decade or less of good work are numerous.... The 'amazing continuity' of Davis's work does not seem to have been kept with blinders, in fact, could not have been.  Neither has Davis been startled into compromises with newer developments.  Some older artists abandoned developed styles for one of the various ideas included under 'Abstract Expressionism,' spoiling both.  Davis must also have faced the fact of increased power and different meanings.  Instead of compromising, he kept all that he had learned and invented and, taking the new power into account, benefited" (Lowery Stokes Sims, ed., Stuart Davis, American Painter, 1991, p. 302).