Stuart Davis 1892-1964

Mr. and Mrs. Bryan, 1937
The Downtown Gallery, New York, 1959
Edith Gregor Halpert, New York
Acquired by the present owner from the above, 1969

New York, Nordness Gallery, The Importance of the Small Painting, March-April 1960, no. 13
Washington, D.C., Corcoran Gallery of Art, The Edith Gregor Halpert Collection, September-November 1962

Ani Boyajian and Mark Rutkoski, Stuart Davis: A Catalogue Raisonné, Vol. III, New Haven, Connecticut, 2007, no. 1602, p. 279, illustrated in color

Very good condition, one pindot of loss at lower center edge, frame abrasions at center left edge, some visible paint separation in thickest areas of green pigment; under UV: fine.
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Stuart Davis returned to the United States from a two year sojourn in Paris, just months before the October 1929 stock market crash. The Great Depression followed with personal and economic hardships for Davis: his small monthly stipend from art dealer Edith Halpert was suddenly discontinued, forcing Davis to take on various teaching jobs in New York; his close friend and fellow painter Glenn O. Coleman died in 1932; and Davis' first wife Bessie died in June of that year due to complications from an abortion.

 

Distracted from the studio, Davis became increasingly active in social reform, particularly issues concerning artists' rights to social assistance and benefits.  Ultimately he became a founder of the Artist's Union and the American Artists' Congress. In addition, he worked on mural projects for The Works Progress Administration (WPA). During these activist years, Davis's journals are filled with a personal struggle between activism and ideals about painting.  But even as his attentions turned away from the studio for much of the tumultuous thirties, Davis was able to produce paintings which encompassed the wide range of imagery engendering formal ideas that occupied him throughout his career. While the streets and buildings of Paris and New York dominated Davis' journals, other places and venues had their own attractions. The small fishing town of Gloucester, Massachusetts, a summer retreat, would become highly influential in his work for decades to come.

 

Encouraged by John Sloan, Davis and his parents spent their first summer in Gloucester in 1915 when he was 23 years old. Davis' mother, an amateur sculptor, was drawn to this quaint village which resembled nearby Provincetown, another summer retreat populated by fellow artists and writers. Eventually Davis' parents purchased a house on Mount Pleasant Avenue where their son, reveling in the clear light and open space around him, set up a small studio. In later years, Gloucester became both a refuge and an ongoing source of artistic inspiration. In 1932, the summer after Bessie's death, Davis retreated to Gloucester where he developed his theories of pictorial construction incorporating a highly specific geometry and the important use of various angles or as he termed it  the "primary unit of variety" (John R. Lane, Stuart Davis: Art and Art Theory, 1978, p. 23). Unable to pay the rent on his West 14^th Street apartment, Davis returned to Gloucester again in the summer of 1933 and stayed until December.

 

In Gloucester Davis was fascinated by the architectural elements and details of a working harbor. The strong angles of shipyard architecture and the endless maze of boats' rigging interested Davis both as subject matter and for their potential value in demonstrating his theories of abstraction. "In 1933 Davis replaced the angle as the lowest common denominator of design with the idea of 'unit area,' a notion that can be traced back to concepts he had developed in the early twenties.  He defined the unit as 'a hypothetical square of a size suitable for the smallest area to be used in the scale in which the artist is working. He said that series of units were to be arranged directionally in sequence to form groups that would be both visually dynamic and consciously related'"(John R. Lane, Stuart Davis: Art and Art Theory, 1978, p. 27). In Fortap, Davis employs this idea by combining two distinct compositions based on the trappings of the busy harbor in one composition. The left side of the painting is one "unit area" consisting of various overlapping elements - boatsheds, a wheelhouse, ropes, the pier and the ocean. The right side of Fortap is comprised of a single related vertical motif, the harbor searchlight. The two elements are connected visually by sinuous, twisting ropes. In an effort to develop these complex ideas into satisfactory compositions Davis made numerous sketches which serve as refined versions of his final paintings. Clean horizontal, diagonal and vertical lines form the structure of open ended sheds and boathouses (figure 1). A well defined sketch of a harbor light (figure 2) includes a tangle of rope which ultimately serves to join the two elements of his composition in Fortap. This important notion of a "unit area building block," first developed in these early years, was evident in his painting for the remainder of his career.

The title word, Fortap, has no known definition but may in fact be Davis' own misspelling, intentional or not, of the nautical term foretop, which is defined as the platform at the head of a ship's mast.