Stuart Davis 1892 - 1964

The Downtown Gallery, New York
Leigh Block, Santa Barbara, California, 1956 (acquired from the above)
John Berggruen Gallery, San Francisco, California, 1986
Hirschl & Adler Galleries, New York, 1986
Private Collection, Long Island, New York, 1986 (acquired from the above)
Richard York Gallery, New York
Acquired by the present owner from the above, 1998

New York, The Downtown Gallery, Stuart Davis: Exhibition of Recent Paintings, 1954-1956, November-December 1956, no. 5
New York, Hirschl & Adler Galleries, Modern Times: Aspects of American Art, 1907-1956, November-December 1986, no. 20, p. 27, illustrated
Beverly Hills, California, Salander-O'Reilly Galleries, American Modernism, July-August 1991, no. 14

Ani Boyajian and Mark Rutkoski, eds., Stuart Davis: A Catalogue Raisonné, New Haven, Connecticut, 2007, vol. III, no. 1690, p. 407, illustrated

In the 1950s and '60s, Stuart Davis’s imagery became more reductive in both color and form, as the artist reworked familiar themes from his earlier work with renewed clarity and focus. After experiencing a period of unproductivity at the end of the 1940s, by 1951 Davis began to paint with ambition again, using more contained forms and a limited palette of bold, pure colors to define his subjects. He continued to revisit many of the same motifs with which he had engaged for many years, but formally pushed his aesthetic away from the crowded and compact format he previously favored towards a new emphasis on scale and clarity of composition.

Completed in 1956, Study for "Stele" belongs to an extended series of works stemming from Davis’s 1927 painting Matches (The Chrysler Museum of Art, Norfolk, Virginia).  The composition represents a variation on the theme that also appears in Medium Still Life (Museum of Fine Arts, Boston) and Nu (Private Collection) of 1953, and the 1953-54 painting Something on the 8 Ball (Philadelphia Museum of Art), culminating in the final Stele, in the collection of the Milwaukee Art Museum (Fig. 1).  Davis wrote of the inspiration for the title of this work, “As an art student I was intrigued by the faces of Cyprean statues in the Metropolitan Museum.  The way the sunlight fell upon them in late afternoon.  Subsequently I learned about statues in general.  The qualitative arithmetic of this span of experience was resolved in the titular equation, 'Stele'" ("Notes by Stuart Davis on Ten Color Plates," unpublished; Stuart Davis: A Catalogue Raisonné, New Haven, Connecticut, 2007, vol. III, p. 409).