Stuart Davis

Estate of the artist

Grace Borgenicht Gallery, New York

Private Collection, Wahwah, New Jersey (acquired from the above in October 1980)

Sotheby’s, New York, 4 October 2022, lot 993 (consigned by the above)

Acquired at the above sale by the present owner

New York, Armory of the Sixty-Ninth Infantry, International Exhibition of Modern Art, 1913, no. 814, p. 56

(probably) New York, Sheridan Square Gallery, Watercolors and Drawings by Stuart Davis, 1917 (titled The Garbage Contractors Ball)

Utica, New York, Munson-Williams-Proctor Institute and New York, Armory of the Sixty-Ninth Regiment, 1913 Armory Show: 50th Anniversary Exhibition, 1963, no. 814, p. 117, illustrated; p. 187, illustrated (titled Dance)

Roslyn Harbor, New York, Nassau County Museum of Fine Art, The Shock of Modernism in America: The Eight and Artists of the Armory Show, 1984, no. 113, p. 73, illustrated (titled The Dance)

(probably) W.H. Bowdoin, “Modern Work of Stuart Davis at Village Show,” New York Evening World, 13 December 1917, n.p. (titled Garbage Collector’s Ball)

“A Glorious Affair,” Time, vol. LXXXI, no. 14, 5 April 1963, p. 59, illustrated in color

Milton W. Brown, The Story of the Armory Show, New York, 1988, no. 814, p. 260

Ani Boyajian and Mark Rutkoski, Stuart Davis: A Catalogue Raisonné, vol. 2, New Haven and London, 2007, no. 987, p. 476, illustrated in color

Stuart Davis’s Dance was notably included in the 1913 Armory Show - an exhibition which permanently altered the trajectory of modern art in the United States. The show opened in New York’s 69th Regiment Armory in February 1913, giving many Americans their first major exposure to European avant-garde artists like Matisse, Picasso, and Duchamp. The exhibition was, as Time magazine later put it, “not so much a handshake as a collision,” pitting European modernism against an American academic establishment that saw it as a threat to tradition and to the marketplace (“A Glorious Affair,” Time, 5 April 1963, p. 59). Upon reflection for the 50th anniversary of the 1913 exhibit, Davis said the encounter was “an experience of Freedom,” and fifty years later he still held up the show as “the correct coordinate for redirection” of modern art as we know it today (Exh. Cat., Munson-Williams-Proctor Institute, 1913 Armory Show: 50th Anniversary Exhibition, 1963, p. 51).