Stuart Davis was an American abstract artist whose idiosyncratic Cubist paintings of jazz musicians, street scenes and urban landscapes heralded the use of commercial art and advertising by Pop artists of the 1960s.
Background
Stuart Davis was born in Philadelphia, United States, on December 7, 1892. Davis grew up in an artistic environment. He was the son of Edward Wyatt Davis, an art editor of The Philadelphia Press, and Helen Stuart Davis, a sculptor. Parents encouraged Stuart's interest in art.
Education
In 1909, during his first year attending Orange High School, sixteen year-old Stuart Davis dropped out and began his formal art training at the Robert Henri School of Art, who was the leader of the group known as The Eight (later absorbed into the Ashcan school), whose teaching emphasized the importance of taking subject matter from urban life. During this time, he befriended artists Glenn Coleman, John Sloan and Henry Glintenkamp. All the men joined the staff of The Masses, a leftist arts and literary magazine. There, they created cover art and drawings for art editor and Ashcan painter John Sloan. He completed his studies in 1912.
Career
In the famous 1913 Armory Show, Davis presented his five watercolors, which rendered in the urban realist style of the Ashcan School earned him some recognition. More importantly, the show uncovered him works of European modernists, including Vincent van Gogh, Henri Matisse, and Pablo Picasso. Stuart Davis's perspective began to change accordingly. His early works of this period were close to the realistic style of "The Eight," but soon began moving toward the more lively, Fauve manner, obvious in Gloucester Street (1916).
Stuart Davis exhibited these increasingly abstract cityscapes with the Society of Independent Artists in 1916 and at Sheridan Square Gallery in New York City the following year. Although drafted into World War I in 1918, Davis managed to remain in New York where he served as a cartographer for the Army Intelligence Department.
After the war, he continued working in his Cubist style with one exception. In January 1920, he made a trip with Coleman to Cuba, a cheap and exotic place, ideal for young painters searching for new subject matter. Davis's watercolors created during this two-month trip revealed that he moved back to the urban realist style of his youth to a degree. However, when the artists returned to New York City later that year, Stuart Davis, again plunged into the European modernism and abstract painting.
A considerable part of the 1920s, Stuart Davis created abstractions of New York urban scenes excepting a few canvases inspired by his summers spent visiting family in Gloucester, Massachusetts, and travels to Santa Fe, New Mexico with painter John Sloan. By 1922, he had joined New York's avant-garde circles.
In 1926 Davis had a solo exhibition at the Whitney Studio Club; the following year, Stuart Davis joined Edith Gregor Halpert’s Downtown Gallery and had a successful exhibit there. In 1928 Juliana Force, director of the Whitney Studio Club (now the Whitney Museum of American Art), purchased two of his paintings, enabling him to travel to Paris, where he resided in the Montparnasse district and began to paint Paris street scenes.
Stuart Davis moved back to New York on the eve of the Great Depression in 1929 and since that time resided in Greenwich Village. In the year 1933 he joined the Public Works of Art Project (later incorporated into the Works Progress Administration (WPA) in 1935), and under its auspices, he completed several murals, including the dynamic Swing Landscape (1938, Indiana University Art Museum, Bloomington). The mid-1930s witnessed another shift in painting style. Now more than ever the artist felt the necessity to make his abstract art accessible to viewers. For him, incorporating recognizable forms, patterns, and text encouraged the viewer to visually enter the painting, examining colors, line, and spatial relations, and finally leave with an emotional response.
Throughout the 1930s and 1940s he taught at the Art Students League and at the New School for Social Research. Davis held a solo exhibition at the American Pavilion at the Venice Biennale in 1952, and his work was displayed there again in 1956. Davis died suddenly from a stroke on June 24, 1964, at the height of his fame.
Stuart Davis created some seemingly Marxist works, but he was too independent to totally support Marxist ideals and philosophies. In spite of several works that appear to reflect the class struggle, Davis's roots in American optimism was obvious throughout his lifetime.
Views
Quotations:
"My concept of form is very simple and is based on the assumption that space is continuous and that matter is discontinuous. In my formal concept the question of two or more dimensions does not enter."
"The act of painting is not a duplication of experience, but the extension experience on the plane of formal invention."
"[Modern art] is a reflection of the positive progressive fact of modern industrial technology."
"I don't want people to copy Matisse or Picasso, although it is entirely proper to admit their influence. I don't make paintings like theirs. I make paintings like mine."
"Reality in art is composed of shapes and colors."
"An artist who has traveled on a steam train, driven an automobile, or flown in an airplane doesn't feel the same way about form and space as one who has not."
"Always remember that in a painting color has a position, and a place, and it makes space."
"For any artist to persevere, they must have an enthusiastic audience of at least one."
Membership
Stuart Davis was a member of a number of organizations, including the following: the American Artists Congress, American Society of Painters and Sculptors, the Brooklyn Society of Artists, the Modern Art Association, the National Institute of Arts and Letters, the Society of Independent Artists, the Union of American Artists.
Interests
Music & Bands
jazz
Connections
In 1929, while in Paris, Stuart Davis married his American girlfriend, Bessie Chosak. In 1932 she died from an infection following an abortion. In 1938, six years after the tragic death of his first wife, Davis married Roselle Springer. In 1952, when Davis was 60, his second wife gave birth to their only child, George Earle.