Davis, Stuart

Davis, Stuart (1894–1964). American painter, born in Philadelphia. He grew up in an artistic environment, for his father was art director of the Philadelphia Press, a newspaper that had employed Glackens, Luks, Shinn, and Sloan—the four artists who were to form the nucleus of The Eight—and his mother, Helen Stuart Foulke, was a sculptor. After leaving High School, he moved to New York at the age of sixteen and studied with Robert Henri, 1910–13; his early works included street and bar-room scenes in the spirit of the Ashcan School. In 1913 Davis was one of the youngest exhibitors at the Armory Show, which made an overwhelming impact on him: ‘All my immediately subsequent efforts went toward incorporating Armory Show ideas into my work.’ He began experimenting with a variety of modern idioms, but for the next few years, 1913–16, he earned his living mainly as an illustrator for the left-wing journal The Masses. In 1915 he spent the first of many summers in the port of Gloucester, Massachusetts, where the bright light helped to introduce stronger colour into his work. He had his first one-man exhibition (of watercolours and drawings) at the Sheridan Square Gallery, New York, in 1917.

During the 1920s Davis achieved a sophisticated grasp of Cubism, but it was only after spending a year in Paris in 1928–9 (funded by selling two of his pictures to Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney) that he forged his distinctive style. Using motifs from the characteristic environment of American life, he rearranged them into flat, poster-like patterns with precise outlines and sharply contrasting colours (House and Street, Whitney Museum, New York, 1931). In this way he became the only major artist to treat the subject-matter of the American Scene painters—extremely popular at this time—in avant-garde terms; he was both distinctly American and distinctively modern—a rare combination that won him wide admiration. During the 1930s he worked for the Federal Art Project and became involved in the art politics of the Depression years: in 1934 he was elected president of the Artists' Union, an organization set up that year to combat alleged discrimination in the distribution of public funds to artists (he edited its journal, Art Front, in 1935–6); and in 1936 he was a founder member of the American Artists’ Congress, subsequently serving as its national secretary and chairman. In 1940, however, he resigned disillusioned from the Congress, and from 1940 to 1950 he taught at the New School for Social Research, New York. His work at this time became more purely abstract, although he often introduced lettering or suggestions of advertisements, etc. into his bold patterns (Owh! in San Pao, Whitney Museum, 1951). The zest and dynamism of such works reflect his interest in jazz; in the early 1940s he went to concerts with Mondrian and in 1960 he said: ‘For a number of years jazz had a tremendous influence on my thoughts about art and life. For me at that time jazz was the only thing that corresponded to an authentic art in America … I think all my paintings, at least in part, come from this influence, though of course I never tried to paint a jazz scene.’ In his later years he became a much honoured figure, and received numerous prizes and awards.

Davis is generally regarded as the most important American painter to come to maturity between the two world wars and the outstanding American artist to work in a Cubist idiom. He made witty and original use of it and created a distinctive American style, for however abstract his work became he always claimed that every image he used had its source in observed reality: ‘I paint what I see in America, in other words I paint the American scene.’ He was an articulate defender of abstract art, an important influence on many younger artists, including his friends Gorky and de Kooning, and a precursor of Pop art. Edward Lucie-Smith describes him as ‘the link between the American art world of the 1930s, in many respects still isolated and provincial, and the triumphant internationalism of the post-war epoch’ (Lives of the Great Twentieth Century Artists, 1986).