Place Pasdeloup
Stuart Davis
STUART DAVIS, 1928. OIL ON CANVAS.
At the age of 19 Stuart Davis was the youngest artist in the 1913 Armory Show, a turning point in American Modernism. The work he was there, especially those by Matisse, Van Gogh, and Picasso, had a profound effect on him, and for the next decade he was a devotee to the schools of Cubism and Modernism, painting works that fit into the contemporary avant-garde. By the start of the 1920s, however, Davis had developed as a painter and found a signature style quite unlike anything being made at the time. Predating Pop-Art by nearly 40 years, he fused advertising graphics and commercial products with a hard lines and flat expanses of colour in works he called ‘Color-Space Compositions’. To begin, these were limited to still lives and landscapes, but in 1928 he spent a year in Paris where he would travel around the city each day and return home to paint the urban scenes he had encountered. To look at these works today is to feel a familiarity with the style, something harmonious and understandable, but at the time these were radical explorations of art. Davis used foundations of simplicity, reducing spatial perception, to add adornments of complication that reveal hidden details and meaning in every corner.