davis_hampton

Stuart Davis (American 1894-1964)

Born in 1892, Davis was raised among artists, both parents studied at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, his father was the Art Director for the Philadelphia Press, and his mother was a sculptor who exhibited in Philadelphia and New York. It was at 17 that he attended the New York Art School of Robert Henri, who had been the teacher and main source of influence for two previous generations of American artists and was the leader of what was later named the Ashcan School.

Henri encouraged his students to look to the world around them as source material for their art, a process that was not only used early on Davis’s career, but throughout his life as an artist. As a student, he and his fellow classmates explored the neighborhoods of New York, looking for new and interesting scenes for their paintings. Many of these early works depicted the sights and people he saw on the streets and in nightclubs. It was a series of watercolors painted during 1912-13 of these very scenes that he exhibited in the Armory Show “International Exhibition of Modern Art.” Participating in the Armory Show drove Davis to work within this new genre of modernist art.

By the 1920s Davis began to venture into this new modernist experimentation, and the work of this decade takes on many of the characteristics of European Modernism after traveling to Paris, France in 1928. His paintings were of still lifes, street scenes, and elements from the everyday, yet the scenes became increasingly abstracted. He made use of the flattened 2-deminsional fragmented compositions of cubism. Davis moved away from the mimetic, and instead used everyday images to emphasize his new process in painting and exploration of form. This new period of experimentation resulted in one of his most recognizable works from this decade titled the Egg Beater Series from 1927-28.

Although Davis looked to modern art as inspiration, he also looked outside of the art world for new subject matter. His outside interests in popular culture and music in particular created a new language in Davis’s work. The 1930s brought with it a growing interest in jazz music, which played a major role in both Davis’s work and personal life, and is a theme that will remain a part of his work for the rest of his career. By the 1940s Davis started to meet and become friends with many of the known jazz musicians of the era. Davis incorporated the same spontaneity and improvisations of jazz music into his art, often incorporating jazz terms even lyrics from popular songs into his paintings.

Davis’s love of jazz marked a period of artistic maturity with a growth in his commercial success. His work was reproduced in the publication What Is Modern Painting? by Alfred H. Barr, Jr. as well as a retrospective of his work at the Museum of Modern Art, New York. His late work of the 1950s was comprised of several commissioned paintings and murals. Aside from these commissions, Davis painted mostly on large canvases where he used few colors and incorporated words and numbers. Throughout the last years of Davis’s career, he was given several awards, commissions, and in 1951 began teaching at Yale University. He was included in the Venice Biennale in 1952 and again in 1956 when he was elected to the National Institute of Arts and Letters. Although poor health slowed down his work in later years, Davis continued to work until his death in 1964.