BIOGRAPHY
On December 7, 1892, Stuart Davis was born to two Philadelphia artists. His mother, Helen Stuart Foulke, was a prominent sculptor who exhibited at the annual exhibitions of the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts and the Philadelphia Museum of Art. His father, Edward Wyatt Davis, was a newspaper art editor who employed many of the period’s great American Realists-- John Sloan, William Glackens, George Luks, and Everett Shinn. In the company of his parents and their famous artist friends, the young Davis grew up surrounded by art.
At the age of 16, Davis dropped out of high school to study with Robert Henri at the artist’s school in New York City. His parents weren’t the least bit worried over his decision, as they were close friends of Henri and could not have thought of a more experienced mentor for their son. For the next three years, Davis remained at Henri’s school, where he learned above all, to capture “life in the raw.” Under the direction of artist John Sloan, the teenage Davis gained additional experience as an illustrator for the socialist weekly, The Masses.
In 1913, he was invited to participate and attend the International Exhibition of Modern Art (also known as the Armory Show). Davis later recalled that he was “enormously excited by the show” and was deeply affected by the post-Impressionist works by Gaugin, Van Gogh, and Matisse that were on display. Upon his return from the exhibition, the young artist vowed to become a “modern” artist.
After the Armory Show, Davis redeveloped his style by loosening up his brushwork and perspective. Shortly after, he held his first solo-exhibition which was then followed by a string of shows at the Whitney Studio Club. In 1922, he became a member of the Modern Artists of America. As an established, “modern” artist, Davis gained entrance into the circles of the New York avant-garde. Over the years, he became close friends with abstract painters Charles Demuth, Arshile Gorky, John Graham and the poet William Carlos Williams.
In 1927, Davis encountered a crossroads in his career when he mounted an electric fan, a rubber glove and an eggbeater to a table. The Eggbeater Series, was then debuted at the Valentine Gallery. Upon the success of the show, benefactor Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney urged Davis to travel to Paris. With her financial help, he was able to go abroad for a year with his girlfriend Bessie Chosak. Once in Paris, he found a studio in the Montparnasse district, painted many Paris street scenes, and married Bessie Chosak.
In 1929, Davis returned from Paris to a changed New York. His mentor Robert Henri had passed away that year and the Great Depression was at hand. Amidst these hardships, his wife, Bessie Chosak Davis, died in 1934 from an infection that was brought on by a botched abortion.
Like many Americans of his time, Davis also suffered financially from the Great Depression. When President Roosevelt announced the debut of the first federally supported art program in 1933, Davis was one of the first artists to sign up. Between 1933-39, he completed several government commissioned murals under the auspices of the Public Works of Art Program (PWAP), the Federal Art Project (FAP), and the Works Progress Administration (WAP). With the financial support of the government, Davis was able to continue his exploration in formalism and American subject matter.
Throughout the 1930s and 1940s, he taught at the Art Students League and at the New School for Social Research to supplement his income and promote his ideas on art theory. By the 1950s, Stuart Davis was already a fixed icon in American art. He was enjoying international success and married his second wife, Roselle Springer, who would later give birth to his only child, George Earle. Together, Davis and his wife would frequent local jazz nightclubs. Davis, a longtime fan of jazz and swing music, drew inspiration from the genres and was even friends with famous musicians, such as Duke Ellington.
Stuart Davis continued to enjoy success as an artist well into his later years. He received honors as a representative of the United States at the Venice Biennale in 1952 and 1954. In addition, he was awarded the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum International Award in both 1958 and 1960. On June 24, 1964, he died suddenly from a stroke, leaving behind a legacy of paintings and a reputation as one of America’s first modernists.
AN ANALYSIS OF THE ARTIST'S WORK
When the teenage Stuart Davis first moved to New York City, his talent in the American Realist tradition was exceptional. Robert Henri praised his work, and he was often compared to his colleague, Thomas Hart Benton, who was five years older than he. However, Davis’ artistic direction took a different course after he witnessed the Armory Show of 1913. From this point forward, it can be said that Stuart Davis and Thomas Hart Benton became lifelong rivals, artists of polar opposites. Whereas Benton became famous as a leader of the Regionalist movement, Davis would go on to paint abstract paintings and become a forefather of the Pop Art movement.
Davis’ shift to abstraction was not an immediate one. He took time in his quest to become a “modern” artist. He explored both Post-Impressionist and Fauvist canvases. It was not until the 1920s that Davis first began to truly research the European techniques of abstraction and Synthetic Cubism. The crown of Davis’ attempts to master Cubism occured during 1927 and 1928, when he mounted an eggbeater, electric fan, and a rubber glove to a table. He then called the Eggbeater Series and the paintings that followed, his “formula pictures,” claiming that the formula involved stripping down his observations of nature to their very core. In doing so, he could paint the same subject matter over and over again, with triumph.
For Davis, every object played an important role in perceiving the modern world, right down to the eggbeaters, gas pumps, matchbooks, and billboards used and seen in everyday life. His subjects come right out of the Jazz nightclubs that he visited and the metropolitan streets of New York City that he enjoyed. Even the specific language of American life during the 1940s and 1950s comes through in his paintings. Phrases such as “The Mellow Pad” and “Swing Landscape” are apt titles for his compositions of squiggly lines and flashy colors.
By painting the jargon and images of American life, Davis was one of the rare painters of the 20th century who successfully transformed a European style of painting (Cubism) into something truly American. However, by the time the Abstract Expressionists took the New York art world by storm in the 1950s, Davis’ art struggled to maintain its modernist edge. Another decade would pass before Davis’ visionary presence would be cemented in art history. In the1960s, artists of the Pop Art movement admired his attention to mass culture. Long before painters such as Andy Warhol and Ed Ruscha, Davis was painting soap boxes, billboards and gas pumps with a tongue-in-cheek wit that was ahead of his time.
AWARDS & AFFILIATIONS
1944 Prize, Carnegie Institute
1952-53 Guggenheim Fellow
1945 Medal, Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Art
1956 Medal, Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Art
1964 Medal, Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Art
American Artists Congress
American Society of Painters and Sculptors
Brooklyn Society of Artists
Modern Art Association
National Institute of Arts and Letters
Society of Independent Artists
Union of American Artists
COLLECTIONS
Amon Carter Museum, TX
Art Gallery of the University of Rochester, NY
Art Institute of Chicago, IL
Avampato Discovery Museum, WV
Block Museum of Art at Northwestern University, IL
Brooklyn Museum of Art, NY
Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh, PA
Cleveland Museum of Art, OH
Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington D.C.
Currier Gallery of Art, NH
Dayton Art Institute, OH
Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, CA
Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington D.C.
Hyde Collection Art Museum, NY
Johnson Museum of Art at Cornell University, NY
Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, Kansas City, MI
Metropolitan Museum of Art, NY
Montclair Art Museum, NJ
Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, TX
Museum of Modern Art, NY
National Portrait Gallery, Washington D.C.
Nevada Museum of Art, NV
Norton Museum of Art, West Palm Beach, FL
Oklahoma City Art Museum, OK
Orange County Museum of Art, CA
Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, PA
Phillips Collection, Washington D.C.
Pomona College Museum of Art, CA
Portland Museum of Art, ME
San Diego Museum of Art, CA
Sheldon Art Gallery, Lincoln, NE
Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington D.C.
Springfield Museum of Art, OH
Terra Foundation for the Arts, IL
U.S. Library of Congress, Washington D.C.
University of Kentucky Art Museum, KY
Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, VI
Walker Art Center, MN
Westmoreland Museum of American Art, PA
Whitney Museum of American Art, NY
CHRONOLOGY
1892 Born December 7 in Philadelphia, PA
1901 Family moves to East Orange, NJ
1909 Enrolls at the Robert Henri School of Art
1910 Has first exhibition with Independent Artists
1912 Leaves the Henri School and opens a studio in Hoboken
1913 Exhibits five watercolors in the Armory Show
1914 Spends the summer in Provincetown, MA
1915 Summers in Gloucester, MA
1917 First solo-exhibition opens at the Sheridan Square Gallery in New York
1918 Serves in World War I as a mapmaker
1919 Travels to Cuba for a month
1922 Begins Cubist still lifes series
1923 Travels to Santa Fe, NM
1925 First museum, solo-exhibition takes place
1927 First exhibition at Edith Gregor Halpert’s Downtown Gallery
1929 Marries Bessie Chosak
1932 Teaches at the Art Students League
1932 Bessie Chosak Davis dies
1933 Joins Public Works Project
1934 Joins Artists’ Unions. Opens studio and apartment on Seventh Avenue
1935 Joins the W.P.A. Federal Art Project
1937 Completes murals for W.P.A. Marries Roselle Springer
1939 Forced to leave W.P.A.
1940 Teaches at New School for Social Research
1945 Retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art, NY
1950 Visiting art instructor at Yale University
1952 Represents the United States at Venice Biennale. Son, George Earl Davis, is born.
1956 Elected to National Institute of Arts and Letters
1957 Walker Art Center retrospective tours the U.S.
1964 Dies of a stroke in New York City
MURALS
Conference Room, United Nations
Heinz Research Center, Pittsburgh
Radio City Music Hall
Radio WNYC
BIBLIOGRAPHY
1. Falk, Peter Hastings ed. Who Was Who in American Art: 1564-1975. Vol. II. Madison, CT: Sound View Press, 1999.
2. Hills, Patricia. Stuart Davis. New York: Harry N. Abrams, Inc., 1996.
3. Myers, Jane ed. Stuart Davis: Graphic Work and Related Paintings with a Catalogue Raisonne of the Prints. Fort Worth, TX: Amon Carter Museum, 1986.
4. Wilkin, Karen and Lewis Kachur. The Drawings of Stuart Davis: The Amazing Continuity. New York: Harry N. Abrams, Inc., 1992.
5. Wilson, William. Stuart Davis’s Abstract Argot. San Francisco, CA: Pomegranate Artbooks, 1993.
EXHIBITIONS
2002 Pierpont Morgan Library, NY
1999 Cape Ann Historical Museum, MA
1997 Peggy Guggenheim Collection, CA
1992 Terra Museum of American Art, IL
1991-2 Metropolitan Museum of Art, NY
1986 Amon Carter Museum, TX
1985 Salander O’Reilly Galleries, NY
1985 Norton Gallery and School of Art, FL
1979, 1983, 1986 Grace Borgenicht Gallery, NY
1978 Hirschl and Adler Galleries, NY
1978 The Brooklyn Museum, NY
1971 Lawrence Rubin Gallery, NY
1966 London, Paris, Berlin
1965 University of California, Los Angeles
1965 National Museum of American Art, Washington D.C.
1957 San Francisco Museum of (Modern) Art, CA
1957 Walker Art Center
1952 Venice Biennale
1951 1965, Art Institute of Chicago, IL
1945 Nelson Gallery
1945 Contemporary Association, NY
1945 Boston Institute, MA
1941 Cincinnati Art Museum
1944 Carnegie Institute, PA
1935-63 Corcoran Gallery, Washington, D.C.
1932, 1945 Museum of Modern Art, NY
1930-64 Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, PA
1929 Whitney Studio Club, NY
1927, 1934, 1946 The Downtown Gallery, NY
1926 Society Anonyme at the Brooklyn Museum of Art, NY
1919-20 National Academy of Design, NY
1918-62, 1932, 1957, 1965 Whitney Museum of American Art
1917, 1918, 1920-23, 1936 Society of Independent Artists
1917 Sheridan Square Gallery, NY
1913 Armory Show, NY