Stuart Davis

The Downtown Gallery, New York (acquired directly from the artist in 1962)

Mrs. Sherman Sexton, Chicago (acquired from the above in 1963)

Fairweather Hardin Gallery, Chicago (acquired from the above in 1976)

Acquired from the above in May 1977 by the present owner

New York, The Downtown Gallery, Stuart Davis: Exhibition of Recent Paintings, 1958-1962, 1962, no. 8

New York, The Brooklyn Museum and Cambridge, Fogg Art Museum, Stuart Davis: Art and Art Theory, 1978, no. 110, p. 191, illustrated

New York, The Metropolitan Museum of Art and San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Stuart Davis, American Painter, 1991-92, p. 87; no. 166, p. 305, illustrated in color

Exh. Cat., West Palm Beach, Norton Gallery of Art, Stuart Davis’ New York, 1985, p. 24

Karen Wilkin, Stuart Davis, New York, 1987, no. 30, p. 28, illustrated in color (on the cover)

Ani Boyajian and Mark Rutkoski, eds., Stuart Davis: A Catalogue Raisonné, vol. 3, New Haven, 2007, no. 1729, p. 456, illustrated in color

With a highly innovative artistic career spanning six decades, Stuart Davis is widely recognized as one of the most influential American painters of the twentieth century. Born in Philadelphia to artistically-inclined parents, Davis immersed himself in the American modernist landscape and adopted a painterly approach indebted to consumer culture, urban life, and the American vernacular. His socially engaged body of work is deeply rooted in American visual culture, yet one of Davis’s defining attributes is his early embrace of European avant-garde ideals. He cites Paul Gauguin, Vincent Van Gogh, Piet Mondrian, and Henri Matisse as pioneers of their crafts from whom he adopts methods of line, color and form; however, central to Davis’s own artistic ethos is how effortlessly this dichotomy between the French influence and American sensibility unfolds.

Dated to 1961, Municipal hails from the final years of Davis’s career, by which point a bold synthesis of color, mastery of geometric principles, and exploration into the New York urban landscape had become defining characteristics of his oeuvre. Depicting Manhattan’s Municipal Building—designed by leading architectural firm McKim, Mead & White—the present work offers a revisitation in oil of a gouache subject Davis completed in 1953 (see fig. 1). Many of Davis’s mature works from the fifties and sixties transfigure and revise earlier compositions, allowing him to expand upon his previous subject matter across media and time. “I can take a painting I made forty years ago and use it as a basis for developing an idea today,” Davis proclaimed (quoted in Rudi Blesh, Stuart Davis, New York, 1960, n.p.).

As a young painter in New York, Davis’s early style reflected his Ashcan lessons with Robert Henri and inherently social realist tendencies. After exhibiting five paintings at the Armory Show in 1913, however, Davis gained exposure to avant-garde styles that both transfixed him and informed his future body of work. “I was enormously excited by the show,” Davis recalled, “and responded particularly to Gauguin, van Gogh, and Matisse, because broad generalizations of form and the non-imitative use of color were already practices within my own experience” (Stuart Davis, American Artists Group Monographs, vol. 6, New York, 1945, n.p.). Traveling to Paris to better understand the fundamental principles of European modernism in 1928, Davis applied the same fervor for illustrating New York urban living to his Montparnasse neighborhood over the course of his fifteen month stay abroad (see fig. 2).

Davis demonstrated a particular affinity for the Cubist sensibilities of Fernand Léger and Pablo Picasso, both during and immediately following his time in Paris (see fig. 3). “I went to the studio of Fernand Léger, internationally famous modernist painter. He showed me all his newest work. Very strong,” Davis described in a letter addressed home to his father (Karen Wilkin, Stuart Davis, New York, 1987, p. 120). The juxtaposition of geometric planes and vibrantly applied colors of his Cubist contemporaries informed Davis’s Parisian-period works as well as those rendered back in New York when he returned home in 1929.

Davis reemerged onto the New York artistic landscape with an eagerness to incorporate the Cubist-inspired flattened forms of his Parisian sojourn into his renditions of everyday urban life. The grid-like tendency to his post-Paris pictures is a testament not only to Mondrian’s geometric principles—whom Davis had “admired since the early 1930s”—but also to the Fauvist teachings of Matisse (William C. Agee, “Stuart Davis in the 1960s: ‘The Amazing Continuity,’”Stuart Davis: American Painter, New York, 1992, p. 87). With its sharp edges and dynamic layering of competing forms, Municipal exudes a freedom of form and expressive application of color that reflect the profound influence of Matisse’s cutouts, which Davis had viewed at The Museum of Modern Art’s retrospective of the artist’s work in November 1951. “I don’t want people to copy Matisse or Picasso although it is entirely proper to admit their influence,” Davis believed (quoted in H.H. Arnason, Stuart Davis Memorial Exhibition: 1894-1964, Washington, D.C., 1965, p. 42). The methods of his European contemporaries undoubtedly shaped the trajectory of Davis’s later years.

The simplification of forms and powerful clarity of Davis’s 1960s paintings exemplifies the culmination of his cross-cultural artistic education and growing confidence both as a draftsman and colorist. Davis utilized a maximum of five colors in his late works, often aptly selecting “New York taxicab yellow,” as Karen Wilkin called it, for his Manhattan city scenes (Karen Wilkin, “Stuart Davis: American Painter,” Philip Rylands, ed., Stuart Davis, New York, 1977, p. 24). In the final years of his life, Davis opted for a reduction of color and form that underscores his belief in the power of shapes and visual language to emphatically convey a broader meaning. Situated within an artistic landscape that increasingly favored abstraction over realism in the post-war years, Davis’s commitment to grounding his art in reality further distinguish him from his American contemporaries in the fifties and sixties (see fig. 4).

Davis possessed a decades-long fascination with consumer culture, labels, and advertising. His infatuation with written language pervades both his Parisian subjects and his American scenes, further testifying to the depth of influence that bold graphic lettering and written language had on his artistic output. In this respect, many scholars of twentieth century art history cite Davis’s exploration into visual language as proto-Pop, thereby serving as a precursor to the post-war generation of Pop artists (see fig. 5). Often incorporating letters and numbers into his strategically reduced compositions, Davis embedded facets of consumer culture into his compositions with great deftness. His incorporation of bold, enlarged lettering in Municipal and its predecessor work on paper, Park Row, align the two works with one another visually while simultaneously showcasing Davis’s deep concern for the fusion of written word and fine art.

Encapsulating Davis’s unwavering desire to blend modernist principles with his increasingly urban environment, Municipal celebrates his fascination with New York’s vibrant visual landscape. From mass advertising to impressive grid-like structures, Manhattan of the 1960s possessed a vital spirit that Davis sought to capture through his simplified yet dynamic forms. It is through these densely arranged, geometric figures that Davis imparts his distinctly American, albeit deeply influenced by French modernist principles, approach to twentieth century painting.