Biography of stuart davis
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He adored the cinema. In January 1920, he travelled with Coleman to Cuba, a cheap and exotic locale, perfect for young artists in search of new subject matter. He had a major influence on younger painters such as Arshile Gorky (1904-48) and Willem de Kooning (1904-97). Although drafted into the First World War in 1918, Davis was able to remain in New York where he worked as a cartographer for the Army Intelligence Department.
After the war, Davis continued working in his Cubist style with one exception.
For Davis, incorporating recognizable patterns, forms, and text encouraged the viewer to visually enter the painting, explore colors, line, and spatial relations, and finally leave with an emotional response. Well respected among his peers, Davis rose to prominence in both the Artists' Union and the American Artists' Congress. By 1912, Davis had left Henri's School to establish a studio with Glintenkamp in nearby Hoboken, NJ.
Shortly thereafter, Davis left The Masses due to differing views on the editorial policy; but he continued producing work for Harper's Weekly.
In 1913, Davis's creative vision expanded considerably when he became one of the youngest artists to exhibit his work in the Armory Show. The features of the package are rearranged on the canvas seemingly at random, reminding the viewer of the difficulty of translating a three-dimensional object to a flat canvas.
An intense interest in "Americanness"—understood in terms of his Philadelphia background as well as a commercial and working-class present—formed a part of these views.
Swing Landscape was initially commissioned by the WPA for display at a housing project in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. As an Ashcan artist, Davis was among the first American painters to express an interest in enlightening and educating viewers on the populist reality.
Oil on Canvas - Amon Carter Museum, Fort Worth, Texas
1921
Lucky Strike
During the 1920s, Stuart Davis painted table and object still lifes that, because of the clarity of abstraction, have been designated as Cubist-Realist.
The family's relocation from Philadelphia, where Davis was born, to New Jersey was fortuitous for Davis's artistic development. It was the expression of ideas and emotions about the life of the time." Henri encourages spontaneity in his students' work, urging them to capture "life in the raw." Davis did just that. Angular, planar shapes of blue, green and fuchsia intersect in the center of the canvas, evocative of billboards and posters in a manner that anticipates Pop art's fascination with imagery taken from consumer culture and advertising.
It put him in closer contact with a number of artist-reporters who had been working with his father since the 1890s. Soon many younger artists, including Arshile Gorky, Adolph Gottlieb, Willem de Kooning, and Jackson Pollock, also began tinkering with their own departures from Cubism's established spatial order.
Oil on Canvas - Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
1951
Owh!
This painting, with its energetic shapes and Miro-esque squiggly lines buoyed by a vibrant color palette of red, black, white, yellow, orange, and blue, exemplifies this sensorial connection. He also received the Guggenheim International Award in 1958 and again in 1960. Here, Davis offers an honest, objective view of the metropolis's seedy underbelly in the style of the Ashcan School.
He successfully reduced familiar landmarks and structures to flat, geometric shapes arranged in colorful patterns.