Stuart Davis
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STUART DAVIS' art is, among other things, remarkable for its precociousness and its capacity to renew itself steadily, over a long period of time. Born in Philadelphia in 1894, he was producing altogether personal watercolors and drawings before World War I. He was only nineteen, with several years of training at the Henri School in New York behind him, when the Armory Show startled him into a recognition of the visual revolution that had taken place since impressionism. In 1921 he painted Lucky Strike, a picture which holds up well in the toughest European company of cubists and abstractionists in general. Considered as a whole, his early art pays the sort of extra dividend which instinctively creative painters alone can afford.
He returned from two years in Paris ( 1928-29) more skilled and perceptive than before but at the same time more definitely American in the brash freshness of his vision. The tempo of New York City, the counterbeats of jazz music, the hieroglyphs of public signboards and lettering, the shrieks of thoughtless color in our streets-these have nourished an inner imaginative life which Davis has disciplined rigidly but almost never dulled. He had grown more bold with age, as the strong do; the concentrated abstract solution of Salt Shaker leads on to the over-all sweep of Report from Rockport and beyond that to the brilliant, spare clarity of Owh! in San Pao.
Davis: The essential content of my work is determined by my concept of Purpose. This is derived from an interpretation of the Anatomy of Awareness. I see it as psychological identification with things outside the self, including that physical area of public action called Language. Integral to Awareness is a sense of urgency to choose between the elements that compose it. Choice is made on one's own responsibility, is free, and becomes the physical Shape of Purpose in the Color-Space idiom of painting. Such a Shape in cumulative totality, regardless of the context of ulterior meaning and mood of its individual elements, defines the Reality and Truth of Art.
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