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Underpass #2 signed twice 'Stuart Davis' (lower center and lower right) gouache on paper 12 x 16 inches (30.5 x 40.6 cm.) PROVENANCE The artist. The Downtown Gallery, New York. Mr. and Mrs. Albert Dorne, New York, acquired from the above, 1955. Christie's, New York, 26 May 1988, lot 327 (as Underpass #1 ). EXHIBITION New York, The Downtown Gallery, Spring 1955: New Paintings and Sculpture, April-May 1955, no. 2 (as Underpass ) Minneapolis, Minnesota, Walker Art Center, Stuart Davis, March-May 1957 (as Underpass #1 ) (This exhibition also traveled to: Des Moines, Iowa, Des Moines Art Center; San Francisco, California, San Francisco Museum of Art; New York, Whitney Museum of American Art) New York, Linda Hyman Fine Arts, Primary Structures: The American Modernists' World, October-December 1996 (as Underpass #1 ) New York, Barbara Mathes Gallery, Forms & Rhythms: Alexander Calder, Stuart Davis, Fernand Leger, October-December 1997 (as Underpass #1) NOTES Stuart Davis said: "To many people a picture is a replica of a thing, or a story about some kind of situation. To an artist, on the other hand, it is an object which has been formed by an individual in response to emotional and intellectual needs. His purpose is never to counterfeit a subject but to develop a new subject. His purpose is also to live in giving importance to certain qualities in himself, which everyone presumably possesses, but which relatively few cultivate." (as quoted in J.J. Sweeney, "Stuart Davis," in Three American Modernist Painters, Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1945, p.5) Davis began his career under the influences of Robert Henri and the revolutionary Armory Show of 1913. In the early twenties, he embraced formalist art ideas, derived from European art theory and introduced in the United States a decade earlier. The young artist, by this time a fully developed painter with strong associations with the Henri circle, began to paint with a forceful theoretical basis. According to John R. Lane in Stuart Davis: Art and Theory, he was practically alone among American artists engaging in the development of both new art theory and a modernist style. For inspiration, he quite naturally turned to the best contemporary European art. Upon his first trip to Paris in 1928, Davis was struck and inspired by the modern works of Van Gogh, Matisse, Mondrian, and the Cubists that he encountered in galleries and exhibitions there. Unlike his fellow expatriates, however, Davis significantly reworked formal elements taken from Picasso, Braque and Leger, blending their influences with his own unique subject matter to create his own distinctly American Modernist style. In Underpass #2, Davis creates a variety of spatial relationships that supercede any anecdotal or literal references. Davis's manner of blending European pictorial attitudes with his own unwavering American sensibility was unique in American Modernism. Diane Kelder has observed: "Davis's gestation of modern concepts was longer than that of most of his contemporaries and it produced a more original assimilation. When the initial enthusiasm for European vanguard art gave way to political and cultural isolationism in the 1920's and 1930's, Davis emerged as American modernism's champion; he was the only major painter who never lost faith in its progressive character, nor his determination to reconcile the formal and philosophic issues it raised with the quality of the American experience." (D. Kelder, "Stuart Davis and Modernism: An Overview," in Stuart Davis: American Painter, New York, 1991, p. 17) Stuart Davis ranks as this country's foremost vanguard artist of the first half of the twentieth century. Praised for the way in which they transcend every change in artistic style and fashion, his abstract works such as Underpass #2 are among the most enduring masterpieces of American Modernist painting. The editors of the forthcoming catalogue raisonn‚ of Davis's works have changed the title of this work back to the artist's original title, Underpass #2 . The Downtown Gallery, upon receipt of the work from the artist had inadvertently assigned the title, Underpass #1, which remained with the work until now. This painting will be included in Ani Boyajian's and Mark Rutkoski's forthcoming catalogue raisonn‚ of the artist's work.