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Artist or Maker: Stuart Davis (1894-1964)
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Provenance: The Downtown Gallery, New York
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Exhibited: New York, The Pierpont Morgan Library, Stuart Davis: Art and Theory 1920-1931, September 10 - December 15, 2002, no. 11.
West Palm Beach, Florida, Norton Gallery of Art, Stuart Davis' New York, October 26 - December 8, 1985.
New York, Museum of the City of New York, Stuart Davis' New York, January 14 - March 16, 1986.
Columbus, Ohio, Columbus Museum of Art, Stuart Davis' New York, April 9 - May 21, 1986.
New York, The Downtown Gallery, The American Scene: Recent Paintings New York and Gloucester, March 8 - 21, 1932, no. 19.
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Notes: Stuart Davis was one of the first American painters to fully embrace the new forms of Modernism which transformed the course of art in the early twentieth century. In 1927, Davis had his first one-man show at The Downtown Gallery in New York and in the following year Juliana Force of the Whitney Studio Club purchased two paintings. These sales enabled him to travel to Paris. The trip abroad would be a significant influence on Davis' career.
"Having heard it rumored at one time or another that Paris was a good place to be, I lost no time in taking the hint. With one suitcase I hopped a boat and arrived in the center of art and culture in the middle of June The rumors were correct The conviction was already established on the train from Le Havre that I had done the right thing in coming to this place.
"Everything struck me as being just about right. I had the feeling that this was the best place in the world for an artist to live and work; and at the time it was. There was so much of the past and the immediate present brought together on one plane that nothing seemed left to be desired. There was a timelessness about the places that was conducive to the kind of contemplation essential to art." (Stuart Davis interview with J.J. Sweeney, as quoted in Stuart Davis, New York, The Museum of Modern Art, 1945, pp. 18-19)
Davis sought to combine the abstraction continually explored in his well known Egg Beater Series with the new visual aesthetic inspired by the Parisian streets and facades. Coffee Pot #2 was created shortly after Davis' return from Paris. As an early proponent of the Ashcan school and a former student of Robert Henri, the urban landscape was a familiar subject to the artist. The late Paris pictures often included the tricolors of the French Flag. In this New York picture the red and blue continue to feature prominently but Davis has broadened his pallet to include orange, green and black.
Coffee Pot #2 is a combination of the abstract and the real. Davis has assembled his immediate visual impressions and highlighted them with the geometric patterns he discovered in the New York landscape. Composed of a series of flat planes covered with linear and dotted patterns Coffee Pot #2 is a highly keyed work when compared with the cool restrained colors of the French pictures which preceded it. Commenting on color, Davis notes "Color must be thought of as texture which automatically allows one to visualize it in terms of space." (Stuart Davis as quoted in an Introduction to the exhibition catalogue Recent Painting in Oil and Water Color by Stuart Davis, Downtown Gallery, New York, March 31 - April, 19, 1931.) The placement of cool colors besides warmer ones enhances the interplay of the planes in the composition and gives the picture a wonderful sense of depth and movement.
