Sold at Auction: Stuart Davis

(b Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, 1892; d New York, New York, 1964) American Artist. Stuart Davis’s father was the Art Director of Philadelphia Press, and his mother was a sculptor. He studied painting under Robert Henri from 1910 to 1913. Davis was one of the youngest artists to exhibit at in the Armory Show in 1913. In 1946-47 exhibitions, Advancing America Art, Davis’s work was purchased by U.S. State Department as a part of a significant exhibition introducing the most progressive American art to Europe and Latin America. The works Davis created in 1930s, after visiting Paris, were some of the artist’s most accomplished works. In Egg Beater series, he adopted the analytical style of cubism, integrating the imagery’s pictorial and fragmentation concerns to create a fragmented and reconstituted reality in the painting with relatively flat paint and geometric style. The use of brilliant colors reflected Davis’s interest in Jazz music, in which he intensifies the tempo, the sense of movement, the gaiety, and rhythmic beat through increasing complication of smaller, more irregular, and more contrasted color shapes. Davis’s paintings also often hinted the artist’s whimsical personality, where the real objects were, themselves, aesthetic objects that carried an inner logic of their own. (Credit: Christie’s, New York, American Paintings, December 1, 2005, Lot 22.)