Stuart Davis

Stuart Davis was born in Philadelphia, the son of Helen Stuart Foulke Davis, a sculptor, and Edward Wyatt Davis, art editor at the Philadelphia Press. As a youth, Davis knew John Sloan, William Glackens, George Luks, and Everett Shinn, artists who worked as illustrators at the "Press" and would later become the leaders of the Ashcan School. In 1909 Davis went to New York to study with Sloan and Robert Henri at the Robert Henri School of Art. Davis quickly came under their influence, painting in the Ashcan style, and became part of the progressive, socialist, and bohemian milieu of Greenwich Village and of Gloucester, Massachusetts. From 1913 to 1916 he was a major contributor of illustrations to the socialist magazine "The Masses". About 1916, however, Davis abandoned his Realist style and subject matter and began experimenting with abstraction, taking his cue from Cézanne, Matisse, Van Gogh, and other European modernists whose works he had seen at the 1913 Armory Show.

Davis developed his characteristic style, a unique mixture of abstraction and American subject matter, during the 1920s. His best-known works from this decade are images from American advertising and commercial packaging executed in a Cubist idiom, such as "Lucky Strike" (1921; Museum of Modern Art, New York) from the "Tobacco" series; "Percolator" (1927; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York); and the breakthrough Egg Beater series, executed in 1927 and 1928. By the early 1930s Davis's characteristic style was largely in place: still lifes, Gloucester landscapes, and New York street scenes painted in flat color planes, their dynamic parts held in equilibrium by color relations and by interlocking and overlapping geometric shapes. Davis has sometimes been associated with the American Scene movement of the 1930s, though his work was quite abstract compared to the Realist style and rural subject matter of the Regionalists Thomas Hart Benton, John Steuart Curry, and Grant Wood, whose work he despised. Rather, Davis portrayed the urban American scene and conveyed a sense of place largely through symbols and motifs, specifically, icons of American life, popular and consumer culture, and mechanization.

Throughout his career Davis was active in numerous political artist organizations, especially during the 1930s, when he was a member of the Artists' Union and the American Artists' Congress. He painted a number of murals, including "Swing Landscape" (1938; Indiana University Art Museum, Bloomington), originally for the Williamsburg Housing Project, and "Men without Women" (1932) for the men's lounge in the new Radio City Music Hall. From 1940 to 1950 he taught art at the New School for Social Research in New York City, and in 1948 a "Look" magazine poll of critics and museum directors named him one of the ten best painters in America.