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Artist or Maker: Stuart Davis (1892-1964)

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Provenance: The artist.
With The Downtown Gallery, New York.
United States State Department, Washington, D.C., 1946.
Sale: New York, War Assets Administration, 19 June 1948, lot 17.
Acquired by the present owner from the above.

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Exhibited: New York, Whitney Studio Galleries, Spring Exhibition, March 17-29, 1930 (as Flowers).
New York, The Downtown Gallery, Stuart Davis: Recent Painting in Oil and Watercolor, March 31-April 19, 1931 (as Flowers).
New York, L'Elan Galleries, Modern French and American Painters, October 1931, no. 22.
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, Crillon Galleries, Inc., Stuart Davis December 5-21, 1931, no. 15.
New York, The Artists' Gallery, The American Artists' School, February 1-March 1, 1938 (as Still Life, Flowers).
Cincinnati, Ohio, Cincinnati Modern Art Society, Marsden Hartley, Stuart Davis, October 24-November 24, 1941 (as Still Life, Flowers).
Detroit, Michigan, Detroit Institute of Arts, Group Exhibition of Paintings by American Artists, April 9-May 10, 1942, no. 30 (as Still Life, Flowers).
New York, The Museum of Modern Art, Stuart Davis, October 17, 1945-February 3, 1946.
New York, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, and elsewhere, Advancing American Art, October 1946-April 1947.
New York, Whitney Museum of American Art, 117 Oil and Water Color Originals by Leading American Artists, May 17-June 20, 1948.
Chicago, Illinois, The Art Institute of Chicago, on extended loan.

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Literature: Whitney Studio Galleries, Spring Exhibition, exhibition catalogue, New York, 1930, p. 6, illustrated (as Flowers).
W. Bailey, "Exhibition of Paintings by Stuart Davis Seen in Crillon Galleries," Philadelphia Record, December 13, 1931, p. 8.
C.H. Bonte, "In Gallery and Studio: Stuart Davis Holding a One Man Show at the Crillon Galleries," The Philadelphia Inquirer, December 13, 1931, p. 5.
S. Davis, Stuart Davis, New York, 1945, illustrated (as Still Life--Flowers).
"Debunking State Department's Art," New York Journal American, November 19, 1946, illustrated, p. 17.
H. Weisgall, Advancing American Art, exhibition catalogue, U.S. Information Service, Prague, Czechoslovakia, 1947, illustrated.
R.M. Pearson, The Modern Renaissance in American Art, New York, 1954, pp. 203, 206, illustrated.
"Davis 1930 Still Life Highlights Art Collection," New Trier News, Winnetka, Illinois, March 18, 1966, p. 4, illustrated.
M.L. Ausfeld, Advancing American Art: Politics and Aesthetics in the State Department Exhibition, 1946-48, exhibition catalogue, 1984, p. 102, no. 11.
P. Hills, Stuart Davis, New York, 1996, pp. 95, 98, pl. 82, illustrated (as Still Life--Flowers).

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Notes: Property of the New Trier Township High School District 203, Winnetka, Illinois

A student of Robert Henri and an early proponent of the Ashcan School, Stuart Davis (Fig. 1) was also one of the first American painters to embrace the new forms of Modernism which transformed the course of art in the early years of the twentieth century. "As with other artists of his generation," writes Diane Kelder, "Davis's encounter with European Modernist painting in the Armory Show of 1913 had a decisive effect on his development. His initial training with the realist Robert Henri had encouraged an acute sensitivity to his environment, and direct visual stimuli would always be fundamental to his method of painting. Conversion to modernism did not result in Davis's repudiation of his realist heritage, but it made him aware of the autonomous character of a work of art. 'The act of painting,' he later maintained, 'is not a duplication of experience, but the extension of experience on the plane of formal invention.'" ("Stuart Davis and Modernism: An Overview," Stuart Davis: American Painter, New York, 1991, p. 17)

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 by Davis, enabling him to travel to Paris. This trip abroad would prove to be a significant influence on the artist, as he sought to combine the abstraction continually explored in his influential Egg Beater Series (Fig. 2) with a new visual aesthetic inspired by the Parisian streets and façades. The artist commented, "the year before, in New York, I had looked at my eggbeater so long that I finally had no interest in it. I stared at it until it became just a combination of planes. But over there, in Paris, the actuality was so interesting I found a desire to paint it just as it was." Combining the abstract and the real, the works Davis created in 1930 upon his return to the United States are among the artist's most accomplished and advanced from his career.

Still Life with Flowers, painted in 1930, combines the abstracted forms and references Davis had been exploring in his famed Egg Beater Series of 1927-28 with visual representations discovered by the artist during his trip to Paris. This integration of imagery, pictorial concerns and fragmentation would ultimately shape the foundation of all of the artist's subsequent work. In 1930, "this fragmentation was expressed in relatively flat paint and a geometric style, products of cubist exercises, eggbeaters, and Paris façades, rather than in expressionist brush and paint texture. However, the intent and the effect were logical outgrowth of the earlier experiments. The New York-Paris paintings of 1930, in which [Davis] was assembling a series of reminiscences combined with immediate visual impressions, were the beginnings of this new essay in fragmented and reconstituted reality." (H.H. Aranson, Stuart Davis Memorial Exhibition, exhibition catalogue, Washington, D.C., 1965, pp. 20, 26)

"Davis's work in the early 1930s reveals in many ways that he was still assessing the effects of his stay in Paris, while scrutinizing his earlier, painstaking formulation of Cubism, and coming to terms with his keenly American identity...Still Life with Saw (Fig. 3) of 1930 reveals a startling freedom in the disposition of its hybrid shapes, as well as a playfulness that suggests a delayed receptivity to the art of Joan Míro and Surrealism that is also evident in Salt Shaker (Fig. 4) of 1931." (D. Kelder, "Stuart Davis and Modernism," Stuart Davis: American Painter, exhibition catalogue, New York, 1991, p. 25) Still Life with Flowers similarly demonstrates the artist's appropriation of Surrealism while building upon the tradition of the Modernist still-life genre established by Picasso and Braque.

In the present work, the interplay of imagery, form, line and motion, achieves a powerful realization. The commonplace title, Still Life with Flowers, hints at the artist's whimsical personality, as the recognizable form gives way to a multitude of further complex imagery that is a vibrant scene of color and line. Underscoring Davis's interest in music, the flower at center resembles a phonograph from which renderings of a musical note at left and fragmented lines of notes that seem to echo a sense of movement and sound extend from the white "plume" at right. The music notes add a sense of rhythm to the scene, while contributing a sense of overall motion to the work. Additional symbolic imagery can be found in the flag marking the "9th Hole" and the Harvard and Yale pennants, which further add a sense of recognizable, yet elusive imagery to the atmosphere of city life, sports, music, pageantry and tradition. Dramatically curved lines and planes, calligraphic scribbles and the flowing curtain in the upper right corner each give a sense of movement that reaffirms a lively surface. Contrasting this rhythmic motion is the rigid geometry that underscores the composition; grid lines, an arrow pointing to the sharp-edged lines that delineate a building's façade. "During the thirties Stuart Davis's principal paintings continued the interplay of clearly defined if fragmented objects with geometric abstract organization. At the same time, he was making many experiments with complete abstraction, notably in terms of line drawings and paintings. His color was becoming more brilliant and in many works he was intensifying the tempo, the sense of movement, the gaiety, and rhythmic beat through an increasing complication of smaller, more irregular, and more contrasted color shapes." (Stuart Davis Memorial Exhibition, exhibition catalogue, p. 27) With its bright palette and dynamic and complex composition, Still Life with Flowers serves as an exceptional example from Davis's prolific career.

Davis understood that his paintings depicted real objects and were, themselves, aesthetic objects which carried an inner logic of their own. He attributed the transformation of his outlook to his first encounter at the Armory Show of the major European masters exhibited there. "I was enormously excited by the show," he later recalled, "and responded particularly to Gauguin, van Gogh, and Matisse, because broad generalizations of form and the non-imitative use of color were already practices within my own experience. I also sensed an objective order in these works which I felt was lacking in my own." (as quoted in Stuart Davis: American Painter, p. 20) In 1927, the artist also commented: "In the first place my purpose is to make realistic pictures. I insist upon this definition in spite of the fact that the type of work I am now doing is generally spoken of as abstraction...People must be able to realize that in looking at abstraction they are looking at pictures as objective and as realistic in intent as those commonly accepted as such." (Stuart Davis: American Painter, p. 57)

"As Davis's work evolved stylistically, he constantly considered the audience for his art. During the 1930s, that audience became specifically identified with the working man, and Davis began to focus on government support for the arts...The advent of government support was supposed to free artists from financial concerns and allow them to concentrate on furthering the cause of the working classes. The WPA programs were widely regarded as a sign that the 'golden age' of federal support for the artist had arrived, for this official sanctioning was an important gesture for the American artist still struggling to gain acceptance and find support in this country." (L.S. Sims, "Stuart Davis in the 1930s: A Search for Social Relevance in Abstract Art," Stuart Davis: American Painter, exhibition catalogue, New York, 1991, p. 58) An icon of the most progressive trends in American painting, Still Life with Flowers was purchased by the State Department to represent the United States abroad in the 1946-47 exhibition, Advancing American Art. Although the exhibition was well-received abroad, the abstract qualities of the works and the assumption by congressmen of leftist sympathies held by many of the artists forced the exhibition to close and the paintings returned to the United States. Subsequently, the paintings were sold in 1948 to tax supported institutions, where the work has remained until today.

Advancing American Art was a significant, and at that time, controversial exhibition organized by the U.S. State Department in 1946 to showcase the most progressive American art to European and Latin American cultures. In a highly scrutinized decision, rather than facing costly expenditures for loans, using public funds the American government purchased seventy-nine oils and thirty-eight works on paper for the exhibition, which began with a preview at The Metropolitan Museum of Art before traveling abroad. The exhibition included notable works by some of the most prominent American artists including Milton Avery, Ralston Crawford, Arthur Dove, Adolph Gottlieb, Philip Guston, Marsden Hartley, Walt Kuhn, Yasuo Kuniyoshi, John Marin, Georgia O'Keeffe, Charles Sheeler and Max Weber, among others.

Subject to many political debates, the works were eventually recalled and sold by the government as war-surplus property, with a majority of the works eventually going to The University of Oklahoma and Auburn University and the remaining works, including Still Life with Flowers, were sold to various educational institutions. "In retrospect, the significance of Advancing American Art lies primarily in the response that it generated. It suffered the misfortune of becoming linked in the public consciousness with sociopolitical factors only marginally related to its purpose as an art exhibition...they wished to promote international understanding while glorifying a society that allowed the production to intellectually and politically provocative art." (M.L. Ausfeld, "Circus Girl Arrested: A History of the Advancing American Art Collection, 1946-1948," Advancing American Art: Politics and Aesthetics in the State Department Exhibition, 1946-48, exhibition catalogue, Montgomery, Alabama, 1984, pp. 25-6)

In the 1947 exhibition catalogue for Advancing American Art, Hugo Weisgall writes, "While the tendencies in American art today are extremely diverse, the abstract group now appears to be stronger in influence and more numerous than any other group...they tend toward an internationalization more in harmony with post-war ideas. They realize that their homes are part of a continuum that includes the civilizations of Europe and Asia as well as of the primitive peoples. All this has nothing to do with politics, but is an expression of the prophetic function of art which has been heralding the idea of 'one world' from the beginning of the century. It is the artist who makes us conscious of the essential unity which is the very stuff of our single earth."

"Davis's gestation of modernist concepts was longer than 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 1920s and 1930s, David emerged as American Modernism's champion; he was the only major painter who never lost his 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," Stuart Davis: American Painter, New York, 1991, p. 17)

This painting will be included in Ani Boyajian's and Mark Rutkoski's forthcoming catalogue raisonné of the artist's works.