Stuart Davis: In Full Swing
June 10–Sept 25, 2016
Late Work
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In the late 1950s, Davis's art became even more expansive as he enlarged his shapes further and reduced his palette to three colors—red, green, and yellow—along with black and white. He continued to base the majority of his paintings on extant motifs, but now he occasionally selected a close-up or inverted section of an earlier image as his starting point. Playful and animated, Davis's late paintings exude a sense of exhilaration and spontaneity that, in his words, "help to keep the eye of the beholder alive, force him to make observations, and give value to aspects of nature which everyday preoccupations too often leave unnoticed."
Below is a selection of works from Late Work.
Rue Lipp, 1928
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Stuart Davis, Rue Lipp, 1928
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Barbara Haskell: Davis went to Paris in 1928 courtesy of a purchase by Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney of two of his paintings. When he was there, he extended the geometric angularity that he had introduced in his Eggbeater paintings, but made it much more lyrical, much more delicate in keeping with his sense about the city. The picture, like many of the paintings from Paris, has this very confectionary palette, very linear detailing. For the first time he introduces his line as an independent element which becomes very prominent in his later work.
He presents the viewer as if we're sitting at a restaurant on the second floor overlooking a city street. In front of us are various objects used in drinking, which apparently Stuart Davis did a great deal of when he was in Paris.
Whimsically titled after the Brasserie Lipp, a restaurant Davis frequented while in Paris, this work combines a street scene and a still life. Painted from the perspective of someone sitting at a table on the restaurant’s second floor, drinking absinthe and beer and looking at the facades of the buildings in the square below, Rue Lipp suggests Davis’s affection for Parisian cafés as meeting places for the American expatriate crowd.