or more than half a century, Stuart Davis celebrated in his art modern American urban life with all its speed, noise, and visual cacophony. Davis home–brewed a personal brand of Cubism not, as his French forerunners did, from studio props and things you find on café tables, but from the random, sometimes overwhelming sights and sounds of the 20th century American city.

The exuberant, dissonant colors of Davis's pictures, together with their hard–edged shapes and energetic syncopated rhythms, can be read as inspired distillations of the fast–moving urbanite's fragmented perceptions, equivalents for the shifting perspectives of tall buildings and shop window reflections. Davis's brash hues and jostling shapes function as metaphors for the clangor of crowded streets, traffic noise, and rumbling subways, even for his beloved boogie–woogie and swing. When Davis itemized "things which have made me want to paint, outside of other paintings," in 1943, his list included such 20th century urban phenomena as "skyscraper architecture; … chainstore fronts, and taxicabs; … electric signs," along with such less specifically citified but equally up to date items as "the brilliant colors on gasoline stations … fast travel by train, auto, and aeroplane … 5 & 10 cent store kitchen utensils; movies and radio; Earl Hines hot piano and Negro jazz music in general."[1]

Born in Philadelphia in 1892 and raised in New Jersey within commuting distance of New York, Davis was a Manhattan resident for most of his adult life. He began coming regularly to the city in 1909, when he left high school to enroll at the progressive Robert Henri School of Art. The school was located on Broadway, near where Lincoln Center stands today, and Davis stayed in the neighborhood when he established his first New York studio with two fellow alumni, only a few blocks away, in 1913.

Garage Lights, 1931-32

Later he preferred to be farther downtown. The painters Jacob Lawrence and his wife Gwendolyn Knight, who knew Davis well during the 1940s, recalled that "he had the reputation of never going north of 14th Street," although he made an exception for them and regularly visited their Harlem studios.[2] Mostly — from about 1919 to 1955, with a few interruptions — Davis lived and worked in Greenwich Village, spending more than two decades at Seventh Avenue and 13th Street before returning to the neighborhood he had first come to as an eager teenager. His last years, before his death in 1964 at the age of seventy–one, were spent with his wife Roselle and their son Earl at an apartment and studio at 67th Street near Central Park West, a short walk from where the teenaged Davis had attended classes at Henri's school.

Davis's art bears witness to his confirmed New Yorker's pride and pleasure in the stimulating pace and abrasive energy of his city, his affection for its most characteristic elements. He filled his notebooks with drawings of the emblems of New York in the years before the Second World War: the iron–and–glass canopies of subway entrances, the rivet–studded girders and frivolous curlicues of El stations, and the scrollwork of lampposts. He drew the evolving midtown skyline of the 1930s, along with cigar–store fronts, fire escapes, barbershop poles, filling stations, and more, recording them all in sharply observed detail, later to be translated according to the demands of what he called "Color–Space Logic" into the inventive shapes and structures of his best known works.

When Davis traveled to Havana soon after his twenty–seventh birthday and when, almost a decade later, he lived for an extended period in Paris, he accorded these unfamiliar urban settings the same scrupulous attention that he did New York. Like many Americans abroad for the first time, he was struck by everything that was unlike what he knew in the U.S. — by evidence of long habitation, distinctive items of daily life, the vegetation of a different climate, colors tempered by another quality of light, and presumably, new sounds, smells, and tastes. Davis's pictures inspired by Havana and Paris are catalogues of an exotic past and an equally exotic present, full of ironwork balconies and louvered shutters, mansard roofs and decorative railings, public statues and shop signs in foreign languages, all distinguished by their otherness. (In Paris he carefully drew a syphon bottle on a café table and a Turkish–style toilet.)

Davis had been primed for this kind of acute response to his environment by Henri, who, as a central figure of the Ashcan School and a connoisseur of the seamier side of city life, fostered similar enthusiasms in his students.

Study for Shapes of Landscape Space, 1939

Davis had been primed for this kind of acute response to his environment by Henri, who, as a central figure of the Ashcan School and a connoisseur of the seamier side of city life, fostered similar enthusiasms in his students. "Art was not a matter of rules and techniques, or the search for an absolute ideal of beauty," Davis wrote about Henri's teaching. "It was the expression of ideas and emotions about the life of the time… . We were encouraged to make sketches of everyday life in the streets, the theater, the restaurant, and everywhere else."[3]

From first to last, from the works made when he was Henri's precocious star pupil to the economical "abstract" compositions of his last years, Davis's primary subject remained "the life of the time." He believed that the painter could invent expressive shapes and set them in significant, logical relationships only if he derived them from the irregular, disorderly reality of his surroundings. Davis, in fact, routinely denied that his work was abstract, insisting that his images were always rooted in his everyday experience and perceptions, however transformed by his emphasis on what he called "color–space coordinates" — pictorial elements with which he mapped space and imposed order on actuality.