THE PLACE I HAD BEEN LOOKING FOR:
by Karen Wilkin (continued) 

THE GLOUCESTER INFLUENCE

ince Davis's point of departure was largely the life of the city where he chose to live and work, it is not surprising that so much of what he included in his account of what made him want to paint should be, like skyscrapers, taxicabs, and electric signs, essentially bound up with urban experience. But the list also includes many things not usually associated with big–city life: "American wood and iron work of the past, Civil War … architecture" and perhaps most significantly, "the landscape and boats of Gloucester, Mass."[4]

Morning Walk, 1919

This last allusion seems wholly unexpected, especially in relation to the uninhibited "abstract" pictures of the mature Davis — pictures such as Swing Landscape, 1938, or Midi, 1954, or Memo, 1956, with their full–throttle color, snappy floating shapes, staccato patterns, and crisp drawing. It is relatively easy to see why the author of such free–spirited, improvisatory, apparently non–specific compositions should list "Earl Hines hot piano" and "jazz music in general" as prime sources of inspiration, but a picturesque fishing town, beloved of traditional painters?

Swing Landscape, 1938

Yet the longer and the more carefully you look at Davis's work, the more thoroughly you study his evolution, the less surprising this becomes. Sometimes his titles offer clues, although given his delight in jive talk, it is difficult to be sure whether Report from Rockport refers exclusively to the Cape Ann town or whether, as in such playful later titles as Owh! In San Pao or Rapt at Rappaport's, sound, rhythm, and alliteration were deciding factors.

Gas Station, 1917

But if you pay attention to the visual clues Davis provides in both his notebooks and his finished paintings, maritime imagery begins to declare itself insistently, competing with his familiar urban vocabulary. Apparently casual references and obscure images, such as the drawn "ladders" and the twisting "ropes" of Swing Landscape, start to reveal themselves not as products of Davis's imagination, but as concrete allusions to the intricacies of ships' rigging and the complex dockside structures of a working harbor; a floating oval shape with a splayed tail, like one that hovers against a blue expanse in Midi, starts reading not as "cloud," but as a symbol of "fish," which in turn has the effect of detaching the picture's schematic buildings, with their rows of stylized windows and tall chimneys, from urban associations and turning them into evocations of a New England waterfront. Such references pervade Davis's work, but as overtones, not as dominant motifs.

Even the mural he painted in 1939, for a WNYC broadcasting studio (now at the Metropolitan Museum of Art), a free–wheeling arrangement of musical instruments and street signs, proves to be centered on a linear improvisation on ship's rigging. Once you are alerted to the importance that Davis accorded to "the landscape and boats of Gloucester, Mass.," it becomes clear that echoes of the North Shore inform and animate his work throughout his long career. Once you scent the tang of Gloucester — as unmistakable as the briny smell of the harbor at low tide — in even apparently abstract configurations and at virtually all periods of Davis's art, it appears that the town, its harbor, and its environs were, in many ways, as crucial to the evolution of his home–grown variety of Cubism as all of his accumulated observations of urban life. Certainly the time Davis spent on Cape Ann was formative. It can even be argued that his experience of Gloucester and the North Shore was not only paramount to his early understanding of Cubist space and fragmentation, but formed the basis of his mature aspirations for what a picture could be.

Report from Rockport, 1940