Stuart Davis 1892 - 1964

Estate of the artist
Salander O'Reilly Galleries, New York
Private Collection, Aspen, Colorado, 1999 (acquired from the above)
Gift to the present owner from the above

West Palm Beach, Florida, Norton Gallery of Art; New York, Museum of the City of New York; Columbus, Ohio, Columbus Museum of Art, Stuart Davis' New York, October 1985-May 1986, no. 4, illustrated in color p. 26
New York, Salander-O'Reilly Galleries, Stuart Davis, Scapes: An Exhibition of Landscapes, Cityscapes and Seascapes Made between 1910 and 1923, March 1990, no. 10, illustrated in color
New York, Museum of the City of New York, Within Bohemia's Borders: Greenwich Village, 1830-1930, October 1990-February 1991, no. 18, p. 9
New York, The Metropolitan Museum of Art; San Francisco, California, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Stuart Davis: American Painter, November 1991-February 1992, no. 2, pp. 40, 110, 112, illustrated in color p. 111
Vienna, Austria, Galerie Ulysses; New York, Ulysses Gallery, Stuart Davis, October-November 1992, p. 8, illustrated in color n.p.
Stamford, Connecticut, Whitney Museum of American Art, Fairfield County, Double Take: Views of Modern Life by Stuart Davis and Reginald Marsh, January-March 1995
Koriyama, Japan, Koriyama City Museum of Art; Shiga, Japan, Museum of Modern Art; Tokyo, Japan, Tokyo Metropolitan Teien Art Museum, Stuart Davis: Retrospective, 1995, July-November 1995, no. 5, p. 46, illustrated in color
Venice, Italy, Peggy Guggenheim Collection; Rome, Italy, Palazzo delle Esposizioni, Amsterdam, The Netherlands, Stedelijk Museum; Washington, D.C., National Museum of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, Stuart Davis, June 1997-September 1998, no. 5, p. 82, illustrated in color p. 83

Holland Cotter, "Swing Cubism," Art in America, vol. 80, no. 9, September 1992, p. 100
Donna M. Cassidy, Painting the Musical City: Jazz and Cultural Identity in American Art, 1910-1940, Washington, D.C., 1997, p. 112
Ani Boyajian and Mark Rutkoski, eds., Stuart Davis: A Catalogue Raisonné, New Haven, Connecticut, 2007, vol. III, no. 1349, p. 19, illustrated in color

This work is in good condition. There is some craquelure visible mostly in the upper register. The canvas is lined. Under UV: There are a few scattered spots of inpainting mostly in the upper right and left sky. There are some minor strokes of inpainting to address cracking in the window at the center right, and one very thin line along the stretcher bar mark at the lower right.
In response to your inquiry, we are pleased to provide you with a general report of the condition of the property described above. Since we are not professional conservators or restorers, we urge you to consult with a restorer or conservator of your choice who will be better able to provide a detailed, professional report. Prospective buyers should inspect each lot to satisfy themselves as to condition and must understand that any statement made by Sotheby's is merely a subjective qualified opinion.
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In 1909, at the age of seventeen, Stuart Davis was sent to New York by his father Edward, the art editor at the Philadelphia Press, to attend Robert Henri’s art school. Edward Davis had been instrumental in hiring Henri along with John Sloan, George Luks, William Glackens and Everett Shinn as illustrators for the paper. The group of painters, all members of The Eight, named for a 1908 exhibition at Macbeth Galleries in which they participated, became known for their unsentimental portrayals of New York City. They sought to capture the full range of urban existence from the gritty realities of tenement living to the upper class enclaves along Fifth Avenue. Critics described their work as coarse and at times vulgar, later earning The Eight and their followers the nickname of the Ashcan School, but enthusiasts lauded the group’s daring, modern direction.

Searching for “life in the raw” as Henri instructed, Davis frequented the chaotic streets of Lower Manhattan for subject matter and was particularly drawn to Greenwich Village, a dynamic hub of avant-garde art and culture also painted by artists such as Sloan (Fig. 2). In Bleecker Street, Davis presents a view of an irregular street located in the center of Greenwich Village on a snowy winter day. A few indistinguishable pedestrians amble past the stoic row of buildings that extend diagonally into the background. They are dark except for a few signs visible on the façades advertising J. Colp’s pharmacy and other businesses, an early example of the artist’s interest in incorporating text into his paintings (Fig. 3). Although portrayed indistinctly, tenement buildings and an El station—a popular subject among the artists of Henri’s circle—are visible at the end of the block.

Working under Henri’s tutelage, Davis’s early works were, “rendered sketchily to convey the impression that the pictures were created as a direct emotional response to the urban environment” (Bruce Weber, Stuart Davis’ New York, West Palm Beach, Florida, 1985, p. 10). But the sense of immediacy and spontaneity Bleecker Street displays belies the careful attention Davis paid to compositional organization and design in this work. Henri also thoroughly trained his students in the importance of draftsmanship as the foundation for a successful painting. “I am for drawing and construction," Henri stated in 1908, “for continued and complete study, acquirement [sic] of a firm foundation” (William C. Agee, “1909-February 1913,” Stuart Davis: A Catalogue Raisonné, New Haven, Connecticut, p. 43). Indeed, Davis began Bleecker Street in 1912 and, unsatisfied with the composition, likely reworked it into its finished state in 1913. This focus on design and construction remained vital to Davis’s aesthetic, even while he moved away from purely representational imagery as his career progressed.

In Bleecker Street Davis organizes the composition so that he achieves a sense of balance between positive and negative space. He places the solid line of darkened buildings along the upper left quadrant of the canvas, opposite the open white space of the street, which is more expressively rendered with painterly strokes of lighter pigment. A lone female figure is positioned prominently in this area of the foreground to give further stability to the scene. Her bright red coat—complemented by the brilliant green and yellow hues of the vegetable stand that contrast with the rest of the muted palette—immediately focuses the viewer’s attention and provides a point of entry into the picture.

Davis executed canvases that display this classic Ashcan imagery for only a brief period. In the wake of his exposure to the 1913 Armory Show, he began to shift away from Henri's aesthetic to engage with many ideas of the European avant-garde such as synthetic cubism. His early training, however, provided Davis with an aesthetic, technical and theoretical foundation that he would continue to develop for the entirety of his career. The artist himself confirmed this as late as 1954, stating that “the subject matter of that kind of realism has rapidly changed in its physical and psychological content without changing my attitude towards its significance” (Agee, p. 42).