a new thing: Stuart Davis

So i'm trying this new thing: at least once a week, I want to blog about an artist or art movement. I've been getting art book from the library and reading all kinds of different websites and blogs, so i've decided to share with you. Let's start with Stuart Davis, a personal fav...

Stuart Davis (December 7, 1892 - June 24, 1964), was an early American modernist painter. He was well known for his Jazz influenced, proto-pop art paintings of the 1940s and 1950s.

He grew up in an artistic environment, for his father was art director of a Philadelphia newspaper and his mother was a sculptor. Between 1910-13, Stuart made covers and drawings for the social realist periodical The Masses. It was during an exhibition in 1913, which also included works by Vincent van Gogh and Pablo Picasso, that Stuart became a committed "modern" artist. After a visit to Paris in 1928-29 he introduced a new note into US Cubism. Using natural forms, particularly forms suggesting the characteristic environment of American life, he rearranged them into flat poster-like patterns with precise outlines and sharply contrasting colors.

He later went over to pure abstract patterns, into which he often introduced lettering, suggestions of advertisements, posters, etc. The zest and dynamism of such works reflect his interest in jazz. Davis is generally considered to be the outstanding American artist to work in a Cubist idiom. He made witty and original use of it and created a distinctive American style, for however abstract his works became he always claimed that every image he used had its source in observed reality: `I paint what I see in America, in other words I paint the American Scene.'