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Stuart Davis Research Paper

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Stuart Davis was an American modernist painter born on December 7th, 1892 - June 24, 1964. He was well known for his Jazz influenced paintings and the two main mediums he used to create his artworks were printing and painting. Davis was commonly known as the ‘Father of pop art’, frequently using contrasting vibrant, radiant colours, intricate and rugged shapes, and text in his pieces to portray the Jazz theme. He adapted various techniques such as cubism and expressionism to develop his own individual style. The genre of Davis’ work is abstraction, still life and landscape all beautifully executed with a tongue in cheek sense of humour that some say was before his time. In his early career he was a cartoonist which may have influenced his style …show more content…

However, by the time the Abstract Expressionists took the New York art world by storm in the 1950s, Davis’ art struggled to maintain its modernist edge. Another decade would pass before Davis’ visionary presence would be cemented in art history. In the1960s, artists of the Pop Art movement admired his attention to mass culture. Long before painters such as Andy Warhol and Ed Ruscha, Davis was painting soap boxes, billboards and gas pumps with a tongue-in-cheek wit that was ahead of his time. Most of Davis’ influences came from his surrounding American urban environment in the 1920’s and 30’s, such as the commercial world of the US, neon signs, jazz music, and the American nightlife. Not only this, but Davis was inspired by the American language during the 1940’s and 50’s, using text which is portrayed in his compositions to enhance the meaning of his artwork. Davis pushed the regular boundaries by using letters, words and phrases in his paintings. There were many artists who influenced and inspired Davis to create his own style such as the group called ’The Eight’ lead by Robert Henri (1864-1929). Henri encourages modern American painters to go against the rules and be radical within their artworks. Furthermore, Marsden Hartly (1877-1943) was another great influence of Davis’, who painted ‘The German Flag’ series in 1914 presents a type of abstraction linked to cubism. Davis’ use of complementary non figurative subject matter such as cigarette packages and the contemporary American environment later influenced artists such as Andy Warhol (1928-1987), David Hockney (1937) and Roy Lichtenstein

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