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Lot Essay
Executed circa 1917.
With a wave of modernist thought taking hold of the art world in the early 1900s, Stuart Davis was at the forefront of the American avant-garde working to assimilate European ideas in contrast to his more traditional American contemporaries. Davis' canvas, The Breakfast Table, is one of the artist's early responses to the 1913 Armory Show and marks a shift in the artist's rendering of abstract forms. "Davis's role to become a modern artist did not result in immediate stylistic transformation. It would be four years before he broke definitively with the Ashcan School realism that had marked his earlier work. In paintings executed between 1915 and 1918, he made a conscious effort to emulate the simplified forms and expressive color of the Post-Impressionist and Fauvist canvases he had admired in the Armory Show...In the remarkable canvas Breakfast Table...he experimented with grid-like compositions and faceted color planes that are reminiscent of analytic cubism." (D. Kelder, Stuart Davis: Graphic Work and Related Paintings with a Catalogue Raisonné of the Prints, Fort Worth, Texas, 1986, p. 3)
Davis quickly became recognized as a leader and advocate of the American Modernist movement while developing his own unique subject matter and iconography. According to John R. Lane, he was practically alone among American artists engaging in the development of both new art theory and a Modernist style. For inspiration, he quite naturally turned to the best contemporary European art, particularly that of Picasso, Braque, Gris, Leger and Seurat. Always a prolific writer, he defined his works that developed out of Breakfast Table in his journal as "an organization of units of a given medium which have a positive relation to one another which is satisfactory to the sense of equilibrium." (Stuart Davis: Art and Art Theory, Brooklyn, New York, 1978, p. 16) He also believed that the subject matter was secondary to the integral logic of form and color relationships and that paint must be the primary medium of expression. Breakfast Table was integral in anticipating the style of the 20's and 30's that ultimately came to define Davis' work.
Juxtaposing color and form into flattened frontal views pushed up against the picture plane Davis arranges patterns and shapes to create a work that challenges the viewer's traditional perception. Although it is a simplified pictorial motif, the composition of Breakfast Table is alive with a flurry of color and brushstrokes. Davis explored his notion of analytic cubism briefly during this time with a only a few paintings. His work would soon give way to dynamic compositions of fundamental color and shape. "Early in his career, Davis decided that painting was a matter of order, structure, and relationships...The remarkable continuity of their aesthetic ambition and their pictorial resolution ultimately distinguishes Davis's paintings from those of his modernist predecessors and contemporaries and secures their privileged place in the history of American art." (D. Kelder, "Stuart Davis and Modernism: An Overview" in Stuart Davis: American Painter, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, 1991, p. 30)
This painting will be included in Ani Boyajian's and Mark Rutkoski's forthcoming catalogue raisonné of the artist's work.
With a wave of modernist thought taking hold of the art world in the early 1900s, Stuart Davis was at the forefront of the American avant-garde working to assimilate European ideas in contrast to his more traditional American contemporaries. Davis' canvas, The Breakfast Table, is one of the artist's early responses to the 1913 Armory Show and marks a shift in the artist's rendering of abstract forms. "Davis's role to become a modern artist did not result in immediate stylistic transformation. It would be four years before he broke definitively with the Ashcan School realism that had marked his earlier work. In paintings executed between 1915 and 1918, he made a conscious effort to emulate the simplified forms and expressive color of the Post-Impressionist and Fauvist canvases he had admired in the Armory Show...In the remarkable canvas Breakfast Table...he experimented with grid-like compositions and faceted color planes that are reminiscent of analytic cubism." (D. Kelder, Stuart Davis: Graphic Work and Related Paintings with a Catalogue Raisonné of the Prints, Fort Worth, Texas, 1986, p. 3)
Davis quickly became recognized as a leader and advocate of the American Modernist movement while developing his own unique subject matter and iconography. According to John R. Lane, he was practically alone among American artists engaging in the development of both new art theory and a Modernist style. For inspiration, he quite naturally turned to the best contemporary European art, particularly that of Picasso, Braque, Gris, Leger and Seurat. Always a prolific writer, he defined his works that developed out of Breakfast Table in his journal as "an organization of units of a given medium which have a positive relation to one another which is satisfactory to the sense of equilibrium." (Stuart Davis: Art and Art Theory, Brooklyn, New York, 1978, p. 16) He also believed that the subject matter was secondary to the integral logic of form and color relationships and that paint must be the primary medium of expression. Breakfast Table was integral in anticipating the style of the 20's and 30's that ultimately came to define Davis' work.
Juxtaposing color and form into flattened frontal views pushed up against the picture plane Davis arranges patterns and shapes to create a work that challenges the viewer's traditional perception. Although it is a simplified pictorial motif, the composition of Breakfast Table is alive with a flurry of color and brushstrokes. Davis explored his notion of analytic cubism briefly during this time with a only a few paintings. His work would soon give way to dynamic compositions of fundamental color and shape. "Early in his career, Davis decided that painting was a matter of order, structure, and relationships...The remarkable continuity of their aesthetic ambition and their pictorial resolution ultimately distinguishes Davis's paintings from those of his modernist predecessors and contemporaries and secures their privileged place in the history of American art." (D. Kelder, "Stuart Davis and Modernism: An Overview" in Stuart Davis: American Painter, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, 1991, p. 30)
This painting will be included in Ani Boyajian's and Mark Rutkoski's forthcoming catalogue raisonné of the artist's work.