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Lot Essay
In the best works of his late career, such as Twilight in Turkey, Stuart Davis pushes the limits of representation to their breaking point, reducing landscapes into collage-like compositions of bold color and sinuous linework that bear little resemblance to their source material. The present work explores a theme spurred by a March 18th, 1959, New York Times review of Hannah Closs’s historical novel, High Are the Mountains, about the Medieval crusades in Southern France. Accompanying the article was a photo of a castle with the caption “A view of Carcassone, France,” which Davis clipped from the newspaper and saved among his personal papers. While no explanation for his fascination with the scene is known, the image would inspire more than twenty-five oil paintings, gouaches, and drawings, including the present work, Terrace (1962, San Diego Museum of Art, San Diego, California), and even Davis's final painting Fin (1962-64, Private collection).
In Twilight in Turkey, Davis magnifies and crops the original French landscape to focus on only one wall of the façade and the tree, “which defines and anchors the space, and divides the picture in half...By dividing a painting in half, Davis created, in a sense, two separate paintings, each of which becomes removed from the overall design and from the known and familiar image of the subject.” (W.C. Agee, "Stuart Davis in the 1960s: ‘The Amazing Continuity’,” Stuart Davis: American Painter, New York, 1991, pp. 91-92)
On top of the divided color planes of red and yellow in Twilight in Turkey, Davis also explores “a free-flowing, cursive type of drawing, which [serves] to counter, or set in relief, the pronounced rectilinearity of a painting’s Cubist-based grid.” (Stuart Davis, p. 92) By utilizing this technique of overlaying the flat shapes that broadly define the compositional space with an alternative schema of curving outlines, Davis creatively obscures the landscape and transforms Twilight in Turkey into a mystery of form and color to be deciphered by the curious viewer.
In Twilight in Turkey, Davis magnifies and crops the original French landscape to focus on only one wall of the façade and the tree, “which defines and anchors the space, and divides the picture in half...By dividing a painting in half, Davis created, in a sense, two separate paintings, each of which becomes removed from the overall design and from the known and familiar image of the subject.” (W.C. Agee, "Stuart Davis in the 1960s: ‘The Amazing Continuity’,” Stuart Davis: American Painter, New York, 1991, pp. 91-92)
On top of the divided color planes of red and yellow in Twilight in Turkey, Davis also explores “a free-flowing, cursive type of drawing, which [serves] to counter, or set in relief, the pronounced rectilinearity of a painting’s Cubist-based grid.” (Stuart Davis, p. 92) By utilizing this technique of overlaying the flat shapes that broadly define the compositional space with an alternative schema of curving outlines, Davis creatively obscures the landscape and transforms Twilight in Turkey into a mystery of form and color to be deciphered by the curious viewer.