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Lot Essay
Characteristic of Stuart Davis's most thought-provoking imagery, Anchors is a distinct example of the artist's profound reworking of common motifs through modern composition. Davis traveled to Gloucester in late summer 1929 where he further explored the linear qualities and geometric patterns found in the harbor area and its sailing vessels.
In Anchors, Davis creates an elaborate composition using several different viewpoints along with recognizeable and abstracted images. In the lower left corner a large red anchor dominates the space and provides a more direct view point into the composition. Moving upwards, Davis has divided the upper left corner with vertical masts of ships into three sections and rested the fishing nets and rigging of the ships on an angled horizon line that shifts the perspective of the scene. A lattice-patterned design carries the viewer to the right and to a distant view into the harbor, off set by a blue square and again intiricately composed with an angled horizon and another perspective. The cart, crane and masts at the right bring the composition back to a frontal perpective and help to tie the entire scene together through Davis's combining of linear and circular pattern. By continuing to use contrasting viewpoints the artist has successfully "condensed time and space...into one vision. "He [has] united the past, present, and future by giving us both immediate shapes (identifiable things) and more general shapes." (A. Greene, "Twentieth-Century Art in the Museum Collection: Direction and Diversity," The Museum of Fine Arts Houston Bulletin, Summer 1988, p. 11)
Commenting on Anchors and another work from this period, Davis notes "that the interest which really existed in the scene was the result of a coherent and various order of space relations which the particular lighting of the hour made visible. This information...made it possible for me to eliminate...all irrelevancies...such as...light...the exact relation of the color tone of the sky, to the tree, to the water, etc. Instead I examined the view to discover the chief color-space fields which composed it...These color-space quanta are abstract in the sense that they are independent of any particular objects, but they are concrete in their manifold unique configurations which are the physics of the people, objects, spaces and horizons which we know." (L.S. Sims, Stuart Davis: American Painter, New York, 1991, p. 203)
This painting will be included in Ani Boyajian's and Mark Rutkoski's forthcoming catalogue raisonné of the artist's work.
In Anchors, Davis creates an elaborate composition using several different viewpoints along with recognizeable and abstracted images. In the lower left corner a large red anchor dominates the space and provides a more direct view point into the composition. Moving upwards, Davis has divided the upper left corner with vertical masts of ships into three sections and rested the fishing nets and rigging of the ships on an angled horizon line that shifts the perspective of the scene. A lattice-patterned design carries the viewer to the right and to a distant view into the harbor, off set by a blue square and again intiricately composed with an angled horizon and another perspective. The cart, crane and masts at the right bring the composition back to a frontal perpective and help to tie the entire scene together through Davis's combining of linear and circular pattern. By continuing to use contrasting viewpoints the artist has successfully "condensed time and space...into one vision. "He [has] united the past, present, and future by giving us both immediate shapes (identifiable things) and more general shapes." (A. Greene, "Twentieth-Century Art in the Museum Collection: Direction and Diversity," The Museum of Fine Arts Houston Bulletin, Summer 1988, p. 11)
Commenting on Anchors and another work from this period, Davis notes "that the interest which really existed in the scene was the result of a coherent and various order of space relations which the particular lighting of the hour made visible. This information...made it possible for me to eliminate...all irrelevancies...such as...light...the exact relation of the color tone of the sky, to the tree, to the water, etc. Instead I examined the view to discover the chief color-space fields which composed it...These color-space quanta are abstract in the sense that they are independent of any particular objects, but they are concrete in their manifold unique configurations which are the physics of the people, objects, spaces and horizons which we know." (L.S. Sims, Stuart Davis: American Painter, New York, 1991, p. 203)
This painting will be included in Ani Boyajian's and Mark Rutkoski's forthcoming catalogue raisonné of the artist's work.