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Lot Essay
Stuart Davis's Cigarette Papers, painted in 1933, is an extension of Davis's attempt at constructing an art at once common and abstract. It has an important relationship, not only in name, to an earlier, 1921 oil painting also titled Cigarette Papers. That work depicts, more exclusively than the present work, a box of Wheat Straw brand cigarette papers. The composition of the 1921 work is flat, the paint is thinly applied and the colors are muted. The painting is characteristic of Davis's success at the time in abstracting commercial, and perhaps more importantly, quintessentially American artifacts. Davis himself wrote in 1921, "I feel that my tobacco pictures are an original note without parallel so far as I can see. It is along these lines I wish to develop. In poetry we have Lindsay, Masters, Sandburg and Williams, all in some way direct descendants of Whitman our one big artist. I too feel the thing Whitman felt and I too will express it in pictures - America - the wonderful place we live in." (as quoted in L.S. Sims, Stuart Davis: American Painter, New York, 1991, p.151)
Cigarette Papers consists of a more complicated composition and self-assured color scheme and is flatly composed, like Davis's canvas from 1921. The five horizontal bands of green, ochre, powder and royal blue, and yellow independently would create the illusion of depth by defining foreground, middleground and background, but the two main vertical elements, intersecting each of these registers, keep this illusion in check. At the top of the composition is the package of cigarette papers that gives the painting its title and adds to Davis's abstract depiction of space and combination of formal elements.
Choosing cigarette papers is a significant, and revealing, decision by Davis. The common sights, consumer items, and commercial brands that he wove into his paintings work to define the intended audience for his pictures. Besides cigarette papers, Davis was known to depict - among other symbols of daily life - street signs, newspapers and magazines, household disinfectant, countless gas pumps, and, in a seminal series, eggbeaters. He intended his paintings to have relevance to a working class audience, who could identify and relate to these mundanely American "icons." As Sims tells us, "Davis also theorized that the very nature, or 'form,' of this socially viable art 'always results from the choice made by an artist. This choice is socially determined, because his whole life is socially determined.'" (Stuart Davis: American Painter, p. 58) Davis's desire not to separate his social aims from the subject matter of his body of work, and the methods he employed to meld these two things, are keys to understanding the importance of his contribution to twentieth-century American Art.
Indeed, "along with Gerald Murphy, Stuart Davis is credited with being a pioneer in introducing American consumer-inspired imagery into the modernist syntax in the early 1920s. In his notes, Davis records his admiration for the techniques of advertising; he sees it as a means to move away from the temptation to sentimentalize in representation: 'Don't emotionalize. Copy the nature of the present - photography and advertisements, tobacco cans and bags and tomato can labels.' The impact of these compositions is also predicated on the degree to which packaging has come to dominate our consciousness as consumers." (Stuart Davis: American Painter, p. 151)
Davis, once he broke from the tradition of Ashcan School Realism in which his earliest pictures were steeped, "declared the primacy of formal elements in the creation of the work of art," but was typically contradictory when he, at the same time, "confused issues by steadfastly rejecting the label 'abstract.'" (Stuart Davis: American Painter, p. 57) This dichotomy of interpretation between realist and abstract is at the center of how Davis saw his art. He is quoted as having said "people must be made to realize that in looking at abstraction they are looking at pictures as objective and as realistic in intent as those commonly accepted as such." (Stuart Davis: American Painter, p. 57) The painting's central paradox lends itself to its purpose - and epitomizes Davis's aim in much of his post-1920s body of work - the melding of the consciously semi-representational, and in his view "realist", elements into an abstracted whole.
His intellectual and meticulously considered approach to the combination of composition, color, and subject matter is unique among American artists. Cigarette Papers, with its hard edges, intersecting lines, bold colors, and subject matter variously abstract or overtly representational, is a definitive example of Davis's methodology.
This painting will be included in Ani Boyajian's and Mark Rutkowski's forthcoming catalogue raisonné of the artist's works.
Cigarette Papers consists of a more complicated composition and self-assured color scheme and is flatly composed, like Davis's canvas from 1921. The five horizontal bands of green, ochre, powder and royal blue, and yellow independently would create the illusion of depth by defining foreground, middleground and background, but the two main vertical elements, intersecting each of these registers, keep this illusion in check. At the top of the composition is the package of cigarette papers that gives the painting its title and adds to Davis's abstract depiction of space and combination of formal elements.
Choosing cigarette papers is a significant, and revealing, decision by Davis. The common sights, consumer items, and commercial brands that he wove into his paintings work to define the intended audience for his pictures. Besides cigarette papers, Davis was known to depict - among other symbols of daily life - street signs, newspapers and magazines, household disinfectant, countless gas pumps, and, in a seminal series, eggbeaters. He intended his paintings to have relevance to a working class audience, who could identify and relate to these mundanely American "icons." As Sims tells us, "Davis also theorized that the very nature, or 'form,' of this socially viable art 'always results from the choice made by an artist. This choice is socially determined, because his whole life is socially determined.'" (Stuart Davis: American Painter, p. 58) Davis's desire not to separate his social aims from the subject matter of his body of work, and the methods he employed to meld these two things, are keys to understanding the importance of his contribution to twentieth-century American Art.
Indeed, "along with Gerald Murphy, Stuart Davis is credited with being a pioneer in introducing American consumer-inspired imagery into the modernist syntax in the early 1920s. In his notes, Davis records his admiration for the techniques of advertising; he sees it as a means to move away from the temptation to sentimentalize in representation: 'Don't emotionalize. Copy the nature of the present - photography and advertisements, tobacco cans and bags and tomato can labels.' The impact of these compositions is also predicated on the degree to which packaging has come to dominate our consciousness as consumers." (Stuart Davis: American Painter, p. 151)
Davis, once he broke from the tradition of Ashcan School Realism in which his earliest pictures were steeped, "declared the primacy of formal elements in the creation of the work of art," but was typically contradictory when he, at the same time, "confused issues by steadfastly rejecting the label 'abstract.'" (Stuart Davis: American Painter, p. 57) This dichotomy of interpretation between realist and abstract is at the center of how Davis saw his art. He is quoted as having said "people must be made to realize that in looking at abstraction they are looking at pictures as objective and as realistic in intent as those commonly accepted as such." (Stuart Davis: American Painter, p. 57) The painting's central paradox lends itself to its purpose - and epitomizes Davis's aim in much of his post-1920s body of work - the melding of the consciously semi-representational, and in his view "realist", elements into an abstracted whole.
His intellectual and meticulously considered approach to the combination of composition, color, and subject matter is unique among American artists. Cigarette Papers, with its hard edges, intersecting lines, bold colors, and subject matter variously abstract or overtly representational, is a definitive example of Davis's methodology.
This painting will be included in Ani Boyajian's and Mark Rutkowski's forthcoming catalogue raisonné of the artist's works.