Critical Archive of the Visual and Related Arts
Stuart Davis
American; 20th-century
Des Moines, IA: Olmsted Center at Drake University
89%
Allée. 1955. Oil on canvas
Davis got better as he aged and excised most everything but pure and simple arrangement from his canvases. Allée is a prime example — no more squiggles or texts, less crowded layering, fewer distractions from the ways straight-up colors and shapes in juxtaposition can suggest entire planets of dimension and depth. It's not that he grew decorative; it's that he slimmed his approach to design. This slimming allowed him to get away with a sort of decorativeness, sure — it's the thing you see when you look at a painting like Allée for only a moment or two, its acrobatics of geometry and its almost comic palette — but the art resides elsewhere: it resides wherever that ornamental tightness starts breaking down. And here it breaks down only ever so slightly, but always to enormous effect: edges aren't crisp but they curve and bend, almost imperceptibly; the outsides of ovoids jitter; lines that should be meeting at a point diverge and list off into nowhere. There's so much that's frustrated in this canvas, so much vivacious failure. (TFS, 2025)
Champaign, IL: Krannert Art Museum
76%
General Studies. 1962. Oil on canvas
The second best thing Davis has done here is pull off the colors. I tend to think of his color combinations as brash but fundamentally a bit safer than this — that mustard should have little business cozying up to red and green like it does. But there are a few features of the painting that make it work: the blocks of white and black serve a neutralizing function; the yellow (except for that deft oval alongside its white counterpart at top left) is external to the main action, which means it's not competing; the whole scene is bounded by that red outer band, yoking edge to center while further undermining what might've been the yellow's awkward dominance. Of course, the painting's not just colors, but colors as shapes — and the shapes are a perfect balance of geometric (the triangles and various quadrilaterals) and inexplicable (his reversed signature in green and its rhymes in black and red). This balance is the best thing Davis has done with the painting. Different sorts of shape succeed at mutually coaxing out latent qualities in their cohabitants: seeing those ovals alongside (but not crowded by) the squiggles emphasizes the irregularity of the ovals' edges; a squiggle placed atop a box has order imposed onto it. (TFS, 2025)