Kurzbeschreibung
A beautifully designed book exposing the influence of Gloucester, Massachusetts on the art of Stuart Davis, a pricipal founder of American abstraction. Printed in conjunction with a traveling exposition of Davis work spanning 3 decades. Features an introduction by Judith McColloch from the the Cape Ann Historical Society and an essay by renowned art critic and scholar Karne Wilkin
Der Verlag über das Buch
Shows the importance of Gloucester to Davis' artStuart Davis (1892 -1964), one of America’s most widely collected and written about artists of the twentienth century, was instrumental in the development of American abstraction. Stuart Davis in Gloucester takes the reader through Davis’s early career as a painter summering with other artists in Gloucester, Massachusetts.
Beginning with Davis’s early landscape paintings of the 1920’s and ending with his cubist abstractions of the late 1940’s, this book explores the influence of Gloucester imagery on Davis's oeuvre through beautiful reproductions of over 60 paintings and 20 sketches. It features an essay by renowned art critic and scholar Karen Wilkin and an introduction by Judith McCulloch from the Cape Ann Historical Museum.
“Once you are alerted to the importance that Davis accorded to ‘the landscape and boats of Gloucester, Mass.,’ it becomes clear that echoes of the North Shore inform and animate his work throughout his long career.
Once you scent the tang of Gloucester — as unmistakable as the briny smell of the harbor at low tide — in even apparently abstract configurations and at virtually all periods of Davis’s art, it appears that the town, its harbor, and its environs were, in many ways, as crucial to the evolution of his home-grown variety of Cubism as all of his accumulated observations of urban life.
Certainly the time Davis spent on Cape Ann was formative. It can even be argued that his experience of Gloucester and the North Shore was not only paramount to his early understanding of Cubist space and fragmentation, but formed the basis of his mature aspirations for what a picture could be.” — Karen Wilkin
