Pulitzer prize winning critic, Holland Cotter, gives the Stuart Davis (1892-1964) show at the Whitney Museum a mostly glowing review in today’s New York Times. One thing is a given. If the art of American modernist Stuart Davis is mentioned, Gloucester will pop up somewhere in the text.
“Place was important to him, but the modern world was increasingly about movement and he wanted to picture that. A 1931 painting, “New York-Paris No. 2,” put us in both cities simultaneously, with a Hotel de France set against the Third Avenue El.
In the exuberant “Swing Landscape” of 1938, a mural commissioned by the Works Progress Administration for a Brooklyn housing project but never installed, we see bits and pieces of Gloucester — ships, buoys, lobster traps — but basically we’re in a whole new universe of jazzy patterns and blazing colors, a landscape defined not by signs but by sensations: sound, rhythm, friction…”
Sometimes big shows bring art to market. Last fall the Stuart Davis 1960 painting Ways and Means, 24 x 32, sold at auction for $3,189,000 at Christie’s.
the 1940 Composition June Jitterbug Jive for $689,000,
and the Autumn Landscape Rockport, 1940, 8 x 12 for $905,000.
Meanwhile, Sotheby’s sold New York Street, 1940, 11 x 16, $490,000.
This month, Sotheby’s sold a 1960 Gloucester harbor scene for $100,000 on June 9th, and the 1919 “Gloucester” painting measuring 24 x 30 fetched $51,000.
I saw one Davis for private sale at the ADAA fair in February. In contrast, there were many Milton Avery works on the market (both auction and via private sales.)
The Davis show at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York runs through the end of September before it moves to the National Gallery of Art in DC. The NGA recently acquired the Davis painting Study for Swing Landscape through the Corcoran collection.
There’s an installation of Stuart Davis sketches of Gloucester on view in the Cape Ann Museum, “The Importance of Place: A Sketchbook of Drawings by Stuart Davis”.
Holland Cotter New York Times review
Good Morning Gloucester 
Loved looking at some of his paintings here. Thanks!
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