The Drawings of Stuart Davis: The Amazing Continuity

Stuart Davis (1892-1964), once described as "the ace of America's Modernists," regarded drawing as central to his art. He believed that all his works were drawings, and developed his images as carefully adjusted black-and-white "configurations" which he translated to "color-space compositions" only at the last stage of his painting procedure. He even retranslated some of his most ambitious and best-known paintings back into large-scale black-and-white drawings on canvas, apparently as a final version of the image.
This volume examines, for the first time, the full range of Davis's activity as a draftsman, from his early naturalistic drawings in the manner of the Ashcan School to the economical near-abstractions of his maturity. A broad interpretation of the notion of drawing, in keeping with Davis's own understanding of the term, allows the inclusion of works on paper in a variety of mediums, including watercolors, gouaches, and some late black-and-white drawings on canvas.
Included as well are selections from Davis's extensive writings, which contain innumerable references to drawing: attempts to define what constitutes a good drawing, and discussions of the role of drawing in his work and in the formulation of his complex theories of composition. Just as important, Davis's notebooks contain many images, ranging from diagrams that illustrate theory to fully developed, self-sufficient drawings.
Karen Wilkin and Lewis C. Kachur, both eminent Davis scholars, draw heavily on his unpublished writings and less well-known images to deepen our understanding of Davis and of American modernism in its formative years.