Stuart Davis

(1894-1964). American painter

Stuart Davis, Egg Beater No. 1, 1927. Oil on canvas, 29 1/8 × 36 in. (74 × 91.4 cm). Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; gift of Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney  31.169  

Art © Estate of Stuart Davis / Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY

Stuart Davis Egg Beater V

Biography

On December 7, 1892, Stuart Davis was born to two Philadelphia artists. His mother, Helen Stuart Foulke, was a prominent sculptor who exhibited at the annual exhibitions of the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts and the Philadelphia Museum of Art. His father, Edward Wyatt Davis, was a newspaper art editor who employed many of the period’s great American Realists-- John Sloan, William Glackens, George Luks, and Everett Shinn. In the company of his parents and their famous artist friends, the young Davis grew up surrounded by art.

The crown of Davis’ attempts to master Cubism occurred during 1927 and 1928, when he mounted an eggbeater, electric fan, and a rubber glove to a table. He then called the Eggbeater Series and the paintings that followed, his “formula pictures,” claiming that the formula involved stripping down his observations of nature to their very core. In doing so, he could paint the same subject matter over and over again, with triumph.

STUART DAVIS (1892-1964)EGG BEATER

By painting the jargon and images of American life, Davis was one of the rare painters of the 20th century who successfully transformed a European style of painting (Cubism) into something truly American.

In the1960s, artists of the Pop Art movement admired his attention to mass culture. Long before painters such as Andy Warhol and Ed Ruscha, Davis was painting soap boxes, billboards and gas pumps with a tongue-in-cheek wit that was ahead of his time.

The zest and dynamism of his works reflect his interest

in jazz.

Letter Design

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• Place emphasis on one element such as line, shape, space color, texture, and form.

• Of course other elements will be a part of the design.

• Also, consider how you will use the principles of design in order to give your image a good composition.