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Gene DavisBullet Proof Gene Davis color field 1960s multicolor abstract stripe print1969
1969
About the Item
This Gene Davis screenprint can only be described as jewel toned, with vibrant ink in peridot green, sapphire blue, turquoise green, amethyst purple, carnelian brown, grey, and pink. Vertical stripes, the artist’s trademark, run perfectly even and parallel down the sheet. It is within this deceptively simple format that Davis produces infinite variations, equal parts whimsical and thoughtful. The artist has chosen low contrast hues for this iteration, save a handful of rebellious, pale blue stripes. This palette produces the effect of a strong, vibrating ripple of color. Perhaps Davis named this work after this sense of watertight impermeability.
Screen print on canvas laminated to board (one of a series of six screen prints comprising the "Series 1" portfolio).
24 x 30 in. / 61 x 76 cm
Signed by the artist verso and annotated AP in pen. Edition 150. Published by Petersburg Press.
The American artist Gene Davis is most well-known for his colorful, striped paintings and prints, but he worked in a variety of formats and media, from neon, to collage, to vibrant public art covering walls and sidewalks. A former sportswriter and journalist, Davis was never formally trained in art, and compared himself to a jazz musician who plays by ear, referring to his style as ‘playing by eye.’ He was inspired by the rhythm and cadence of music, and attempted to capture this quality in his art.
Davis suggested that viewers examine his works closely to gain an understanding of its rhythm and meaning. "Instead of simply glancing at the work, select a specific color—and take the time to see how it operates across the painting.—Enter the painting through the door of a single color, and then you can understand what my painting is all about."
A copy of this print is in the collection of the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, D.C., and Kemper Art Museum, Kansas City.
- Creator:Gene Davis (1920-1985, American)
- Creation Year:1969
- Dimensions:Height: 20 in (50.8 cm)Width: 30 in (76.2 cm)Depth: 0.18 in (4.58 mm)
- Medium:
- Movement & Style:
- Period:
- Condition:Mild bowing of the board consistent with age and light corner wear.
- Gallery Location:New York, NY
- Reference Number:1stDibs: LU121127866442
Gene Davis
Davis was born in Washington D.C. in 1920 and spent nearly all his life there. Before he began to paint in 1949, he worked as a sportswriter, covering the Washington Football Team and other local teams. Working as a journalist in the late 1940s, he covered the Roosevelt and Truman presidential administrations, and was often President Truman's partner for poker games. His first art studio was in his apartment on Scott Circle; later he worked out of a studio on Pennsylvania Avenue. Davis's first solo exhibition of drawings was at the Dupont Theater Gallery in 1952, and his first exhibition of paintings was at Catholic University in 1953. A decade later he participated in the "Washington Color Painters" exhibit at the Washington Gallery of Modern Art in Washington, DC, which traveled to other venues around the US, and launched the recognition of the Washington Color School as a regional movement in which Davis was a central figure. The Washington painters were among the most prominent of the mid-century color field painters. Though, he worked in a variety of media and styles, including ink, oil, acrylic, video, and collage, Davis is best known by far for his acrylic paintings (mostly on canvas) of colorful vertical stripes, which he began to paint in 1958. The paintings typically repeat particular colors to create a sense of rhythm and repetition with variations. One of the best-known of his paintings, "Black Grey Beat" (1964), owned by the Smithsonian American Art Museum reinforces these musical comparisons in its title. The pairs of alternating black and grey stripes are repeated across the canvas, and recognizable even as other colors are substituted for black and grey, and returned to even as the repetition of dark and light pairs is here and there broken by sharply contrasting colors. In 1972 Davis created Franklin's Footpath, which was at the time the world's largest artwork, by painting colorful stripes on the street in front of the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and the world's largest painting, Niagara (43,680 square feet), in a parking lot in Lewiston, NY. His "micro-paintings", at the other extreme, were as small as 3/8 of an inch square. For a public work in a different medium altogether, he designed the color patterns of the "Solar Wall," a set of tubes filled with dyed water and backlit by fluorescent lights, at the Muscarelle Museum of Art at the College of William and Mary in Williamsburg, Virginia. Davis began teaching in 1966 at the Corcoran School of Art, where he became a permanent member of the faculty. His works are in the collections of, among others, the Corcoran Gallery of Art, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, The Phillips Collection in Washington, DC, the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, MN, The Governor Nelson A. Rockefeller Empire State Plaza Art Collection in Albany, NY, and the Smithsonian American Art Museum. He died on April 6, 1985 in Washington, DC.
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