Street Scene, Havana

Karen Wilkin writes, "In the early twenties, Davis traveled for the first time out of the United States. January 1920 found him in Cuba--cheap, exotic, and with liberal liquor policy, in contrast to America's prohibition laws of the period. A group of lovely watercolors bears witness to the impact of southern light, tropical vegetation, and Latin street life on the impressionable young painter. Davis was enthralled, as he would be whenever he traveled anywhere new, by the particulars of the place and loaded his watercolors with details that, for him, defined the character of Havana and made it unlike New York: iron railings, tile roofs, palm trees, sinuous women, and imposing policemen. He filtered his acute observations through his memory of Matisse, just as he had imposed what he knew of Van Gogh on Pennsylvania cornfields some years earlier, finding Caribbean light and color, real-life justification for broad, unbroken planes and a palette of intense pastels. These watercolors...may have played a role in liberating his drawing from depiction." (The Drawings of Stuart Davis: The Amazing Continuity, New York, 1992, p. 19)