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Lot Essay
Please note this lot retains its original frame.
The present work is one of two works related to Davis’ well known Famous Firsts (1958, The Brooklyn Museum, Brooklyn, New York), which the artist began painting the day after completing the larger oil. Famous Firsts, in turn, is based on a detail of one of Davis’ earlier and most famous paintings, Report from Rockport (1940, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York), as Davis notes in his calendar entry for November 17, 1956. Karen Wilkin comments: “As if imitating the jazz musicians he so admired, Davis treated his configurations like favorite tunes, each recognizable every time he played it but varied each time by new harmonies, new rhythms, new colors. The original theme could be endlessly embellished, simplified, inverted, even dissected.” (The Drawings of Stuart Davis: The Amazing Continuity, exhibition catalogue, New York, 1992, p. 27)
The present work is one of two works related to Davis’ well known Famous Firsts (1958, The Brooklyn Museum, Brooklyn, New York), which the artist began painting the day after completing the larger oil. Famous Firsts, in turn, is based on a detail of one of Davis’ earlier and most famous paintings, Report from Rockport (1940, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York), as Davis notes in his calendar entry for November 17, 1956. Karen Wilkin comments: “As if imitating the jazz musicians he so admired, Davis treated his configurations like favorite tunes, each recognizable every time he played it but varied each time by new harmonies, new rhythms, new colors. The original theme could be endlessly embellished, simplified, inverted, even dissected.” (The Drawings of Stuart Davis: The Amazing Continuity, exhibition catalogue, New York, 1992, p. 27)