Gene Davis (American, 1920 to 1985)
Gene Davis was a prominent member of the Washington Color School, known for his vertical stripe paintings. Born in Washington D.C. in 1920, Davis first worked as a sportswriter, and then as a White House correspondent covering the administrations of Presidents Franklin Roosevelt and Harry Truman; several of his photographs of Truman-with whom he played poker-are in the Smithsonian’s Archives of American Art.[1]
Davis received no formal art training, though he did frequent museums and galleries, and was “smitten with the complex color harmonies” of works he viewed in the Phillips Collection.[2] He acknowledged the influence of Paul Klee, Jasper Johns, and Barnett Newman, whose color stripe paintings inspired Davis to elaborate on the theme.[3]
After his first solo exhibition in 1952, Davis subsequently had three one-man shows at the Corcoran Gallery of Art, and was included in the 1965 exhibition at the Washington Gallery of Modern Art that fixed a loose collective of local color field painters with a name that stuck, the Washington Color School. Davis taught at the Corcoran School of Art, American University, Skidmore College, and the University of Virginia.
“What drives them is their colors, their tall, performing colors, some of which step forward as if to take a solo, while others, less assertive, appear to retreat. These colors work in teams, joining with their neighbor stripes, or colleagues far away, to form ever-rearranging chords.”[4]
Although he began his paintings by methodically placing strips of masking tape on cotton duck canvas, Davis’s approach was propelled neither by theory nor program. “The way to really make good art is to do the outrageous, the unexpected — to be a renegade.”[5] To that end, Davis often partook of the unexpected: he painted one-foot wide stripes across a road in Philadelphia, created a series of paintings “no bigger than a credit card”, and channeled the anarchic humor of Marcel Duchamp by capturing the air in front of the White House in a glass container.[6]
In 1974 Davis received a Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship, and in 1984 he was appointed commissioner of the National Museum of American Art, Smithsonian Institution. He died in Washington D.C. in 1985.
[1] http://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/images/collection/gene-davis-papers-7153.
[2] Gene Davis biography, http://www.phillipscollection.org/research/american_art/bios/davis_g-bio.htm.
[3] Steven Naifeh, Gene Davis (New York: The Arts Publisher, 1982), 40.
[4] Paul Richard, The Primary Figure of the Color School (The Washington Post, April 28, 2007).
[5] Richard
[6] Richard
Essay written by Jerry N. Weiss.
Information courtesy of Shannon’s Fine Art Auctioneers, October 2011.