December 2, 2016

The National Gallery’s Harry Cooper guided The Art Newspaper’s Pac Pobric through Art Basel | Miami Beach. The Expert Eye took time to linger on an early work by Stuart Davis Menconi + Schoelkopf’s booth, remarking:

Early in his career, Stuart Davis was enthralled by Vincent van Gogh, “but it wasn’t just a phase”, Cooper says. The US painter’s early interest in the Dutch post-Impressionist never deserted him, partly because Davis was a landscape and still-life painter. “But he worked even more quickly—there’s a lot of wet-on-wet technique in this painting—whereas Van Gogh made most of his paintings more deliberately.” Although this work speaks to Davis’s burgeoning self-confidence, it left significant room for growth. “This one is still a little immature,” Cooper says. “The yellow/purple complementarity is straight out of a textbook, and that warm brown chimney is more naturalist, an anomaly, as if out of a painting by Robert Henri [one of Davis’s teachers].”