Stuart Davis in Gloucester

Art. Biography. I want you to get some idea of the facts (physical) of painting. By physical facts I do not mean permanency of colors. By physical facts I mean the two-dimensional division of the surface on which you work. I mean the cultivation of the ability to quickly disassociate the associational and relative values of any subject from its two-dimensional structural reality. This is necessary because your picture is a two-dimensional reality at all points of its conception, execution and finish, and to consider it in any other manner is to deal in fantasy -- Stuart Davis. In STUART DAVIS IN GLOUCESTER, Karen Wilken brings together a generous assemblage of the artist's images and writings and provides a critical essay that spans the arc of Stuart Davis's career. Karin Wilkin is a New York-based indepenent curator and critic who has published a monograph on Stuart Davis, the first major work on the artist since his death in 1964, and contributed to the catalogs of the Davis retrospective at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.