Memo

Although working with abstracted forms, Stuart Davis always considered himself a realist and devised a kind of artistic shorthand for this ​“memo” about Gloucester harbor. Ship masts and wharf structures are schematically suggested by intersecting white lines below a white circle that floats like the moon against a night sky. The foreground is a tangle of overlapping red and green planes punctuated by letters and numbers. The word ​“ANY” at the bottom left refers to Davis’s belief that any subject can be transformed into art; the number 8 his reference to infinity.


Modern American Realism: The Sara Roby Foundation Collection, 2014