
About the Object
In this painting, a single leafless tree stands in the center of a cubist landscape constructed of planes of color that Davis textured with line and recall the squares of a quilt. This tree appears in Davis’s landscapes throughout the 1920s, including Garden Scene (2004.01.01) and Sword Plant (From the Shore) (2005.01.01), both 1921, in the Collection.
Additional Information
Davis revisited and reinvented this composition 25 years later in two paintings—Pad #1 (Honolulu Museum of Art) and Pad #2 (private collection)—illustrating what Davis called the “amazing continuity” of his art. Throughout his career, he would mine his earlier art as his ideas about and his theories on painting evolved.
The Artist;
Estate of the Artist;
[Salander-O’Reilly Galleries, New York, NY];
[Owings-Dewey Fine Art, Santa Fe, NM];
New York, NY. Grace Borgenicht Gallery. Stuart Davis: Provincetown and Gloucester: Paintings and Drawings. April 1-26, 1986, cat. no. 20.
New York, NY. Salander-O’Reilly Galleries. Stuart Davis, Scapes: An exhibition of landscapes, cityscapes, and seascapes made between 1910 and 1923. March 2-31, 1990, p. 126, ill. np., cat. no. 50.
New York, NY. The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Stuart Davis, American Painter (November 23, 1991-February 16, 1992); San Francisco, CA. The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (March 26-June 7, 1992); pp. 91-92, 154, 156, 159, 267, ill. p. 154, cat. no. 36.
Koriyama, Japan. Koriyama City Museum of Art. Stuart Davis Retrospective (July 8-August 6, 1995); Shiga, Japan. Shiga Museum of Modern Art (August 12-October 1, 1995); Tokyo, Japan. Tokyo Metropolitan Teien Art Museum (October 10-November 26, 1995), pp. 80, 163, ill. p. 80, cat. no. 38.
Chicago, IL. Robert Henry Adams Fine Art. [Stuart Davis], closed October 11, 1996.
Cotter, Holland. “Swing Cubism,” Art in America 80, no. 9 (September 1992), pp. 102-3.
Boyajian, Ani and Mark Rutkoski eds. Stuart Davis: A Catalogue Raisonné. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007, vol. 3 p. 105, ill. p. 105, cat. no. 1454.
Galligan, Gregory. “The Cube in the Kaleidoscope: The American Reception of French Cubism, 1918-1938,” (PhD dissertation, New York University, 2007), pp. xxviii, 402, ill. pl. 131.
Agee, William C. and Lewis Kachur. Masterpieces of American Modernism: From the Vilcek Collection. London: Merrell, 2013, pp. 11, 13, 17, 176-177, 263, ill. p. 177.
Pochoda, Elizabeth. “Freedom and the abstract truth: Jan and Marica Vilcek’s collection of American modernist art,” The Magazine Antiques (May/June 2013), ill. p. 102.
O’Hern, John. “Modern Manor,” American Fine Art Magazine, September/October 2013, pp. 56, 59, ill. p. 62.
Abatemarco, Michael. “Assimilation Through Art: The Modernist Collection of Marica and Jan Vilcek,” Pasatiempo, September 25, 2015, p. 38.