Stuart Davis (1892-1964)
Quinciette
signed 'Stuart Davis' (center right) and inscribed with title, signed again and dated '1964' (on the stretcher)
casein on canvas
20 1/8 x 24 1/8 in. (51.1 x 61.3 cm.)
Painted in 1964.
Footnotes:
Provenance
Estate of the artist.
Salander-O'Reilly Galleries, Inc., New York.
Private collection, New York, acquired from above, 1986.
By descent to the present owner from the above, 2010.

Exhibited
New York, Salander-O'Reilly Galleries, Inc., Selections: Stuart Davis Exhibition, October 3-25, 1986, no. 7.
Roslyn Harbor, New York, Nassau County Museum of Art, American Vanguards, January 21-April 28, 1996, pp. 1, 54, 88, illustrated.

Literature
D. Sylvester, 'New York Takeover,' Sunday Times Colour Magazine, London, April 26, 1964, pp. 26-27, illustrated.
B. O'Doherty, 'Stuart Davis: A Memoir,' Evergreen Review, New York, February 1966, vol. 10, no. 39, p. 25, illustrated.
W. Wilson, Stuart Davis's Abstract Argot, San Francisco, 1993, p. xv, illustrated in progress on easel in studio with artist.
A. Boyajian, M. Rutkowski, Stuart Davis: A Catalogue Raisonné, vol. III, New Haven, Connecticut, 2007, p. 475, no. 1748, illustrated.

By the start of the 1950's, Stuart Davis had established himself as the pre-eminent painter of modern American life and he drew inspiration from many of its most quintessential tenets, chief among them advertising, consumer culture, and jazz. After a period of stagnation following World War II, he decided to undertake a new period of creativity and re-examine some of the familiar themes from his earlier work. With a renewed sense of clarity and focus, Davis pulled his imagery away from the frenetic and crowded format he favored in the 30's and 40's. He began distilling his compositions to only the essential elements and limiting his palette, rendering them in bold, pure colors at greater scale than previously explored. In Quinciette, Davis has effectively reduced his palette to green, red, yellow, black and white. While possibly coincidental, it is interesting that 4 of those five colors are directly linked to the African Diaspora and Civil Rights Movement, which was happening in full force in 1964, the year of execution for Quinciette.

While Davis had used text and numbers in his compositions since being exposed to Synthetic Cubism at the 1913 Armory Show, they become much more prevalent following 1950. With the post-war boom in advertising and the homogenization of American culture, logos and the use of branded materials became a hallmark of the American Dream and Davis absorbed this change by increasing the scale and clarity of the graphics in his paintings. The flattened pictorial space and graphic execution of Quinciette evokes the look and feeling of his contemporaries in the Pop Art movement. Though unlike the Pop artists Andy Warhol (1928-1987), James Rosenquist (1933–2017), and Robert Indiana (1928-2018), Davis did not just copy the text, he reinvented it to make it something all his own. The vertical lettering 'HIP-SLIP' along the left-hand edge maintains a distinctively static graphic element and he has integrated his signature into the form of graphic element, no longer an identifier for the painter but part of the composition itself.