Acquired from the artist by The Museum of Modern Art with funds from an anonymous donor, 1941

New York, Julian Levi Gallery, November-December 1940
New York, Museum of Modern Art, New Acquisitions and Extended Loans: Cubist and Abstract Art, March-May 1942
Toronto, Canada, The Art Gallery of Toronto, Museums' Choice: Paintings by Contemporary Americans, February 1945, no. 48
New York, Museum of Modern Art, Stuart Davis, October 1945-February 1946
Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, Outlines Gallery, Stuart Davis, March 1946
Wilmington, Delaware, Society for the Fine Arts, Contemporary American Paintings, March-April 1947
New York, Museum of Modern Art, American Paintings from the Museum Collection, February-March 1949
Utica, New York, Munson-Williams-Proctor Institute, Formal Organization in Modern Painting, November 1953, no. 23
Amherst, Massachusetts, Amherst College, Mead Art Building, 13 Painters 40 Years, May 1956
Westport, Connecticut, Jessup Gallery, Westport Public Library, Development of Abstract Art, February 1961
Brooklyn, New York, Brooklyn Museum; Cambridge, Massachusetts, Harvard University Art Museums, Fogg Museum, Harvard University, Stuart Davis: Art and Art Theory, January-May 1978, no. 53, illustrated p. 132
Cologne, Germany, Internationale Ausstellung Köln, Museum der Stadt, Westkunst Zeitgenössich Kunst Seit 1939, May-August 1981
West Palm Beach, Florida, Norton Gallery & School of Art; New York, Museum of the City of New York; Columbus, Ohio, Columbus Museum of Art, Stuart Davis' New York, October 1985-May 1986, no. 43, p. 16, illustrated p. 70

Alfred H. Barr, ed., Painting and Sculpture in the Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1942, no. 134, pp. 14, 35
Alfred H. Barr, ed., Painting and Sculpture in the Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1948, no. 171, p. 305
Painting and Sculpture in the Museum of Modern Art: A Catalog, New York, 1958, p. 20
Alicia Legg, ed., Painting and Sculpture in the Museum of Modern Art with Selected Works on Paper: Catalogue of the Collection, January 1, 1977, New York, 1977, p. 26
Karen Wilkin, Stuart Davis, New York, 1987, illustrated in color p. 169, pl. 183
Alicia Legg, ed., Painting and Sculpture in the Museum of Modern Art: Catalogue of the Collection with Selected Works on Paper to January 1988, New York, 1988, p. 30
Bonnie L. Grad, "Stuart Davis and Contemporary Culture," Artibus et Historiae, vol. 12, no. 24, 1991, pp. 183-84, illustrated as a diagram p. 185
Ani Boyajian and Mark Rutkoski, eds., Stuart Davis: A Catalogue Raisonné, New Haven, Connecticut, 2007, vol. III, no. 1633, pp. 319-20, illustrated in color

This work is in very good condition and retains its original frame. There is slight paint separation in the black area at center. Under UV: There is no apparent inpainting.
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Study for “Hot Still-Scape” is a remarkable example of Stuart Davis’ mature, highly personal style of abstraction, which emerged in the 1940s. In the first years of this decade, Davis produced several of his most sophisticated images including Hot Still-Scape for Six Colors-7^th Avenue Style (Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Fig. 1)—for which the present painting is a study—that today are considered among the best expressions of his distinctive iconography, and the most complete realizations of his complex theories of art and aesthetics. While continuing to utilize the themes and motifs that had always attracted him, Davis intensified his focus on understanding how shape, texture and especially color could be used to define space on a two-dimensional surface. Calling this synthesis of color and drawing “color-space,” he produced paintings that revisited the configurations of earlier compositions, now rendered with new and dramatic color combinations, which capture the dynamic visual character of the modern world.

In a pattern of overlapping planes of strikingly vibrant, riotous color, Study for “Hot Still-Scape” conveys the lively cacophony of the sights and sounds of New York City, specifically 7^th Avenue, where Davis maintained his studio for 15 years. The artist utilized the streets of Manhattan as subject matter from the beginning of his career. As a young student of Robert Henri, he was deeply influenced by the work of the artists associated with the Ashcan School; his earliest paintings depict the gritty urban scenes preferred by the artists of Henri’s circle, who sought to represent the raw vitality of contemporary life in the city.

In the years following the 1913 Armory show, Davis diverged from Henri‘s teachings and began to embrace influences of the European avant-garde. By the 1920s, he had adopted his own visual vocabulary. A distinctive language of modernism defined his work, described by Wanda M. Corn as “an American style structured on cubism and calibrated to express urban street life and popular culture.” Over the next 35 years, Davis dedicated himself to the development of his aesthetic theories, which he continued to refine, modify and at times, contradict, both in the written word and on canvas. Throughout this development, the metropolis remained a vital source of inspiration for Davis, who later recalled that, “as an American I had need for the impersonal dynamics of New York City” (Bruce Weber, Stuart Davis’ New York, West Palm Beach, Florida 1985, p. 10).

In Study for “Hot Still Scape," Davis revisits one of his most complex and sophisticated compositions from the 1920s: Egg Beater No. 2 (Amon Carter Museum of American Art, Fig. 2). He utilizes the basic compositional structure of Egg Beater No. 2, arranging a series of flat, interlocking areas of color set inside an ambiguous rectilinear space. Although Davis’ imagery appears entirely abstract, both paintings remain rooted in the representational world. While in Egg Beater No. 2 Davis restricts his imagery to the components of a typical still life, the present work is an innovative synthesis of still-life, landscape and invented elements, explaining Davis’ inclusion of “still-scape,” a word of his own invention, in the title. Of the final version of the present painting, Davis wrote, “The subject matter of this picture is well within the everyday experience of any modern city dweller. Fruit and flowers; kitchen utensils; Fall skies; horizons; taxi-cabs; radio; art exhibitions and reproductions; fast travel; Americana; movies; electric signs; dynamics of city sights and sounds; these and a thousand more are common experience and they are the basic subject matter which my painting celebrates” (“Stuart Davis,” Parnassus, vol. 12, December 1940, p. 6).

Davis returned to Manhattan in 1929 after a nine month stay in Paris to find that the city had changed rapidly and dramatically. He felt simultaneously overwhelmed and invigorated by the chaos of the city, which had seemingly modernized in his absence. “The environment,” according to Bruce Weber, “both stimulated his imagination and withstood his varied approach. In his works he captured a sense of New York City’s multiplicity and formulated a provocative visual vocabulary for dealing with the modern metropolis” (Weber, p. 17). Although always a part of his technical process, Davis’ reuse and reinterpretation of existing subjects and compositions now deepened, as he used the ideas he had formed in previous decades to strengthen his understanding of color as a key determinant of spatial arrangements. As Davis himself explained in 1942, “I can work from Nature, from old sketches and paintings of my own, from photographs, and from other works of art. In each case the process consists of transposition of the forms of the subject into a coherent objective color-space continuum, which evokes a direct sensate response to structure” (Philip Rylands, ed., Stuart Davis, Boston, Massachusetts, 1997, p. 26).

Although similar in composition and subject, Study for “Hot Still-Scape” differs dramatically from Egg Beater No. 2 in its palette of bold primary colors, which Davis applied to the canvas with thick impasto. Davis believed that the specific combination of these kaleidoscopic hues—red, orange, yellow, blue, black and white—created a “hot” or dynamic mood. The artist later drew an analogy between these colors and a jazz musician’s use of different instruments to create a melody.

Visually, the painting supports Davis’ assertion that color could be used to create and organize space on a canvas. The planes of fiery yellow, orange and red seem to surge forward into the three dimensional space outside of the picture plane, evoking a strong sense of energy and vitality. This outward thrust is simultaneously restrained by the cooler tones of blue, white and black, which recede into the surface. As a result, color and shape move with and against each other, creating a dynamic composition that resonates with the artist’s sensory experience of New York. As Davis himself explained, “every time you use a color you create a space relationship. It is impossible to put two colors together, even at random, without setting up a number of other events…So the notion that thinking of color as a thing by itself seemed inadequate” (John R. Lane, “Stuart Davis in the 1940s,” Stuart Davis: American Painter, New York, 1991, p. 71).

A month after he completed Hot Still-Scape for Six Colors—7^th Avenue Style, Davis described it as “the product of everyday experience in the new lights, speeds, and spaces of the American environment.” Indeed, in the final version Davis added numerous patterned and calligraphic embellishments and flourishes to the composition, further enhancing the sense of chaos, clamor and vibrancy that was central to his everyday life in the modern, urban world.