About This Artwork

Stuart Davis
American, 1892-1964

Detail Study #1 for "Package Deal", 1956

Gouache with graphite on off-white wove paper
411 x 331 mm
Gift of Leo S. Guthman, 2003.270

Although he studied with the quintessential early 20th-century American painter Robert Henri, Stuart Davis was profoundly influenced by European abstract art, especially the flattened planes of Cubist art that he saw at the 1913 Armory Show in New York. Later Davis also used the solid forms of signage and advertising to evoke the tempo of jazz and urban street life, as in this drawing. Made as a commission for Fortune magazine in 1956, Package Deal is a series of works in which Davis reinterpreted the traditional theme of still life.