Yellow Hills
Stuart DAVIS
(American, 1892-1964)
Yellow Hills
Date1919
Mediumoil on canvas
Dimensionsoverall: 24 x 30 in. (61 x 76.2 cm)
frame: 32 5/8 × 38 5/8 × 2 3/4 in. (82.9 × 98.1 × 7 cm)
ClassificationPAINTINGS
Credit LineSBMA, Gift of Heyward Cutting
Object number1980.73
Subject(s)
- landscape
Collection
- 20th century American
Sub-Collection(s)
- Modernism
On View
Not on viewCollections
Label TextAfter his epiphany at the 1913 Armory exhibition, where Davis saw works by Cézanne, Gauguin, Van Gogh, and Matisse, he wrote the following: “I resolved that I definitely had to become a “modern artist.” It took an awful long time. I soon came to look at color more objectively so that I could paint a green tree red without batting an eye … but the ability to think about positional relationships objectively in terms of what they were, instead of what they represented, took many years.” While Davis’s technique would continue to morph over the course of his career, this painting is an excellent example of the lessons he gleaned from Van Gogh as applied to the Pennsylvania landscape. Paint is so thickly laid on that the impasto casts shadows and the high color palette responds less to descriptive ends than to the artist’s emotional response to the motif. Clearly, the darker palette and urban realism of the Ashcan School to which he had earlier subscribed no longer held sway. Davis would go on to take a leadership role in American modernism, developing his own deadpan version of Cubist-inspired abstraction, often impelled by the design aesthetics of collage.
