Stuart Davis (1892-1964)

Mountains and Molehills, a humorous yet sympathetic depiction of working class women in a local mining town, reflects Stuart Davis' keen social awareness characteristic of his early work. Davis studied with Robert Henri at the Henri School from 1909-13. His teacher, best known as a founding member of the AshCan school, encouraged his pupil to find inspiration in his immediate surroundings, particularly in the urban street life in New York and New Jersey where he lived, and translate them into uncensored, gritty depictions of these environs. Mountains and Molehills, innovative both in subject matter and style, simultaneously demonstrates Davis' early foray into abstraction through experimentation of distortion of form while pioneering the use of non-realistic color.

In 1913, Davis attended the International Exhibition of Modern Art, commonly referred to as the Armory Show, and was profoundly impacted by the art that he saw there. He remarked that the show was, "the greatest single influence I have experienced in my work. All my immediately subsequent efforts went toward incorporating Armory Show ideas into my work...Here indeed was the vindication of the anti-academy position of the Henri School, with developments in undreamed of directions. I was enormously stimulated by it...I responded particularly to Gauguin, van Gogh, and Matisse, because broad generalization of form and non-imitative use of color were already in my own experience." (J.J. Sweeney, Stuart Davis, New York, 1945, pp. 9-10). Painted two years after the Armory Show, Mountains and Molehills embodies Davis' unique and innovative style of blending European pictorial attitudes with his own unwavering American sensibility.