Sketchbooks

Stuart Davis: Sketchbooks reproduces pages from the private sketchbooks of the American modernist painter Stuart Davis (1892-1964), offering a close look at the working notes behind his jazz-inflected, proto-Pop paintings.

The book was first published in 1986 by New York's Grace Borgenicht Gallery in a limited edition of 1,500 copies, gathering facsimile pages of Davis's sketchbooks: quick studies, color notes, and fragments of text. This Taplinger Publishing edition followed in 1987, bringing the facsimile to a wider trade audience.

Davis trained under Robert Henri and began his career among the Ashcan School painters before turning toward Cubism after seeing the 1913 Armory Show. Over the following decades he developed a distinctive American vernacular of hard-edged color, syncopated composition, and fragments of text and packaging drawn from advertising and jazz culture, anticipating Pop art by a generation. His sketchbooks were the workshop for that vocabulary, recording the improvisational note-taking behind his finished paintings.