About Stuart Davis:

Davis was about 16 years old when he quit high school to study art. In 1913 the young man saw the famous Armory Show.

The pictures of Seurat, Fernand, Leger, and Picasso changed his ideas. Five of Stuart Davis' own watercolors hung in the Armory show.

Davis felt a great delight in the paintings in the Armory Show. Davis decided to become a modern artist.

When he looked at European art his work suddenly looked old-fashioned. He was still using art to record the look of things. This is what artists had always done.

By the early 1920s Davis' work became more Cubist. Cubism is an idea in art developed by artists Picasso and Braque.

Cubism grew out of the ideas of Cézanne's art work and African tribal sculpture. Picasso's geometric painting Les Demoiselles d'Avignon was the first painting called cubist.

Davis turned from natural forms and landscapes to sharp-edged abstractions. Abstract art does not imitate the subject of the work. Davis work developed clear colors and machine like forms.

Davis said, "A picture is an independent object with a reality of its own." Art does not have to be about a thing which is drawn or painted.