AFA Summer 2020

Antiques & Fine Art 73 2020 Stuart Davis (American, 1892–1964), Santa Fe Landscape, 1923. Oil on canvas 20¼ x 24¼ inches. Davis, one of the premier modernist painters of the time, dismissed New Mexico as a place suited to anthropologists, and a distraction, “because the place is always there in such a dominating way. You always had to look at it.” This landscape was painted during the single summer in 1923 that he visited the state. Using a shorthand style of staccato brushstrokes, Davis employs heavy outlines to depict a Santa Fe landmark called the Cross of the Martyrs. By drawing a border around the monument, situated on a hilltop and often visited at sunset, Davis limits and contains three mountain ranges, a view he deemed too vast to capture in its entirety. Stevenson was a Brooklyn painter and printmaker who studied with John Sloan (1871–1951) at the Arts Students League of New York and with abstract expressionist Hans Hoffman (1880–1966) in Provincetown, Massachusetts. Her mentor, John Sloan, a former student of Robert Henri and a fellow member of The Eight (better known as the Ashcan School, painters of “everyday life”) bought a home in New Mexico in 1940 and spent each summer in Santa Fe. At Sloan’s urging, Stevenson joined the art colony in Santa Fe during the summers, starting in the mid- 1940s. She employs the push-and-pull contrasts of hot and cold colors in this painting—a technique easily attributed to her teacher Hans Hoffman. Beulah Stevenson (American, 1890–1965), Camino del Monte Sol, Santa Fe, 1947. Oil on canvas board, 16 x 20 inches.