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Untitled by Stuart Davis

Untitled by Stuart Davis
Accession Code: wu0024
Title: Untitled
Date completed: 1964
Medium: Prints
Inscription: Signed in plate, inscribed with title and blind stamped with publisher'smark, lower right edge.
Location Name: Medical Teaching Centre
Location Description: Corridor

This print is part of a portfolio of 10 screenprints, published in an edition of 500 by Wadsworth Athenaeum, Hartford, Connecticut. These prints by leading American artists of the 1960s, demonstrate how appropriate the medium was for the hard edged style of post-painterly abstraction.

The prints were commissioned by Sam Wagstaff, Curator of the Wadsworth Athenaeum. He said that he wanted people 'to get as big a hunk of the current aesthetic as they could as cheaply as possible'. Wagstaff asked each artist to provide a design; a proof was returned to them for approval and/or adjustment.

Davis was a friend and mentor of several key figures in the American art world and his own work took on many of the themes and preoccupations emerging in the 1950's and 1960's. The relationship between colour and space on the flat surface is one of these as illustrated in Untitled (Guy as Guy).

Davis' view was that: "Color must be thought of as texture, which automatically allows one to visualize in terms of space. Every time you use color, you create a space relationship".