Stuart Davis has a sure claim to a place in the history of American art. As early as 1932, he was hailed as “the ace of American modernists” and there is scarcely a museum in the United States that doesn’t boast of at least one of his works. Ask for a description of a typical Davis and you are likely to hear about syncopated, brilliantly colored, hard-edged planes, something like the Museum of Modern Art’s Visa (the one with “champion” in large letters) or the Whitney’s Owh! In San Pao (the one with the taxi-yellow background that frequently hangs in the stairwell). They are typical Davises, all right, but they are late paintings and characteristic of only a small part of a career spanning half a century. Surprisingly, given Davis’s fame, most of his long, complex evolution as an artist remains unfamiliar.

Davis first exhibited in 1910. He was seventeen, Robert Henri’s star pupil, and already adept at the scenes of urban low-life that had won Henri and his intimate circle—a group that included John Sloan, George Luks, and Everett Shinn—the nickname “Ashcan School.” Three years later, Davis had five watercolors accepted for the American section of the great, artist-organized “International Exhibition of Modern Art”—the 1913 Armory Show. He later recalled that the daring European art in the exhibition, which included works by Cézanne, Van Gogh, Matisse, Picasso, and many others, polarized New York artists. He himself was unequivocally enthusiastic, profoundly excited by his first direct encounter with