Arthur Bowen Davies, a painter, muralist and printmaker of visionary landscapes inhabited by dreamy, arcadian figures, is remembered not only for these works but also for his role in introducing modernism to America.
Born in Utica, New York, Davies showed an early interest in mechanics, sports and art. He first studied privately with Dwight Williams in Utica and, when the family moved to Chicago in 1878, he enrolled at the Chicago Academy of Design under Roy Robertson.
Arthur Bowen Davies - The Bawdy Wind, ca. 1906
Oil on canvas, 18 1/2 x 23 inches, Signed lower left: A. B. Davies
Two years of adventure in the Southwest and Mexico followed. Davies joined an expedition to Mexico as a civil engineer, traveling to the post by horseback after spending time with the Blackfeet Indians in the Dakota Territory in 1880. He was back in Chicago by 1882, enrolled this time at the Art Institute School with Charles Corwin. Four years later, he moved to New York City and began producing illustrations for the Century and St. Nicholas magazines while studying at the Art Students League.
His marriage to a medical doctor, Virginia Davis, in 1892 prompted a move to Congers, New York, where Davies tried unsuccessfully to farm. The neighboring countryside, however, became a new backdrop for his watercolors, pastels and small oil panels of the period. He continued to exhibit in New York and, with the support of his dealer, William Macbeth, was able to spend time in Europe in 1893, studying the work of the Venetians, the Pre-Raphaelites and the German Romantics. Three years later, Macbeth held a one-man show for Davies, which guaranteed him a wide circle of patrons.
By 1900, the artist was having major domestic difficulties. He began living with Edna Potter, a model, in New York City, and assumed the name of David A. Owen within this second group of family and friends. He kept these two separate identities to the end of his life. His artistic friends in New York who knew him as Davies included Marsden Hartley, Rockwell Kent, Walt Kuhn and the members of the Ashcan School (Robert Henri, John Sloan, William Glackens, Ernest Lawson, Maurice Prendergast) with whom he exhibited at Macbeth's famous show of The Eight in 1908.
In 1911, Davies was elected President of the Association of American Painters and Sculptors and, with Walter Pach, Kuhn and others, organized the first major show of modern art in this country, known as the Armory Show of l913. Also during this period, he was advising the collector Lillie P. Bliss, whose Post-Impressionist masterpieces later became the foundation of the Museum of Modern Art. Davies's post-Armory work, under the strong influence of the Synchromism of Morgan Russell and Stanton Macdonald-Wright, combined the interpenetrating planes of Cubism with his figural representations.
In 1924 Davies executed murals for Bliss and for the International House in New York. He also produced, in his lifetime, about eighty works in bronze and wood and numerous lithographs, aquatints and etchings. The last decade saw a return to his romanticized figure works, which show the influence of the theories of "inhalation," in which the models posed while holding their breath. In the twenties, Davies also began to divide his time between New York and Europe, first in Paris and then in Florence.
Arthur Bowen Davies died in Florence in 1928. The Metropolitan Museum of Art held a memorial exhibition two years after his death. He is represented in many important private and public collections including the Addison Gallery of American Art, Andover, Massachusetts; Art Institute of Chicago; the Brooklyn Museum of Art, New York; Butler Institute of American Art, Youngstown, Ohio; Carnegie Institute, Pittsburgh; Chrysler Museum of Art, Norfolk, Virginia; Cincinnati Art Museum, Ohio; Delaware Art Museum, Wilmington; Denver Art Museum, Colorado; the Detroit Institute of Arts, Michigan; High Museum, Atlanta, Georgia; Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, DC; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Minneapolis Institute of Arts, St. Paul, Minnesota; the Montclair Art Museum, New Jersey; Musess Nationaux Paris, France; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; the Museum of Modern Art, New York; National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC; the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, Missouri; the Newark Museum, New Jersey; the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia; Philadelphia Museum of Art; the Phillips Collection, Washington, DC; San Diego Museum of Art, California; Smithsonian American Art Museum, Lawrence, Kansas; Telfair Museum of Art, Savannah, Georgia; the Toledo Museum of Art, Ohio; Wadsworth Athenaeum Museum of Art, Harford, Connecticut; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York and the Worcester Art Museum, Massachusetts.
LB
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