American painter Stuart Davis documented and celebrated the modernization of American cities in the 1920s and 1930s in his works of art. While other artists painted factories and machines, Davis turned his eye to the everyday sights of his urban surroundings, particularly the busy streets of New England. In Gloucester Harbor, Davis depicts a bustling waterfront scene that captures the rhythm and movements that make up life in a dynamic city.
Between 1915 and 1934, Davis spent his summers in the picturesque town of Gloucester on Cape Ann in northeastern Massachusetts. The area inspired a number of paintings, including this vibrant view of boats, piers, houses, and even smoke arranged in a complex composition. Combining an interest in Cubism with an insistence on depicting semi-recognizable objects, Davis searched for abstract patterns in everyday scenes. Like the Cubists, Davis reduced his objects to simplified geometric forms and then reassembled them to create a two-dimensional composition. Davis paints the entire scene in a series of flat planes of color. Flatness in a painting can be described as smooth areas with the absence of surface detail. Although he used overlapping shapes to suggest depth, the mountains and buildings in the background are as brightly colored and as precisely outlined as the objects in the foreground. The use of color to express rather than describe recalls the work of the Fauve artists, who used vivid colors and bold brushstrokes.
In this work, the artist was inspired by the pulse of people and machines in the harbor, which he related to the modern and fractured rhythms of jazz music. Gloucester Harbor is alive with energetic improvisation like the uniquely American sounds of jazz. He breaks apart this dockside scene of boats and water and translates it into a rhythmic pattern of geometric shapes and color. The water still ripples, but in flat yellow bars. Furthermore, little depth is included in the composition. Everything is flat—in fact, the right corner is even folded up as if the whole scene were a flag. But the pieces fit together into a jumbled, slightly crooked surprise—like the structure of jazz music.
Davis’ interest in jazz demonstrates his attraction to American culture and his resolve to celebrate American art—both musically and visually. He became determined to develop into a “modern” artist after visiting the Armory Show in 1913, the landmark event that marked the true beginning of modernism in the United States. It was, he recalled, “the greatest shock to me—the greatest single influence I have experienced.”
