- Artist or Maker
- Stuart Davis
United States, Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, active New York City and France, Paris, 1892-1964 - Title
- Premiere
- Date Made
- 1957
- Medium
- Oil on canvas
- Dimensions
- 58 × 50 in. (147.32 × 127 cm)
- Accession Number
- M.60.4
- Collecting Area
- Modern Art
- Curatorial Notes
Premiere’s colorful quadrants combine geometric abstraction and the graphic appeal of consumer goods in anticipation of the Pop art of the 1960s. In response to a commission by Fortune magazine, which invited several artists to make still life paintings of ordinary products, Stuart Davis purchased common items from the supermarket, such as coffee, juice, and Brillo cleaning pads, and arranged them on the floor of his studio. Drawings of the process—also in LACMA’s collection— reveal the artist’s exacting approach to finding the right rhythm of color and sensory impact of the scene. In the end, Davis highlighted simple shapes and contrasting colors with bold terms such as “large,” “free,” and “new.” These are the hyperboles of advertising, but they also comment on the vocabulary of Abstract Expressionism, which was becoming cliché and giving way to Pop’s irony and humor.
Wall label, 2021.
- Selected Bibliography
- Hunter, Sam. Art Since 1950, American and International. Seattle: Seattle World's Fair, 1962.
- Selleck, Jack. Line. Worcester, MA: Davis Publications, 1974.
- Green, Dominic. "Music of the Eye." Art & Antiques 39, no.6 (2016): 64-71.
- Boyajian, Ani; Rutkoski, Mark. Stuart Davis: A Catalogue Raisonné. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2007.
- Cooper, Harry, and Barbara Haskell. Stuart Davis: In Full Swing. Washington, D.C.: National Gallery of Art, 2016.
- Sims, Lowery Stokes. Stuart Davis: American Painter. New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1991.
