The Lives, Loves, and Art of Arthur B. Davies - Hardcover

Perlman, Bennard B.; Davies, Arthur B.

9780791438350: The Lives, Loves, and Art of Arthur B. Davies

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 079143835X ISBN 13: 9780791438350

Publisher: State Univ of New York Pr, 1998

This is the first full-length biography of the artist Arthur B. Davies, who played a major role in twentieth-century American art's coming-of-age. Includes 101 illustrations.

This is the first full-length biography of the American artist Arthur B. Davies, who played a major role in twentieth-century American art’s coming-of-age. It was Davies who made possible the landmark exhibitions of The Eight and The Rockwell Kent Independent, and in 1913 he emerged as the mastermind behind the Armory Show, the first large-scale display of European modern art in the United States. Dozens of the country’s best-known collectors purchased their initial avant-garde acquisitions at this show, and U.S. artists, in turn, could no longer be kept in check by the conservative National Academy after viewing works by Duchamp, Matisse, Picasso, and others.

Drawing on extensive archival research, including previously unavailable letters and diaries, this book covers the breadth and depth of the artist’s life and career, from his boyhood in Utica in the 1860s; through his close association with such artists and collectors as Robert Henri, John Sloan, Alfred Stieglitz, Lizzie Bliss, and Abby Aldrich Rockefeller; to his death in Italy in 1928 in the company of his mistress, with whom he had lived a secret double life as “David A. Owen” for more than twenty years.

Included are 101 color and black-and-white illustrations of Davies’s own work, ranging from romantic dream visions to fragmented cubist forms, as well as photographs depicting his family and friends. Davies, who worked in over twenty different media, was called "one of the foremost artists in this country" and “one of the greatest artists of our time,” and his work is represented in major collections throughout the United States. The illustrations alone, many of works in private collections and available here to the public for the first time, as well as the appended chronology, exhibition checklist, and list of addresses, make this a valuable addition to the library of every art dealer, curator, and student of American art. But equally fascinating is the story of the forces, personalities, and relationships that helped shape the course of twentieth-century American art.

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About the Author:

Bennard B. Perlman is former Professor and Chair of the Department of Fine and Applied Arts at the Baltimore City Community College and has lectured extensively on American art. He is the author of The Immortal Eight: American Painting from Eakins to the Armory Show; 1% Art in Architecture; The Golden Age of American Illustration: F. R. Gruger and His Circle; and Robert Henri: His Life and Art and editor of Revolutionaries of Realism: The Letters of John Sloan and Robert Henri.

From Publishers Weekly:

Painter Arthur B. Davies (1862-1928) emerges as an odious and, probably, deeply disturbed man in the detailed account of his life by researcher and writer Perlman (Robert Henri: His Life and Art). Davies (like Henri) exhibited with the group of painters known as The Eight, and as president of the Association of American Painters and Sculptors, he introduced European modern art to the American public by organizing the 1913 Armory Show. But Davies built his career by gaining the affection of women whom he neglected badly once they bore his children. Only Lizzie Bliss and the other wealthy patrons he charmed escaped the neglect suffered by his wife and mistress, with whom he lived a secret double life, after they bore his children. Perlman's cautious, at times plodding style works in a biography that meticulously piles up the facts about Davies's scandalous behavior: he took his mistress to Europe in order to avoid the census takers; the house he volunteered as collateral for the Armory Show belonged to the hardworking wife he had virtually abandoned years before. He found the refuge he sought--a place where he had neither financial nor emotional responsibilities--in art. Differing sharply from the cityscapes painted by such colleagues as John Sloan, his pastoral idylls have classicizing qualities that pay a very weak homage to Puvis de Chavannes. Everywhere else, it seems, Davies was his own man. But, as this fascinating biography attests, his freedoms cost others dearly. 101 illustrations (16 in color) not seen by PW.

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