Barber Shop Chord

American printmaker and painter Stuart Davis is considered one of America's important modernist artists. Born in Philadelphia to artistic parents—both his mother and father studied at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts—Davis began his creative career at seventeen, when he left school to study in New York with artist Robert Henri (1865-1929). Davis worked under Henri’s tutelage at least a dozen years-- until 1912. His earliest works consisted of city street scenes painted with heavy brushstrokes and a dark palette, reflecting the influence of Henri and his urban realist contemporaries including George Luks (1867-1933), John Sloan (1871-1951), and Everett Shinn (1876-1953), all members of the so-called Ashcan School.

Davis exhibited five watercolors at the controversial Armory Show of 1913, which introduced European avant-garde art to American audiences. He was undoubtedly stirred by what he saw there, because in the years following the exhibition, Davis eschewed his Ashcan realist style and began to experiment with European abstract styles such as Post-impressionism and cubism. He soon began to develop the artistic vocabulary—geometry, precision, pattern, intersecting planes, and visual humor—that would define his works for the rest of his career.

While in Paris during 1928-1929, Davis made a number of important lithographs focusing on architectural subjects and street scenes, which he imbued with a cubist sensibility. He continued to explore the medium of lithography upon his return to the United States, and the works he created during 1930-1931 count among his most successful.

Barber Shop Chord is evocative of the frenetic spirit of jazz music, which Davis considered the musical equivalent of abstract art; the title of the lithograph itself refers to this music.. By using texture and bold black and white contrasts in this work, Davis created the illusion of perspective and depth. He juxtaposed recognizable symbols such as the striped barbershop sign, fire hydrant, and cross with arbitrary geometric shapes and planes that float around the image. The placement of words within the lithograph grounds its abstract composition. The tower structure in the top left hand corner alludes to a particular setting and links this lithograph to Davis’s earlier realist works; it represents one of two brick, natural gas tanks located in Gloucester, Massachusetts, where Davis spent a number of summers.