The Haunting Talent of Noah Davis
Noah Davis died when he was thirty-two. It’s a strange, in-between age in the history of painting. Basquiat and Schiele left us in their twenties; Kahlo made it to forty-seven; O’Keeffe to ninety-eight. I didn’t think much of the difference until I saw the survey of Davis’s work at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, where all his best paintings seem to sit somewhere in the middle of life and in the middle of everything. The work is light and dark, solid and liquid, empty and busy, earnest and tongue in cheek. At times, Davis is a masterly nocturne painter, in the vein of Whistler and Henry Ossawa Tanner; at others, his world is medicinally clear and well lit, like that of a Thomas Eakins. Don’t be surprised if you leave the show feeling both healed and brokenhearted.
Curated by Wells Fray-Smith and Eleanor Nairne, the exhibition is on its final stop after touring through Potsdam, London, and Los Angeles. What makes it so affecting are the enthusiastic lurches in Davis’s style, as he spots one shimmering possibility for his art and then darts to another. In total, he left behind more than four hundred paintings, drawings, sculptures, and collages, and also founded, with his wife, Karon Davis, a cultural institution in Los Angeles called the Underground Museum. Like an earlier generation of Black artists in L.A., such as Charles White and Betye Saar, who responded to the exclusions of the art world by exhibiting work in churches, community centers, local businesses, and homes, Davis wanted the Underground to bring museum-calibre art to people in its immediate vicinity, in the neighborhood of Arlington Heights. The Philadelphia show has an ample selection of Davis’s paintings but also includes a mini-installation from the Underground, where Davis remade some minimalist and post-minimalist hits—Dan Flavin’s fluorescent lights, Robert Smithson’s pile of dirt looking at itself in a mirror, Jeff Koons’s vacuums in a vitrine—and called the exhibit “Imitation of Wealth” (2013). That allusive smirk may seem unrelated to his approach as a painter, but it’s not. Art history was always alive for him.
The show opens with Davis’s early work, some of which is precisely that. Looking at reproductions, I’d been eager to see “40 Acres and a Unicorn” (2007)—a twist on Reconstruction’s failed promise of “forty acres and a mule”—but, on closer inspection, its fidgety modelling of a man’s face revealed an important caveat to Davis’s skill, which is that he wasn’t a portraitist. What’s a delight, though, are the rival tendencies on display in the first room. You can see a lunge toward van Gogh in the thick, swirling brushwork of “Mary Jane” (2008), and an out-of-left-field gesture in “Nobody” (2008), where Davis does a riff on a Malevich square, in purple. Then there’s a little thunderclap of originality: “Bad Boy for Life” (2007). Squeezed into a room with candy-striped wallpaper, a woman raises her arm to strike a boy on her lap. The first thing you’ll notice is her mouth. She doesn’t have one. The body horror turns absurd when you see that the child is dressed like a naughty jockey, wearing a gold suit and leather riding boots. The painting could be about the transmission of violence across generations, but it has all of the moral weight of a circus tent. Like much of Davis’s best work, it creates ambivalence through a specific stylistic trick: arranging blurred or roughly painted figures on a crisply delineated ground. The people always seem to be both of this world and the next.
The year 2008 was a hinge in Davis’s life. He fell in love with his future wife, Karon; had his first solo exhibition, at the Roberts & Tilton gallery, in L.A.; and was the youngest painter chosen for a major exhibition of the Rubell Family Collection which featured thirty Black artists, including stars such as David Hammons, Glenn Ligon, Lorna Simpson, and Kara Walker. Davis felt uneasy about the strictures of “Black artist” as a category, but was thrilled about the invitation. “For a while, I thought I was being put in a box,” he said. “But it’s probably the most glamorous box I’ve ever been in.” Growing up in Seattle, his first eureka moment with art was seeing Walker’s cutout silhouettes. Now he was in a show with her.
By the following year, Davis had a discernible style. Playing solid blocks of color against thin or runny paint, he could turn the surface of a painting into its emotional core. In “The Architect” (2009), a portrait of the L.A. architect Paul Revere Williams, a glacier of light blue swallows Williams’s face and drips onto the model of a building, which fans out in a ziggurat of blocks and triangles. Williams was the first Black member of the American Institute of Architects; he had to learn how to draw upside down, because white clients didn’t like sitting next to him. The psychological chill sent through the painting by the drip work isn’t unlike Edvard Munch’s “The Sick Child” (1885-86), where the streaks cast over the scene imply the painter’s own tears. That’s what an active surface can do. My favorite example in the show is “The Year of the Coxswain” (2009), in which a group of rowers in singlets carry a boat across the picture plane, slicing it in two. There’s a lone trumpeter to the side, wearing a black tunic and looking like Death. Note all of the variations in texture. The boat is as dry and yellow as a crumpet, but the paint elsewhere runs in long tendrils, or swirls into the swampy alluvial ground. In Davis’s work, runny paint has a way of acquitting objects of their permanence. Here, it gives the impression that the rowers are pallbearers and the boat is a coffin. A painting of morning calisthenics turns into an elegy.
Walking through the show, I noticed that my attention kept swimming toward the blues and greens of Davis’s pools, lakes, and rivers. They’re hypnotizing—particularly those in his “1975” series, a sequence based on a cache of his mother’s high-school photographs from Chicago. In “1975 (8)” (2013), we’re floating in the air near a municipal pool. A boy in swim trunks launches at a diagonal into the water, which is just a block of teal. (Think Hockney’s “A Bigger Splash.”) Especially striking is Davis’s choice to drain the soles of the boy’s feet of color, while filling the pool with it. The painting makes dozens of little feints like this, giving and taking away. Davis is a curious sort of colorist, using a limited palette that works overtime in the production of moods. His painting “The Missing Link 4” (2013) doubles as a mini-thesis on his materials, as he turns the windows of a Mies van der Rohe high-rise in Detroit into rows of little paint swatches with some of his favorite colors: skin tones, grays and blacks, and bright open-sky blues. It’s not beautiful or soothing, per se, but it cuts right to the essence of things. Bodies, buildings, and air.
At the end of the show is a small annex with just three untitled paintings, all done in July, 2015, a month before Davis died, of cancer. If we didn’t know that, the paintings would look different. But we do. Now they read like three studies of disappearance. In one, there’s a body lying on the ground, with a patina of mint-green paint over the surface—a sign of decay. In another, two women on a couch, exhausted, sit next to a third person, whose waist has been abolished with a slash of dripping gray paint. The work that disturbs the most is of a translucent man. He has an obscured, purplish face, a little roundel for an ear, and flecks of white, like stars, in his body. Standing hunched, almost neckless, he extends his arm to open a door that isn’t there. Behind him, his shadow is impossibly small, not much larger than a dishrag. You can feel it, heightened by the solid ground and the decisive colors of the wall: he’s about to evanesce. ♦