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Artform May 1974 RR 1974

[[image - caption: William M. Davis, A Canvas Back, n.d., o/c 8" x 10". (The Suffolk Museum Stony Brook, Long Island, N.Y.)]]

ALFRED FRANKENSTEIN

William M. Davis is not one of the major heroes in the history of American painting. The only comprehensive show ever devoted to his work lasted three days, October 16-18, 1971, in the rooms of the Historical Society of Greater Port Jefferson Long Island, and the catalogue (Melville A. Kitchin, Port Jefferson's Foremost Painter W.M. Davis, 1829-1920) for it has just appeared, in the spring of 1974, thereby establishing something of a record for time lag between exhibition and publication. He was a follower of Heorge Henry Durrie and of William Sidney Mount, but at one point he broke through to an astonishing prediction of Pop art and is the earliest of the several 19th-century painters whose parallels to Pop are so striking as to suggest a line of descent between them and the Lichtensteins, Warhols, and Jim Dines of the present century.

The picture in question, now at the Suffolk Museum in Stony Brook, Long Island is of the back of a painting. A sturdy canvas stretcher is held together with large old-fashioned keys in three of its corners, and two envelopes have been inserted between the back of the stretcher and the canvas. The uppermost envelope, addressed to Davis at Port Jefferson, and postmarked at Westport, New York on March 6, without a year date, has been slashed open at its right-hand end to reveal a letter and the edge of a banknote; the envelope below reveals only its stamp and two postmarks, only one of which — "New York," without a date — is legible. The top stretcher bar bears a painted label lettered with the painfully arch title, A Canvas Back/By Kro Matic.

The brown rose stamp on the lower letter was issued

FOOLING THE EYE

[[image - caption: Roy Litchtenstein, Stretcher Frame, 1968, oil and magna on canvas, 30" x 30".]]

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