American Art Collaborative

"Electric Bulb" exemplifies Davis' experimental encounter with Cubism. His use of oversized objects, portrayed with hard-edged clarity, foreshadowed what Davis would continue to achieve later in his career. Davis developed and expanded upon a unique analysis of the modern idiom. "Electric Bulb" is an expression of the American scene, fragmented and recombined as a vividly colored geometric structure. Between 1916 and 1920, Davis's work underwent a dramatic stylistic change. He abandoned the expressionistic landscapes and portraits painted in a style reminiscent of Van Gogh in favor of the visual language of cubism, adopting the bold forms and unmodeled planes of color to express the raw energy of postwar America. In 1923 and 1924, he painted a series of images based on the most common artifacts of modern life--an eggbeater, a saw, and in the Dallas Museum of Art work, a light bulb and its cardboard sleeve. Davis exaggerated the forms of these industrial objects and colored them brilliantly, creating visual counterparts to the rhythms of the Jazz Age. These works represent a clean break with traditional still-life painting, exemplifying Davis's comment in 1923 that "No work of art can be true to nature in the objective sense. The nearer it approximates the natural appearance of objects the more it is likely to be far away from art."