Gene Davis

By the 1960s, Washington D.C. born Gene Davis had become a central figure of the Washington Color School who’s members included Kenneth Noland, Howard Mehring, Morris Lewis, and Howard Mehring. Their 1965 exhibition called The Washington Color Painters at the now defunct Washington Gallery of Modern Art, and which traveled to the Walker Art Center, solidified the style as Washington’s signature art movement. Though he worked in a variety of media, Davis’ best-known paintings, executed over a twenty-seven year period, are the vertical stripe works in acrylic on unprimed canvas, including our five Flamingo paintings from 1970. Though he himself was not a musician, Davis referred to the repetition of colored intervals as being akin to musical rhythm. It was his suggestion that, when looking at his paintings, one begins by “… simply glancing at the work, select a specific color and take the time to see how it operates across the painting. Enter the painting through the door of a single color, and then you can understand what my painting is all about.”

Though the Washington Color School of painters were part of a larger movement in art concerned with non-representational painting, the general structure and order of their canvases separated them from the contemporary movement of Abstraction Expressionism.