Analogical Emblem

Stuart Davis’ Analogical Emblem is the culmination of several sketches he recorded across two notebooks on a 1933 visit to Gloucester, Massachusetts. The work has also been known as Abstract of Smith’s Cove, relating the composition to the Gloucester site of the same name. Favoring color and perspective over realistic depictions, the work is a bustling image of coastal life—balancing abstracted planes and natural description, while retaining an overall sense of clarity owed to Davis’ keen attention to linear construction. Elements of this composition were later adapted into his famed 1938 mural Swing Landscape (Indiana University Art Museum, Bloomington, Indiana).

On a related drawing of the foreground dock dated August 26, 1933, Davis declared, “This drawing was made by impulse and observance of the adjacent angles only.” Perhaps explaining the title of the present work, immediately following a sketchbook page exploring the arrangement of pillars, ladders, and distant land, Davis summarized the “facts of painting” as “Visualize abstract area groups which have analogy to simple visual naturalism.” (as quoted in Stuart Davis: A Catalogue Raisonné, vol. II, pp. 278, 283, 287)