"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."
Noah Davis died at thirty-two, leaving more than four hundred paintings, drawings, sculptures, and collages. His work shifts enthusiastically across styles, ranging from nocturnal, Whistler-like atmospheres to medicinally lit, Eakins-like clarity. The paintings balance opposites—light and dark, solid and liquid, empty and busy—and convey both earnestness and wit. Davis and his wife, Karon Davis, founded the Underground Museum in Los Angeles to bring museum-calibre art to Arlington Heights. The Underground follows a tradition of Black artists creating alternative exhibition spaces in response to exclusion. A Philadelphia show presents a broad selection of his paintings alongside a mini-installation from the Underground.
Read at The New Yorker
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