Stuart Davis’s Electric Lights and Buildings was probably made in 1931, when the artist was creating drawings and lithographs that juxtaposed details of several cities in one view. This drawing demonstrates how Davis’s vision evolved from a scattered grouping of scenes into a reductive composition. His inclusion of separate scenes in one work was the result of his desire to compare and contrast New York, Paris, and Gloucester, Massachusetts, underscoring the composition with a Cubist grid.