After Stuart Davis

Sherrie Levines After Stuart Davis from 1983 is a watercolor over graphite on white wove paper that exemplifies the American appropriation artists practice of re-creating existing works of art by hand, a strategy that complements her better-known practice of rephotographing existing photographs and raises questions about the relationship between original and copy that are fundamental to her practice. Davis, the American modernist painter whose abstract compositions based on the visual language of commercial signage and popular culture were among the most exuberant and visually energetic works of American modernism, provided Levine with a subject that combines the issues of authorship and appropriation with the specific visual qualities of American modernist painting, in which the distinction between high art and popular culture is already blurred. The watercolor medium, which Levine uses to reproduce the visual appearance of a Stuart Davis painting rather than photographing it, introduces a new dimension to her appropriation practice: the question of whether a hand-made copy of a painting raises the same issues of authorship and originality as a photographic reproduction. The white wove paper provides a smooth, absorbent ground that allows the watercolor to reproduce the flat, even color of a Davis painting with a fidelity that makes the copy virtually indistinguishable from the original, while the graphite underdrawing reveals the working process of an artist who is making a copy rather than an original. The year 1983 places this work in the period when Levine was expanding her appropriation practice from photography to painting and watercolor, creating hand-made copies of original works that raise the same questions of authorship and originality as her photographic copies.

Levines hand-made copies of modernist paintings are significant works in the history of appropriation art, and After Stuart Davis demonstrates the expansion of her practice from photographic to manual reproduction. The work influenced the discourse on authorship and originality and the broader tradition of art that critiques the patriarchal and economic structures of the art world.

A 1983 watercolor over graphite on white wove paper by Levine reproducing a Stuart Davis painting by hand, expanding her appropriation practice from photographic to manual reproduction and raising the same questions of authorship and originality in relation to American modernist painting.