Born in Washington, D.C., in 1920, Gene Davis worked as a sportswriter before his career as an artist began in 1949. Davis, a leading American artist of the twentieth century, contributed significantly to the Color Field and Post-Painterly Abstraction movements that reached prominence in the 1960s and the Washington Color School. Davis was never formally trained, which he viewed as a positive aspect that freed him from the traditional and limiting aspects of art schooling. Instead, Davis developed his artistic skills through the art institutions in Washington and regular visits to museums and galleries in New York. He also received guidance from friend, artist and curator Jacob Kainen.
His first exhibition of drawings took place at Washington’s Dupont Theatre Gallery in 1952, and the following year, he showed paintings at Catholic University. While gaining popularity in the 1960s, Davis’ art practice focused on spontaneity. In his early work, he explored the concept of musical abstraction, inspired by Paul Klee, which created a sense of rhythm through visual alliteration. His highly successful colour stripe works use this, and Davis has explained that he encourages each colour to be observed in how it operates across the painting to understand what his paintings mean fully. He exhibited his colour stripe paintings at the “Washington Color Painters", a travelling exhibition organized by Gerald Nordland, which premiered at the Washington Gallery of Modern Art in 1965. Throughout the rest of his career, Davis used a variety of methods, media, and sizes, from minuscule "micro-paintings," often no larger than half an inch in either direction, to large public installations as seen in his 1972 artwork “Franklin's Footpath,” made up of monumental stripes painted on the street in front of the Philadelphia Museum of Art.
The artwork of Gene Davis is held in various prominent collections, including the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington; the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.
