Post-War & Contemporary Art

Provenance: 

A. A. Goldfarb 

Lot Essay:

Nicholas Davis: Monumentalizing Harlem 

Untitled (Street Sweeper in Harlem), 1971 shows a glimpse of the bright, pop-like world of Nicholas Davis (American, b. 1937). Though featuring a quotidian scene of a street sweeper in the left foreground, dragging his trash bin behind him as he walks past a group of rowhouses, Davis idealizes the composition through his bold use of geometry and color, designating the figure a hero.

Inorganic shapes and heavy contours work to emphasize the sweeper through his placement in the foreground while geometric forms draw the viewer’s eye to the figure’s interactions with his environment: the rowhouses spanning the upper plane of the composition, the diagonal line of the street, and trash can with garbage bags at the right foreground corner are defined by various-sized rectangles and triangles. The wheels attached to the sweeper’s bin are the only circles in the composition, drawing the viewer’s eye repeatedly back to the lower center. The viewer is continually invited to engage with the triangular relationship around the wheels created between the sweeper, the rowhouses, and the bin. The vertical form of the sweeper is emphasized as he cuts through the horizontal planes between the verticals of the rowhouses and trashcans, and the geometric grid from the horizontal diagonals of the rowhouses and street. The more organic (but still boxy) forms of the sweeper’s body emphasize his presence in the composition as well, allowing him to stand out in this rigidly defined space. Davis’s use of color accentuates the sweeper as it guides the viewer through the composition. The colors idealize the ordered scene and elevate the sweeper as a monumental figure.

Davis applied the colors in this painting as shallow blocks of pigment without use of shading. This lack of tonal variance within the blocks of color and unnatural shades—bright red and deep navy in the city street and a flare of yellows, blues, reds, and pinks in the rowhouses -- lend the impression of ordered but spectacular artificiality. The clashes of color, though different, are not discordant, creating a pleasing staccato as the viewer’s eye scans the rowhouses across the composition. Though the colors are artificial (the blaze of pinks in the upper left, the red of the street stopping at the sweeper’s feet, the yellows and oranges of the first few rowhouses at the upper left suggest a morning sunrise), they are contextualized in the composition by the sweeper’s isolation in the space as he paces the street before the neighborhood’s inhabitants are awake. Davis illustrates a Harlem where the streets are clean and the garbage is carefully collected and stored, with a telephone line at the upper left suggesting a neighborhood with amenities: a pop-colored world perfectly at peace in the early morning that monumentalizes the street sweeper who is doing his part in in maintaining this ordered space.

Davis worked for much his career in Harlem and was in involved in a variety of black-centric art exhibitions, including Harlem Artists 69 at the Studio Museum in Harlem and the Philadelphia Civic Center’s Afro American Artists, 1800-1969. He was a member of the Long Island Black Artist Association, an organization founded in 1968 that works to find exhibition venues highlighting black artists, while also providing a center of artistic fellowship. In painting areas familiar to him in his bright way that utilizes a bold geometric plane, he was able to highlight the usually overlooked figures of his neighborhood, particularly clear here in this early morning scene.