Artist Noah Davis left us way too soon

Ephemeral and timeless

Paintings by Noah Davis at the Hammer Museum in Westwood

by Bondo Wyszpolski

I was beginning to feel guilty. I’d go to the Hammer Museum in Westwood and see much-ballyhooed exhibitions like “Breath(e)” and “Alice Coltrane, Monument Eternal,” and come away not very impressed. But now we have “Noah Davis” on view throughout the summer, and what a poignant, elegant show it is.

If we’re talking about this artist, we’re not talking ancient history. Raised in Seattle, where he was born in 1983, Noah Davis went to New York and studied at the Cooper Union School of Art before relocating to Los Angeles in 2004. He had his first solo show here in 2008, the same year he met and married the artist Karon Vereen. Their son, Moses, was born in 2010. In 2012, having inherited money from his father, Noah and Karon rented four adjacent storefronts along Washington Blvd. in Arlington Heights and converted the spaces into the Underground Museum, which opened in 2012.

The Underground Museum became a cultural community center for the black and brown residents of the area by hosting concerts, talks, and film screenings in addition to art shows.

An auspicious beginning, but it came to a halt when Davis died of a rare cancer at the age of just 32. Some of us are just getting started at 32, but other artists who died young (Aubrey Beardsley at 26 or Egon Schiele at 28) have also left behind a stunning legacy.

One doesn’t propose to put Davis in such exalted company merely because of his early death, but because in a span of maybe eight or nine good years he created hundreds of paintings, works on paper, and sculptures, many of which are quite remarkable. About 50 of these works are in the current show where it’s the large-format oil paintings that often convey a fine balance between the vigorous and the graceful.

The canvases depict people, not in any conventional portrait sort of way, but as if glimpsed and captured at random or informally. Partly that’s because many of the works were based on casual snapshots picked up at flea markets and the like and then repurposed. The subjects are African American, and Davis has been quoted as saying that he chose “to show Black people in normal scenarios.”

As a person of color in the United States, Davis undoubtedly confronted racial issues, but his decision not to push an agenda based on inequality or gender or racial politics worked to his advantage because it allows and invites the viewer, of whatever color, to focus on the quality of the art and not have it diluted by an attitude that can reveal more about someone with an axe to grind, pulling us away from the aesthetics of the work.

Yes, perhaps an artist should poke and probe, and make us ponder what we’re seeing and why we’re seeing it. I understand that. Art shouldn’t be a babysitter. But putting a viewer on the defensive is rarely a good idea.

I emphasize this because, for the moment at least, we can put everything else aside and simply look at what Noah Davis has created. These are figurative paintings, layered with rich, soothing, muted tones, and with a creamy and somewhat saturated application of color. They do not have hard, sharp, and harsh angles and thus are visually embraceable. But it’s more than all that. It’s also the artist’s eye for composition and color balance that’s commendable in painting after painting.

This is what we want to lose ourselves in, the virtuosic handling of form and an intuition for knowing just where each pigment and tonal value needs to be placed. In canvas after canvas we witness a strong, sure hand and yet a gentle craftsman’s touch. The noted painter Francesco Clemente, addressing his words to Davis in hindsight, tells him, “to think of the gentleness implied in your being a painter, to think of the fury implied in your being a painter.”

A compelling example might be “Painting for My Dad” (2011), created when his father was ill and dying. In the picture, is that the painter’s father, about to step into the abyss? Or is it the artist, with his lantern, trying to glimpse and grasp what lies ahead and beyond? It can, of course, be both; and yes it can also be much more.

In the year before his own death, Noah Davis created “Seventy Works,” a series of 70 collage paintings of varied achievement, but what stands out are the paintings in his “Pueblo del Rio” series, which includes “Concerto,” “Arabesque,” and “Prelude,” as well as “The Conductor.” It’s not just the titles; there’s a musicality emanating from these pieces, individually and as a whole.

Davis continued this remarkable streak of enticing and seductive work during the early part of 2015 with “Congo,” “Congo #2,” and “Untitled” (which appears to depict mourners standing over a casket). Naturally this leads us to think, How would Davis have continued to evolve his art had he been granted a few more years?

I have not said anything about the modest yet attractive catalogue, edited by Wells Fray-Smith, Paola Malavassi, and Eleanor Nairne. In part, that’s because many of these works of art defy us to say anything at all. There are times, with art, when it’s better to just shut up, look, and absorb.

Nonetheless, some of the catalogue entries delve into topics of race and inequality. Perhaps this was inevitable. There’s a somewhat political (and slightly pretentious) essay by Tina M. Campt that’s titled “Black-Ground: Noah Davis and the Spatial Frequencies of the Black Everyday,” in which the author inserts the word “Black” as often as possible. This tends to undermine Davis’s avowed intention of wanting us to see African Americans as just human beings going about their lives without dividing us into categories.

Some of this might have been relevant — Claudia Rankine alludes to police brutality and lynching in the 1930s — if Davis had grown up in the ghetto and gotten into drugs and guns and criminal activity. But he appears to have come from a strong, supportive family: His mother was a teacher and his father a corporate lawyer whose clients included Venus and Serena Williams, the rapper Ludacris and trumpeter Wynton Marsalis. When he was a junior in high school, his parents rented a nearby apartment where Davis could paint. And then there were the educational programs he attended as a youngster and young man. For that matter, his wife Karon is the daughter of noted singer and performer Ben Vereen.

None of that ensures that a child will grow up to be an accomplished artist, but it’s a good start and a foot in the door. In the end it comes down to talent and a certain ineffable artistic sensibility. Somehow or other, Noah Davis had the gift of being able to create beautiful pictures.

Noah Davis is on view through August 31 at the Hammer Museum, 10899 Wilshire Blvd (at Westwood Blvd), Los Angeles. Hours, Tuesday through Thursday, plus Saturday and Sunday, from 11 a.m. to 6 p.m., and on Friday from 11 a.m. to 8 p.m. Closed Monday. Free; parking is $8 for the first three hours ($22 max). Call (310) 443-7000 or visit hammer.ucla.edu. ER