Part of an extensive series of works of the late 1920s inspired by Paris, Stuart Davis's Yellow Café is composed of the architecture, awnings and street signs that make the city an important patchwork of imagery for artists of the day. With the financial support of Juliana Force, director of the Whitney Studio Club, Davis spent a year and a half from 1928 to 1929 working in Paris, living in the studio of fellow artist Jan Matulka in Montparnasse. Morris Kantor, Isamu Noguchi and Alexander Calder all resided nearby and collectively formed an unofficial artists' community. Although he only spent a relatively brief time abroad, the time proved influential on Davis's career.

"Having heard it rumored at one time or another that Paris was a good place to be, I lost no time in taking the hint. With one suitcase I hopped a boat and arrived in the center of art and culture in the middle of June...The rumors were correct...The conviction was already established on the train from Le Havre that I had done the right thing in coming to this place.

Everything struck me as being just about right. I had the feeling that this was the best place in the world for an artist to live and work; and at the time it was. The prevalence of the sidewalk café was an important factor. It provided easy access to one's friends and gave extra pleasure to long walks through various parts of the city...There was so much of the past and the immediate present brought together on one plane that nothing seemed left to be desired. There was a timelessness about the place that was conducive to the kind of contemplation essential to art. And the scale of the architecture was human." (Stuart Davis interview with J.J. Sweeney, as quoted in Stuart Davis, New York, The Museum of Modern Art, 1945, pp. 18-9)

In Yellow Café, Davis builds upon the framework of Synthetic Cubism he had been previously exposed to and further witnessed in Paris, using the brightly colored building façades as an effective collage of words and form. Utilizing a full palette, Davis has established a highly developed composition of planar relationships of color. Within the color façades, black and brown lines establish an additional pattern, contrasting the angular windows and doorways with contoured archways and other architectural details in the windows and balconies that lend a sense of motion to the street scene. Davis has aggressively incised the surface of the work in the gray building, mimicking the bold red crosshatching in the white hotel. As a result, the artist has further tied in the geometry of the scene while also contributing a sense of activity that underscored the significant presence the café brought to Paris culture. The artist's masterwork, Place Pasdeloup (1928, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York) provides a direct comparable to Yellow Café, demonstrating a similar composition, palette and specific imagery that were central themes in Davis's works from this period. In Yellow Café, Davis has effectively depicted the livelihood of a Parisian café and street corner by reducing the composition to its most essential elements.

Always a prolific theorist, Davis writes in a Whitney Museum exhibition catalogue introduction in 1935, "All efforts at imitation of nature are foredoomed to failure. Art is an understanding and interpretation of nature in various media. Therefore in our efforts to express our understanding of nature we will always bear in mind the limitations of our medium of expression...We will never try to copy the uncopyable but will seek to establish a material tangibility in our medium which will be a permanent record of an idea or emotion inspired by nature. This being so, we will never again ask the question of painting, 'Is it a good likeness, does it look like the thing it is supposed to represent?' Instead we will ask the question, 'Does this painting which is a defined two-dimensional surface convey to me a direct emotional or ideological stimulus?'" (as quoted in C. Harrison and P. Wood, Art in Theory: 1900-1990, Malden, Massachusetts, 1998 ed., pp. 415-16)

Works from his brief time in Paris would provide Davis with important imagery that he would continue to re-visit throughout his career. Paintings from the 1940s and 50s would become more abstract, composed of reduced shapes of interlocking planes of bold colors, oftentimes with lettering or words stamped across the composition as if advertising a billboard message. The aesthetic of Yellow Café, the blocks of color, strong linear patterning and use of text, provide an imperative precursor for these later images. For instance, the previously subtle use of the word "Café" would be replaced in later works with the large billboard style "BEER." Davis's The Barber Shop (Neuberger Museum, State University of New York at Purchase) of 1930 would be reconceived in the 1941 painting New York Under Gaslight (The Israel Museum, Jerusalem) and Rue Lippe (Private Collection), which contains recognizable, delineated imagery in 1928 would become abstracted blocks of color forms in a 1959 painting, The Paris Bit (Whitney Museum of American Art, New York). Yellow Café is a superb example of the structural sophistication Davis explored during his time in Paris that introduced a visual and structural syntax that would prove significant throughout his prolific career.

This painting will be included in Ani Boyajian's and Mark Rutkoski's forthcoming catalogue raisonné of the artist's works.